Certain journalists and convicted criminals with ties to hedge funds have suggested that we at Deep Capture are crazy because we believe some short-sellers deliberately destroy public companies for profit.

Last night, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon was interviewed by Charlie Rose.

Rose said, “[Bear Stearns CEO] Alan Schwartz is quoted as saying.. that he thought [the demise of Bear Stearns] was premeditated [by short-sellers].

Dimon responded: “I would say where there is smoke, there’s fire. If someone knowingly starts a rumor or passes on a rumor, they should go to jail…This is even worse than insider trading. This is deliberate and malicious destruction of value and people’s lives. They shouldn’t go to jail for a short period of time. So if I was the SEC I’d find out who made the money and I’d investigate–emails, phone records, you name it–and I’d find out….There’s enough smoke around that I think there should be a full investigation…”

So now the CEO of JP Morgan is crazy, too. So is former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz. Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld said something similar, so he must be a crackpot. The SEC itself claims to have begun an investigation. They’re all nuts.

Anyway, permit us to suggest an easy way to get this investigation moving: Send a subpoena to CNBC reporter David Faber.

On March 13 and March 14, Faber told CNBC viewers that a hedge fund manager – “a friend” whom he “trusts” – told him that Goldman Sachs had refused to accept Bear Stearn’s credit. This information was false. It was a deliberate, malicious rumor delivered to a friendly journalist in order to destroy Bear Stearns.

Find out who Faber’s hedge fund friend is. Case solved.

This would not be the first time that Faber reported misinformation in service to a hedge fund friend. He used to do it for Jim Cramer, back before Cramer became CNBC’s leading “journalist” – back when Cramer was running his own hedge fund. A former employee of Cramer’s hedge fund has written a book, “Trading with the Enemy,” in which he describes Cramer feeding Faber tips and illegally trading ahead of Faber’s reports on CNBC.

It is no small coincidence that a clique of journalists connected to Cramer regularly write false or misleading hatchet jobs on companies targeted by short-sellers connected to Cramer. And it is no coincidence that these same hedge funds have deliberately and maliciously sought to destroy dozens of public companies and people’s lives by circulating rumors, issuing bogus “independent financial research,” clogging Internet message boards with false information, filing bogus class-action lawsuits, getting the SEC and other government agencies to conduct dead-end investigations, and hiring convicted felons to harass CEOs. (And that’s not all; see “The Story of Deep Capture” for the gory details.)

It is also worth noting that in almost all of the companies targeted by these people, somebody has sold massive amounts of phantom stock to further drive down prices. Two companies targeted by these people are Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Both have been victimized by phantom stock sellers.

We’d say somebody should investigate this. But that would be crazy.