Political hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have found emails linking Texas Rep. Ron Paul to an American white supremacist group, a claim the Paul campaign says is completely untrue.

Las Vegas-based group American Third Party Position (AP3) — whose stated goal is “to reach out to Americans of European ancestry and particularly to disenfranchised White workers, farmers and students who have become victims of the discriminatory affirmative action policies” — was allegedly hacked by Anonymous Tuesday, and emails purportedly reveal close ties between Paul and members who are admitted white supremacists.

The alleged emails show that James Kelso, a former member of the John Birch Society, was just one of several members of the group that regularly met with Paul.

“In addition to finding the usual racist rants and interactions with other white power groups, we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul,” said Anonymous in a statement.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.”

When asked by The Daily Caller if the allegations were true, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign denied any ties to AP3.

“This stuff is completely false, and a waste of time,” said Paul spokesman Gary Howard.

A3P did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment by the time of publication.

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Political hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have found emails linking Texas Rep. Ron Paul to an American white supremacist group, a claim the Paul campaign says is completely untrue.

Las Vegas-based group American Third Party Position (AP3) — whose stated goal is “to reach out to Americans of European ancestry and particularly to disenfranchised White workers, farmers and students who have become victims of the discriminatory affirmative action policies” — was allegedly hacked by Anonymous Tuesday, and emails purportedly reveal close ties between Paul and members who are admitted white supremacists.

The alleged emails show that James Kelso, a former member of the John Birch Society, was just one of several members of the group that regularly met with Paul.

“In addition to finding the usual racist rants and interactions with other white power groups, we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul,” said Anonymous in a statement.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.”

When asked by The Daily Caller if the allegations were true, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign denied any ties to AP3.

“This stuff is completely false, and a waste of time,” said Paul spokesman Gary Howard.

A3P did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment by the time of publication.

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Ron Paul’s campaign is receiving financial support from Silicon Valley tech visionaries, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist donated nearly a million dollars to Endorse Liberty, the pro-Ron Paul super PAC disclosed Tuesday.

Endorse Liberty — prior to officially filing with the Federal Election Commission – published its donor list, which revealed that Thiel was responsible for a significant chunk of the super PAC’s wealth.

Thiel, a libertarian activist who has written the widely read essays “What Happened to the Future? We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters” and “The End of the Future,” was an early and significant investor in Facebook.

Thiel also endorsed Paul’s 2008 presidential bid.

The organization’s independent expenditures, totaling $ 3.4 million, were primarily online advertising buys with various social networks and search engines, including Google, Facebook and StumbleUpon — and for video production related to its outreach efforts on YouTube.

Thiel donated $ 900 thousand toward Endorse Liberty’s efforts.

“PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek and Scott Banister, an early adviser and board member, put their support behind the Endorse Liberty Super PAC, alongside Internet advertising veteran Stephen Oskoui and entrepreneur Jeffrey Harmon, who co-founded Endorse Liberty in November,” reports Reuters.

Harmon said in a statement to TheDC that ”Peter Thiel could see Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of Facebook before anyone else understood it. Peter knew that Facebook was the future and he was the first investor. I think Peter can see that Ron Paul is the future of the Republican Party.”

“While Romney and Gingrich are out pandering to voters over the age of 50, Ron Paul is winning over the youth vote, independents, Democrats, and ethnic groups — all of the demographics the GOP has struggled with for years,” said Harmon.

Endorse Liberty has spent $ 3,280,612 in support of Paul, in contrast to the $ 66,564 it has spent against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“Too often in this country we learn things the hard way … With its unsustainable deficits, government spending is heading down the same path. Men and women who want freedom and growth should take action. A good place to start is voting for Ron Paul,” Thiel said in a statement to Reuters.

“We think Ron Paul can win the nomination,” said Harmon. “We know he can beat Obama. We also knew when we got into this race that Ron Paul is the underdog and the only outsider in the race. Even if he doesn’t win, we are part of a movement that is one thousand times bigger than any election cycle.”

