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A good deal of the false Sandy information circulating on social media originated with one user: Twitter's @comfortablysmug. Now that his identity has been made public, he's being pilloried on the Internet.

While people tried to make sense of a deluge of incoming Sandy news, they might have heard CNN report that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was flooded three feet deep. Maybe they read a Reuters brief about Con Edison employees being trapped in a power station. Maybe they scrolled past a panic-stricken all caps retweet announcing a preemptive power shut down throughout Manhattan. None of those reports were correct, and they can all be traced back to Comfortably Smug's anonymous account, cultivated around the persona of a cocky, Romney-supporting 1-percenter.

It turns out that the real person behind the handle closely matches that description. Matching Comfortably Smug's Twitpics with his Youtube account, Buzzfeed's Jack Stuef outted him as Shashank Tripathi, a New York City hedge-fund analyst who also manages Republican Christopher R. Wight's campaign for the House of Representatives. His name is listed on the website for a Romney volunteer event.