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COL Gregory Hollister USAF (RET) |
Some late breaking news was the main topic on the
RC Radio program last night. It appears that COL Gregory Hollister USAF (RET), the plaintiff in the failed
Hollister v Soetoro lawsuit may have carried his dislike for President Obama a bit too far by poking around the Social Security and Selective Service databases with nefarious intention. The first part of story first broke a few days ago on
Obama Conspiracy Theories where Doctor Conspiracy speculated that Gregory Hollister may have committed a crime if he used a system designed for employers to verify employees' social security numbers to look up the social security number for Barack Obama. The SSVNS site failed to return the number that Orly Taitz and others have associated with Barack Obama. Doc C quotes from the SSVN Handbook:
Anyone who knowingly and willfully uses SSNVS to request or obtain information from SSA under false pretenses violates Federal law and may be punished by a fine, imprisonment or both.
The Federal EIN number of the requesting party is redacted, actually physically removed with a razor knife, from the copy of the search results so we cannot say with certainty that the requestor was in fact Gregory Hollister. However, several birther blogs have published the search results and attributed them to Hollister.
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SSVN Lookup for "Obama's" SS # |
Ah, but the plot thickens...
Yesterday, Orly Taitz filed a first amended complaint in her new FOIA lawsuit demanding Obama's social security records,
Taitz v Astrue, and attached several exhibits. One was the same SSVN search result page that is shown above. Another was an apparently recently generated copy of Barack Obama's draft registration record that had been mailed to someone. The recipient's address portion of the record had been redacted, again using a razor knife. However, the recipient left the bar codes used by the government in automated mailings. A poster at The Fogbow forum named Raicha quickly Googled POSTNET bar code and determined that the recipient was in fact one Gregory Hollister of Colorado Springs, CO.
Why is this a big deal? Well in fact the site that Hollister apparently accessed is the site where one can update their address and obtain a copy of their selective service registration record via mail. So the person who obtained the record was pretending to be Barack Obama and was pretending to change his address to a new one in Colorado Springs. Some would call this identify theft and possibly mail fraud.
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Obama Draft Registration from Taitz Motion |
Good Authority has it that both incidents have been reported to the appropriate agencies. These incidents lead to several questions:
- Did Hollister act on behalf of Taitz to obtain these documents?
- Is Taitz culpable by including these illegally obtain documents in a Federal court filing? (Which she conveniently copied to USAG Eric Holder!)
- Why did he redact his address and EIN number if he didn't know he was doing something "sneaky"?
- Did the SSA provide President Obama with a new social security number after his number was published by Taitz? That could explain why the SSVNS returned a code showing the number was not used.
- What laws were broken when Hollister or someone else obtained this information?
This is a portion of the show where we discussed the illegal database access:
Raicha from The Fogbow explained how she decoded the POSTNET bar code to determine the exact address of the requestor:
More information is available on the
Taitz v Astrue topic at
The Fogbow forum.Wouldn't it be ironic if a birther actually went to prison or paid a hefty fine for their sad preoccupation over where or how Barack Obama received his social security number? Remember that this tempest in a teapot is over whether Obama was a assigned a number starting with 042 that is normally geographically associated with Connecticut. Yet the SSA cautions not to make too much of the geographic location and social security numbers:
Note: One should not make too much of the "geographical code." It is not meant to be any kind of useable geographical information. The numbering scheme was designed in 1936 (before computers) to make it easier for SSA to store the applications in our files in Baltimore since the files were organized by regions as well as alphabetically. It was really just a bookkeeping device for our own internal use and was never intended to be anything more than that.
Yes, that is what this is all about. Orly Taitz has been screeching about this for two years and has nothing more. Now her pal Gregory Hollister may have committed a felony trying to chase a shadow. These people are sad if nothing else.
[Update 3/30/2011] The
Colorado Springs Gazette ran an article yesterday on COL Hollister. The article quoted Hollister on the social security access:
Hollister denied breaking any laws.
“I was very meticulous and made sure everything I did was compliant with the law,” Hollister said, noting that he sent Obama an 1099 tax form.
Oh really? Hollister sent Obama a fraudulent 1099 form and that made it all OK? What about impersonating the President to get a copy of his selective service record? Did the 1099 cover that too?
Buckle up kids. This story is just starting to launch.
[Update 4/9/2011] The Fogbow now has a very well done page up debunking the entire "Obama social security number fraud" birther story:
The President's Social Security Number