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Google searches for news about Texas Rep. Ron Paul dominated the Republican field in New Hampshire in the days leading up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, while the amount of media overwhelmingly favored former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The results of a recent study by social media analytics firm Socialagility suggested that the number of times a candidate is mentioned in the media — as opposed to social media — more closely mirrors the results of an election.

Searches for news stories about Paul grew 38.6 percent between Jan. 3 and Jan. 8, according to Google Insights for Search. News searches for Romney increased 78.6 percent in New Hampshire, but when compared solely against Paul, Romney did not register on the New Hampshire graph. There was not enough online interest in new stories about Romney — nor the rest of the GOP candidates, other than Paul — to generate enough search volume to even produce a graph for the last 30 days.

New Hampshire Google users displayed more interest in news stories about Ron Paul than the rest of the GOP field, while Romney received 175 percent more media coverage than the Texas congressman.

While media mentions in the past week — as of January 10  — dropped for every Republican candidate except for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, Romney led the pack with 9,155 media mentions according to the Washington Post app, @mentionmachine. He was mentioned 3,937 times more than Paul.

Excluding Paul, Romney and former Sen. Rick Santorum were the only Republican candidates who registered on a graph depicting a broader look at New Hampshire search interest trends from December 11 – January 8. Romney rose 284 percent between Jan. 3 and Jan. 8, while interest in Santorum averaged at zero percent.

As of Jan. 8, broader interest in Paul among New Hampshire Internet users was 150 percent higher than interest in Mitt Romney. (RELATED: Google: Ron Paul, Kim Kardashian more popular in New Hampshire than Romney)

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Republican presidential candidate former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman accompanied by his wife Mary Kaye Huntsman tours manufacture Tidland Corporation, Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2012, in Keene, N.H. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Republican presidential candidate, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman talks to reporters following a campaign stop at the Horse Meadow Senior Center Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012 in North Haverhill, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

A new Facebook app has revealed that the book “Facebook fans” of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman are reading the most is Texas Representative Ron Paul’s “The Revolution: A Manifesto.”

The Washington Post recently conducted an analysis of Facebook data culled by a new Facebook app, Wisdom. The paper ”identified the Wisdom users who ‘Like’ the major Republican candidates, and revealed the books, music and sports teams that appeal to them.”

Wisdom — which measures 304,164,585 page “likes” by 3,648,774 people in 72,403 cities, as of Saturday, January 7 — is a “free collective intelligence application,” which allows users to gather insight from the information that is in their Facebook network.

Facebook users are able to “Like” multiple candidates through their own profiles in order to follow updates from from the candidates through their “News Feed,” so results are not mutually exclusive to a particular candidate. For example, the number one book Paul “fans” are reading is the same as Huntsman’s.

The number one book Mitt Romney “fans” are reading is “Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America — and How to Stop Him,” by Phil Kerpen, vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity.

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Republican presidential candidate former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman accompanied by his wife Mary Kaye Huntsman tours manufacture Tidland Corporation, Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2012, in Keene, N.H. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Republican presidential candidate, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman talks to reporters following a campaign stop at the Horse Meadow Senior Center Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012 in North Haverhill, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

A new Facebook app has revealed that the book “Facebook fans” of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman are reading the most is Texas Representative Ron Paul’s “The Revolution: A Manifesto.”

The Washington Post recently conducted an analysis of Facebook data culled by a new Facebook app, Wisdom. The paper ”identified the Wisdom users who ‘Like’ the major Republican candidates, and revealed the books, music and sports teams that appeal to them.”

Wisdom — which measures 304,164,585 page “likes” by 3,648,774 people in 72,403 cities, as of Saturday, January 7 — is a “free collective intelligence application,” which allows users to gather insight from the information that is in their Facebook network.

Facebook users are able to “Like” multiple candidates through their own profiles in order to follow updates from from the candidates through their “News Feed,” so results are not mutually exclusive to a particular candidate. For example, the number one book Paul “fans” are reading is the same as Huntsman’s.

The number one book Mitt Romney “fans” are reading is “Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America — and How to Stop Him,” by Phil Kerpen, vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity.

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Polling data suggests that GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is more popular in New Hampshire than the rest of the Republican field. But recent Google statistics indicate that Texas Rep. Ron Paul and even Kim Kardashian are piquing greater interest than Romney in the Granite State.

