Obama Social Security Number Fraud Allegations Rely on Faulty Underpinnings

A private investigator named Susan Daniels unleashed a firestorm when she and another unrelated private investigator made public allegations that President Obama appears to be using a fraudulent Social Security number. Daniels told World News Daily she’s “staking [her] reputation on a conclusion that Obama’s use of this Social Security number is fraudulent.” The Social Security number is question has an 042 prefix indicating issuance in Connecticut.

While Daniels takes a strong stance on the fraud issue in an interview with World News Daily, the affidavit she supplied to Birther Orly Taitz in connection with the lawsuit Keyes v. Obama, challenging Obama’s citizenship was much tamer. In that affidavit, she attested to having found a Social Security number in the name Barrack Hussein Obama, determining its issuance in Connecticut between 1977 and 1979, and documenting an association with several unspecified Chicago addresses. The affidavit says that this Social Security number was the only one Barrack Hussein Obama used.

Throughout the attestation, Daniels speaks of Barrack Hussein Obama spelled exactly as it appears here- incorrectly with 2 Rs. The caption on the document spells the president’s name correctly. So what name did Daniels search exactly? Barack, the president’s name, or Barrack, not the president’s name?

Are we even talking about the president here? Daniels does not refer to the president by job title in the affidavit and she does not specify the Chicago addresses allegedly associated with the 042-prefix Social Security number.

If understood as referring to the president despite the misspelling, this affidavit demolishes the claims of other birthers that Obama used up to 25 different social security numbers with a single sentence:

6. The Social Security number was used by Barrack Obama for numerous addresses in Chicago, and it was the only Social Security number he used.

Then again, you have to ask yourself, how could Daniels have determined whether this was the only Social Security number the president ever used? If he were committing fraud as she suspects, wouldn’t he use a Social Security card with someone else’s name rather than his own on it?

But the telling evidence that this latest Birther claim is unreliable is the scant research about any connection between Obama and the state of Connecticut underlying it. To obtain a Social Security card with a Connecticut prefix, Obama would have used a Connecticut mailing address on his application. Daniels uncovered no connection between Obama and the state of Connecticut, telling World News Daily, “There is no family connection that would appear to explain the anomaly.”

What about Obama’s father, also named Barack Hussain Obama, who lived in Connecticut after divorcing Obama’s mother? That doesn’t count as a family connection?

This slightly inconvenient fact that Daniels failed to uncover or disclose, as the case may be, raises the issue of whose Social Security number Daniels actually traced- the president’s or his father’s. They share a common name, Barack Hussein Obama. Even if Daniels correctly identified the Social Security account holder as the president rather than his father, that whole lack of connection with Connecticut just dropped out of the analysis.

Even assuming that Obama’s father left Connecticut before the Social Security number issued, his residency there establishes the connection Daniels said didn’t exist. And it’s not too hard to imagine a young Barack Obama checking out the place his dad once lived or connecting with people still there who knew his dad. In fact Barack Obama’s dad attended college in Connecticut and in 1977, Obama was college aged; is it beyond reason to consider that he might have checked out his father’s alma mater?

Neither Daniels’ theory nor the documented Connecticut connection of the president’s father answers completely whether the Obama’s Social Security number hails from Connecticut and if so, why, but as the information accumulates, there appear to be at least as many reasons to disbelieve that the president’s Social Security number is fraudulent as to believe it. And reason to question the motives of those putting forth accusations of fraud based on such thin evidence that a quick search of the phrase “Barack Hussein Obama Connecticut” would upend one of its pillars.

What happens when you build a house of cards based on unsupported suppositions as to facts- or skewed suppositions- is that the house comes crashing down.

Sources:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21193983/DOC-86-2-Keyes-v-Obama-Affidavit-of-Susan-Daniels-Refiled;

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp;

http://www.westernjournalism.com/?page_id=3255.