A Princeton researcher who became obsessed with finding the origin of a viral Internet smear against Barack Obama has provided a moment in the sun for a man long known in Florida as a perennial political candidate, prolific filer of lawsuits and conspiracy theorist.

The man is Anthony R. “Andy” Martin, also known as Anthony Martin-Trigona, formerly of Palm Beach but now of Chicago, and most recently an unsuccessful candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois.

Martin, now in his early 60’s, ran or at least announced candidacies in virtually every race for governor, U.S. Senate and available U.S. House seat in Florida, and sometimes for president, from about 1990 through at least 2004. Sometimes he was a Republican, sometimes a Democrat.

Along the way, he sued newspapers including the Tampa Tribune, banks, polling firms, political parties and others, usually for not paying enough attention to his campaigns—or in one case, for reporting on his anti-Semitic rants. He apparently had moved here from his native Connecticut, where a federal judge once ordered him to stop filing lawsuits—he had filed some 250 of them—but Martin contended the order didn’t apply in Florida.

Martin calls himself “an internationally recognized expert on the Middle East”; “a leading corruption fighter in Illlinois spanning five decades,” which includes the time he lived in Florida; and “Florida’s foremost public interest lawyer,” even though he wasn’t a member of the state bar.

Enter the researcher, Danielle Allen of Princeton’s prestigious Institute for Advanced Study. In January, she received an email smear that millions of others already had received, falsely asserting that Obama was a Muslim concealing a radical Islamic background.

Allen, a political theorist who has doctorates from Cambridge and Harvard and won a MacArthur “genius” grant at age 29, was intrigued. She set out to find the origin of the smear, which had already been circulating for nearly a year.

A Washington Post story documented her effort. She painstakingly analyzed email address lists on emailings and compared language in the email to internet postings, looking for similarities that could betray origins.

Her search led to Martin, who claims that in 2004, just weeks after the Democratic convention speech that first brought Obama to national notice, he was the first person to talk about Obama’s allegedly Muslim background.

Though no one will ever know for certain, Martin, at least, claims the subsequent chain emails circulated nationwide came from him or were inspired by him—and many do contain language he used.

Footnote: Other journalists say before Allen traced the email, they reached the same conclusions, published in a story in The Nation last year.

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