A recent RealClearPolitics polling average from Dec. 27, 2011, to Jan. 3, 2012, showed Romney crushing Paul, his closest competitor in New Hampshire, by a whopping 21.3-point margin. Romney governed the neighboring state of Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007.

But despite Romney’s polling advantage, Internet interest in Paul among New Hampshire residents — gauged using search statistics from Google Insights for Search — steadily increased from the beginning of January 2011 to the beginning of January 2012, maintaining a lead in user interest over Romney since early June 2011.

New Hampshire Internet users exhibited significantly more interest in Paul than Romney through December, with Paul-related search queries increasing exponentially throughout the month.

The Google data “analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time,” according to the company

The search engine also eliminates ”repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, so that the level of interest isn’t artificially impacted by these type of queries.”

The number of news stories referencing Romney far outnumbered those mentioning Paul, Santorum and even Kim Kardashian in New Hampshire, but both Paul and Kardashian are more popular Internet searches than Romney, according to Google Trends.

When asked by The Daily Caller if Romney thought this would have any effect on the New Hampshire primary, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul declined to comment. (RELATED: More coverage of Kim Kardashian)

YouTube statistics tell a similar story. One of the most shared videos in Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire is by Endorse Liberty PAC. The video, titled, “Ron Paul — Watch this presentation to see why so many people are endorsing Ron Paul for President,” already has over 96,000 views.

The Huffington Post reported Wednesday that Romney’s first post-Iowa event in New Hampshire opened with hostile questioning from attendees, offering “a rude awakening” to the former governor of Massachusetts.

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According to a recent social media study, GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul has the highest “viral reach” among the current GOP presidential candidates on Facebook.

The study, conducted by Czech analytic company Socialbakers, analyzed data between Dec, 1, 2011 and Dec. 31, finding that, “Ron Paul has the highest overall viral reach, followed by Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.”

“Viral reach” was calculated as the “total reach for each candidate when people ‘like’ and comment, multiplied by the average number of friends per Facebook user to provide a comparable number,” Socialbakers wrote in a statement about the study on Monday.

Ron Paul also “increased engagement rate by 69 percent, followed by a near tie between Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, with a 58 percent increase and 57 percent increase respectively,” the statement read.

Facebook was chosen for the study, according to the statement, because of a recent Pew study that Facebook users are more politically engaged and are more than twice as likely to participate in political meetings or rallies.

Michele Bachmann leads “in person-to-person interactions among Facebook users, followed by Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman.”

Socialbakers calculated person-to-person interaction by measuring “all debates, comments, conversations to each other’s posts on candidate’s page.”

Forbes reported in October that Socialbakers was founded in 2008, recently raised $ 2 million in funding, is “profitable” and “counts 30 of the Fortune 500 as customers.”

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Chris Paul is headed to Los Angeles for real this time — to the Clippers, not the Lakers.

The Hornets have traded Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Clippers for guard Eric Gordon, forward Al-Farouq Aminu, center Chris Kaman and a first-round draft choice.

The deal required the approval of NBA Commissioner David Stern because the Hornets are owned by the league.

So no more lame-duck practices — and ducking questions — in New Orleans.

The move puts an end to a tortured week in which the Hornets’ season sat in limbo while the NBA took a public relations beating over everything from potential conflicts of interest, to retarding the Hornets’ pursuit of free agents, to disrespecting the New Orleans fan base.

The Hornets at last have a measure of certainty about the roster they’ll have when the regular season begins in less than two weeks.

Paul, already a star with international appeal, gets to play in one of the NBA’s biggest markets, even if his new team plays in the shadow of the Lakers. That’s the club Paul was almost traded to last week, only to have Stern nix the deal and unleash a torrent of bad publicity on his league just as it was trying to generate good will following a nearly five-month labor dispute that has already caused a shortening of the season.

Then again, maybe there is no such thing as bad publicity. Even with the NFL’s Saints on a five-game winning streak and wrapping up a playoff spot, the Hornets and Paul ordeal were the talk of New Orleans for a change.

