I doubt the e-mail information came from MD4Bush - if David Colins from WBAL-TV knew the identity of MD4Bush, he'd have put it in his report. More likely, the information came from a reliable source with ties to Free Republic.
That the mddems.org e-mail was the second used makes the Ryan O'Doherty link a little less certain than if it were the first used. I don't think any e-mail is sent to the old or new account if someone changes the e-mail address registered with Free Republic. I could theoretically change my settings here so that my e-mail address is
mickeymouse@disney.com, if I felt so inclined. And if I didn't have notifications on, nothing would be sent to that address.
I think figuring out who
ryanrocks2004@yahoo.com and
brianwaverly@yahoo.com are connected with might be helpful. A Google, Google Groups, Dogpile and Yahoo! search using those e-mail addresses turns up nothing. I don't know of any way to easily search Yahoo! Groups. For what it's worth, Waverly is a section of Baltimore near Ryan O'Doherty's known home address.
I have a reason why he would have changed the email from the Yahoo mail drop to his regular one at mddems.org. He used the mail drop to get a name annonymously. Then he changed it before he talked to Mosk at the Washington Post so that his regular email would show on the
Edit Account page if the reporter looked as he was checking out the FRmail exchanges he described. It would look more credible that way. This makes me more certain that this was Ryan O'Doherty. No one else would have a reason to pick out this particular democrat.
In spite of Mosk claiming he got the sign in information from an "intermediary", I don't see how he would go to print if he did not actually know who the source was.