Update at 2:41 p.m.: I just heard back from Garcia. It was his personal account that was targeted, and it's still down. "They changed the email to the account and changed the password, and they unfriended everybody," he told me.
Why someone would do that, he wasn't sure, but he suspects they made off with personal information. And why would someone go to such trouble at this particular juncture? "It's never happened to me before and now I'm in a Congressional runoff, and now it happens," he said, which is awfully suspicious.
He is working with Facebook to have his account restored and tomorrow, he plans to file a complaint with DPD.
Original post: I noticed while scrolling through my Twitter feed this morning that Domingo Garcia's Facebook account was hacked. He announced it on his lawyer Twitter feed yesterday (h/t Oak Cliff People). It's a protected account but now that I'm pals with pals with lawyer Domingo I can see the Tweet with my own eyes but can't embed, so we'll go with Star-Telegrammer Bud Kennedy's retweet:
MT @Domingotexas The dirty side of politics: someone hacked my FB and unfriended most of my family and 5,000 friends. #cd33 #tx33
— Bud Kennedy (@budkennedy) June 25, 2012
Wow. Dirty indeed. The campaign between Garcia and Marc Veasey has been in the mud for a while now -- just yesterday a Garcia press release implied that Veasey has broken federal election law while Veasey returned fire by pairing an unflattering photo of Garcia with the assertion that he hates American business -- but messing with a man's Facebook account is low.
I went back and checked Garcia's Facebook pages to survey the damage, but they seemed untouched. Lawyer Domingo still has 327 friends, 2,113 people still like politician Domingo, and evil Domingo is a 3-month-old spoof site that is not really Domingo at all.
And wait. Some practitioner of the political dark arts took the trouble of hacking into your Facebook account, passed on the opportunity to post photos doctored in compromising ways or have you make embarrassing revelations on your wall, and instead unfriended your family members? That there is no reasonable motive for doing so only proves what a crafty political operative you're dealing with. But before we say anything more about it, can we make doubly sure that this isn't one of those wacky changes Facebook likes to surprise people with?
