Meet the Man Who Found the Gruber Videos

Howard Kurtz reports:

“I really want to stay out of the limelight,” said Rich Weinstein, a Philadelphia investment adviser. “This is not about me.”

But it is about him in the sense that if not for one slightly obsessed citizen, we wouldn’t have the videos of Jonathan Gruber saying the health care law was deceptively designed and its passage depended on the stupidity of the American public. And it is about his frustrating struggle to get that information out to the media.

Still, Weinstein would not be coaxed into an on-camera interview, or even provide a photograph. He doesn’t want his 15 minutes.

“I think people are going to look for a target. I don’t want to be Rich the Plumber,” he told me.

Weinstein is up front about the fact that his motives were personal. His insurance policy was canceled, he says, because of the Affordable Care Act, and his premiums wound up doubling.

He started out searching for another administration adviser and then switched to Gruber. He sat through hour after tedious hour of video taken at academic conferences and in other settings.

The lesson here is that the evidence was there, had been there for years — and that the Palace Guard Media was deeply uninterested in doing any kind of investigative reporting on the man who gave us ♡bamaCare!!!. But private citizens can still, in the immortal words of Ken Layne, fact-check your ass.

Still, you’d think by now all those six- and seven-figure Washington journalists would be sick and tired of getting scooped.