The 26-year-old Paul, a four-time All-Star, averaged 18.7 points and 9.8 assists last season, his sixth in the NBA. His move to the Clippers means he’ll now be able to make alley-oop lobs to a young star famous for dunking over a car. That would be forward Blake Griffin, who averaged 22.5 points and 12.1 rebounds last season, his first as a pro.

The Hornets, meanwhile, get a prolific young shooting guard in Gordon, who turns 23 on Christmas Day and averaged 22.3 points last season. The 6-foot-9 Aminu is a second-year pro who averaged 5.6 points and 3.3 rebounds as a rookie.

The 7-foot Kaman, 29, is an eight-year veteran who averaged 12.4 points and seven rebounds last season, but played in only 32 games because of a left ankle injury.

“With this trade, we now have three additional players who were among the top eight draft picks in their respective drafts as well as our own first round pick and Minnesota’s first round pick,” Hornets general manager Dell Demps said in a statement released by the team. “Aminu is a young talent with a bright future, Gordon is a big-time scorer and one of the best (shooting) guards in the league and Kaman is a proven center and former All-Star. … We will field a competitive team and our future looks great.”

ESPN, citing anonymous sources, first reported the trade, which also involves New Orleans sending two future second-round draft picks to the Clippers.

“We wanted to make sure that we got the best possible deal for a player of Chris’ caliber, and we feel great about the outcome,” said Jac Sperling, who Stern appointed as the Hornets’ governor after the league bought the team in December 2010. “We feel our future looks very bright. … We want to thank Chris Paul, an extraordinary person who contributed so greatly to our basketball team and our community. We wish him the best of luck.”

The Hornets can only hope the deal will sit well with fans and area business, who bought more than 10,000 season tickets despite the lockout in an effort to show the NBA their community could make the franchise viable for whatever ownership group eventually buys the club from the league.

Paul, whom the Hornets drafted fourth overall in 2005, told New Orleans earlier this month that he was not going to sign an extension, and Demps had been trying to trade him since.

Demps came close to making a three-team deal last Thursday that would have sent Paul to the Lakers. The Lakers would have sent Lamar Odom to the Hornets and Pau Gasol to Houston, while the Rockets would have sent Luis Scola, Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic, and a first-round draft choice to New Orleans.

Stern, however, told Demps to take that deal off the table because he thought the Hornets could get a better deal, both in terms of personnel and salary obligations, in exchange for their marquee player.

Paul showed up for Hornets training camp last Friday but has not spoken to reporters since. He was excused from a normally mandatory media event on Wednesday in which players pose for photos in uniform and talk about the upcoming season.

The urgency to make a deal appeared to be growing, even though Demps insisted earlier Wednesday that the Hornets had no timeline and would not be rushed into a “rash decision.”

Still, Demps acknowledged that it was hard for the Hornets to pursue free agents and further build their roster while Paul’s status was in limbo. If trade talks had dragged on much longer, the Hornets could have gone into Friday night’s preseason opener at Memphis with little idea of what their roster would look like in their first regular season game at Phoenix on Dec. 26.

Other than Paul, the Hornets had only five returning veterans under contract: center Emeka Okafor, forward Trevor Ariza, point guard Jarrett Jack, second-year swingman Quincy Pondexter and shooting guard Marco Belinelli.

The addition of Gordon, Aminu and Kaman give New Orleans desperately needed depth while opening the way for the franchise to further strengthen its roster through free agency.

Meanwhile, the Hornets also could look forward to an additional first-round draft choice next summer. The pick originally belonged to Minnesota, meaning it will be tied to where the Timberwolves finish in the standings this season.

Chris Paul talks to reporters about the Chris Paul All Star Pick-Up basketball game between NBA players in Winston-Salem, N.C., Saturday, Oct., 1, 2011. (AP Photo/Bob Leverone)

FILE – In this April 26, 2011, file photo, New Orleans Hornets guard Chris Paul drives the ball downcourt during the first half in Game 5 of a first-round NBA basketball playoff series against the Los Angeles Lakers in Los Angeles. The framework of a three-team trade is in place to send Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers pending details of the transaction still being worked on Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The NBA’s decision to reject a proposed trade involving All-Star guard Chris Paul set the stage for an awkward opening to training camps on Friday in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Houston.

