It's official. Joe Lieberman and his 2006 campaign staff were either incompetent, dishonest, or both. Atrios has the story.

On the day of the 2006 primary, Joe Lieberman's website came crashing down. Lieberman and his mouthpieces spent the day running around to all the media that would listen, claiming that their site had been hacked by Lamont supporters or other "extremist leftwing elements". Sadly, the media was all too eager to buy into the narrative and they relentlessly pushed the idea that "dirty campaign tactics" by bloggers simply had to be at the root of it.

The problem was, even at the time, it was crystal clear that this was sheer incompetence by the Lieberman camp. Kos pointed to it that very same day:

But now I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman's site went down. They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients. Here's the deal -- you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn't need that much bandwidth, but if you're paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin' cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don't go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out. For their part, the Lamont campaign has offered its technical expertise to get Lieberman's site back up (which could be done in an hour by a competent sysadmin), and has added a link to the googlecached version of Lieberman's site at the top of their blog.

Turns out that federal investigators came to the same conclusion in October 2006 after Lieberman's camp demanded a full investigation. From The Stamford Advocate:

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary. The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash. Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti-Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters. "The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack," according to the e-mail. A program that could have detected a legitimate attack was improperly configured, the e-mail states. "New Haven will be administratively closing this investigation," it concluded. The e-mail, dated Oct. 25, 2006, was included in a technical packet of information recently sent to The Advocate in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act filed in late 2006 with the offices of state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.

Yes, you read that right. The investigation was closed on Oct. 25, 2006, but is just now being reported and only because of The Stamford Advocate's persistence in demanding the investigation results. Will Joe Lieberman publicly apologize to Ned Lamont? And when exactly is the investigation going to begin into Lieberman's election tactics? I seem to recall that after he lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, he decided to thumb his nose at Democratic voters in Connecticut and run on a third party ticket. The problem was that there never was a 3rd party and he seemingly violated Connecticut election laws. When does that investigation begin?

On a final note, you may have noticed that Daily Kos was down for a little while this morning. We are actively investigating whether Joe Lieberman or other extremist rightwing elements may have been responsible. Stay tuned.

Update: Primary day video from the Lamont camp:

While Joe's 3rd party status remains murky, there are a few other outstanding questions that were never addressed. What about the suspicious $387,000 that Joe claimed as petty cash in the waning days of the campaign? And did the Lieberman campaign knowingly file a false report in an effort to influence the election?