Speculation can on rare occasions be interesting, when it's done by informed speculators. But that's not what we have here, is it?
All this other stuff seems tabloid. Not what we need on HN.
"did lots of work on these issues" is misleading. He was an imposter and that was precisely his official role in the tor project.
You can't unroll years of video presentations and writeups by one comment. So, please cite reputable sources saying all that was a hoax in his official job duty on Tor to hoax people.
His role was evangelism, he was successful with it, but it does not affect the technology in any way. Just as the death of your car salesman would affect your customer experience but not the way Ford builds cars for you.
I have no idea what "deploying Tor" means, but apparently it means loading an installation package on a machine. So come one, you could impress non-techies with that but...
I just think that the submission's merit is independent of the page full of awful comments it generated. The submission itself seems about as HN worthy as other "X leaves Y" submissions. IMO, the comments are a problem in the HN community, not a problem in the submission.
Pragmatically though, flagging the story and getting whatever this comment section off the front page probably makes sense.