The NBA-owned Hornets thought they had worked out a three-team deal to send Paul to Los Angeles in a deal that also would have sent Lamar Odom to New Orleans and four-time All-Star Pau Gasol to Houston.

The league, however, declined to approve the trade, meaning Paul was expected to report to Hornets camp, while Odom and Gasol were expected to show up when the Lakers opened practice under new head coach Mike Brown.

After deal fell through, Paul simply wrote, “WoW,” on his Twitter page.

Odom, too, took to Twitter to share his feelings: “When a team trades u and it doesn’t go down? Now what?”

The fallout from the trade that never was caused the NBA to deny reports that deal was nixed because a number of team owners complained about it to NBA commissioner David Stern.

“It’s not true that the owners killed the deal, the deal was never discussed at the Board of Governors meeting and the league office declined to make the trade for basketball reasons,” league spokesman Mike Bass said.

Yahoo Sports reported that Stern killed the trade after several owners complained. Citing anonymous sources, Yahoo reported Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was one of the most outspoken owners upset about the deal, done the same day as the end of the lockout, which was supposed to restore competitive balance in the league.

Owners and players ratified a new collective bargaining agreement Thursday, the final step to ending the five-month lockout and allowing training camps and free agency to open Friday.

There was hope in small markets like New Orleans that after the lockout it would be easier for teams to hold on to their stars. Had the deal had been approved, one of pro basketball’s biggest stars from the league-owned, small-market Hornets would have moved to one of the NBA’s largest, richest markets.

The Hornets have been owned by the NBA since last December, when the league bought the club from founder George Shinn.

A person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press that the framework for a deal had been in place earlier Thursday. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were supposed to remain confidential.

As part of the trade, the Rockets also had agreed to send forward Luis Scola, shooting guard Kevin Martin, point guard Goran Dragic and a first-round draft choice to New Orleans.

Odom, whose marriage to Khloe Kardashian and E! network reality show put him at the center of Hollywood’s love affair with the Lakers, sounded devastated to be leaving his adopted hometown in an interview on 710 ESPN radio earlier Thursday. Odom was the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year last season, and has spent all but one season of his NBA career with the Clippers or Lakers.

The NBA’s move also quashed an attempt by the Lakers to retool their roster after their back-to-back title reign ended last spring with Dallas’ second-round playoff sweep.

There is, however, still the question of Orlando’s Dwight Howard.

The Lakers are widely reported to be interested in acquiring the Magic center, another All-Star expected to move before signing a long-term deal. Unlike Paul, Howard has made no secret of his affection for Los Angeles.

If the Hornets are unable to figure out a trade for Paul, he would be able to opt out of his current contract after the upcoming season.

Speaking earlier Thursday, Hornets president Hugh Weber said the franchise has been preparing for months for the possibility that Paul would resist signing an extension in New Orleans, a move that would leave the Hornets with the choice of trading him or simply letting him walk in free agency at the end of the season.

“We’ve been preparing for this moment for over a year, and it’s not like we were surprised or caught flat-footed,” Weber said. “This is not a surprise. This is not something where we’ve been sitting around waiting to see what would happen. We’ve been managing this and taking control of the situation as best we can and we’re going to have a team that we believe achieves that objective of making this community proud.”

Paul, 26, averaged 15.8 points and 9.8 assists last season.

Despite the lockout and uncertainty over Paul’s future, fan support has been building in New Orleans, where the team has advertised its season-ticket drive as an effort to lure a permanent local buyer who is committed to keeping the team in Louisiana.

The Hornets have increased their season ticket base from a little more than 6,000 last season to 10,019 as of Thursday afternoon.

Paul was drafted by the Hornets fourth overall out of Wake Forest in 2005.

He has been selected to the Western Conference All-Star squad the past four seasons and also was a member of the United States’ Olympic gold medal-winning team in Beijing in 2008.

___

AP Sports Writer Greg Beacham in Los Angeles contributed to this report.