Meet Orly Taitz, Queen Bee of People Obsessed With Barack Obama's Birth Certificate

While Taitz believed she had been hacked—possibly by Obama thugs—her New Jersey-based webmaster, Lisa Ostella, wasn’t so sure. If Taitz’s site had been hacked, that would mean the security of all of Ostella’s clients was compromised. So, in March, she asked Taitz to rescind her complaint to the FBI and stop making unsubstantiated claims about hacking, or else find a new webmaster. Taitz opted for the latter.

It’s not totally clear what happened, but defendourfreedoms.us ended up in Ostella’s hands, and Taitz says that a commenter using the handle “Agent 88” started posting nasty things about her. To Taitz, there was no doubt: This was Lisa Liberi, a paralegal working for Philip Berg, the Pennsylvania eligibility attorney. Weeks earlier, someone had told Taitz that Liberi had a criminal record, so she investigated. She found that a woman named Lisa Liberi had a long rap sheet of fraud, forgery and theft in San Bernardino. Taitz sent Berg a “Ceize and Desist” [sic] letter, telling Berg to investigate Liberi (she also accused him of plagiarizing her legal pleadings, an accusation he has in turn leveled at her). Then she sent out “Dossier #6” (Taitz has a habit of sending out “dossiers” of Obama-related miscellanea to government officials) to, supposedly, 26,000 media outlets. In the dossier: Liberi’s home address, phone number and full Social Security number.

John Gilhooley

Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq.: dentist, lawyer, mom, "eligibility" activist

Gustavo Arellano

Buena Park pastor Wiley Drake was Taitz's first plaintiff

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• Orly Taitz
• Barack Obama
• Philip Berg
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• Crime and Law

And that’s how Taitz ended up being sued by Berg, Ostella, Liberi and others in federal court in Pennsylvania. On May 17, Berg posted on his website, ObamaCrimes.com:

I regretfully advise you that I had to file a lawsuit against Orly Taitz, Esquire, as she has gone too far. Months ago, I advised Orly that I would not work with her because our legal styles were so different.

However, I decided not to bad mouth her.

Well, Orly decided to take me down and she states through my very able paralegal, Lisa [sic]. I cannot understand why she would want to take me down unless she’s working for Obama.

Ostella declined to comment for this story. For Berg, the lawsuit—for slander, privacy violations and harassment—offered a chance for him to finally say what he’d been thinking about Taitz: She’s a menace and possibly an Obama plant. “When you really look at what she has accomplished over the past couple of months, I think it’s nothing,” Berg says. “She’s hurt the cause. I suggest she goes back to practicing dentistry.” Berg says the headlines she generates, about ambushing Supreme Court justices and allegations of government-perpetrated hacking, only serve to make the eligibility movement look nuts. “And we’re not nuts,” Berg says.

Taitz maintains that she was only spreading information that was already public about Liberi, and she has speculated that Berg might be the one working for Obama. But the lawsuit has divided the eligibility community of online-radio hosts and bloggers into two camps: for Taitz and against her. A few people who previously worked with Taitz no longer will speak on the record about her, for fear of her posting their personal information on her blog and directing her followers to harass them. And in the past month or so, a 30-page document purporting to be an anonymous complaint to the State Bar of California about Taitz has circulated on the Web. The Bar doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations; Taitz says she hasn’t been contacted about the complaint. Still, it’s a fairly exhaustive document of all the ways that Taitz may have crossed the line as a lawyer, from her out-of-court communications with judges to not-so-veiled calls for armed insurrection if the legal process doesn’t eventually get Obama removed. (In February, for example, the complaint alleges she posted, “The simple fact is that we are long overdue for another Rebellion in this nation, and I heartily endorse the idea of having one again very soon, preferably starting THIS year!”)

On that last charge, Orly-watchers are nervous. “In my opinion, Orly herself is not dangerous in the sense that she would pull the trigger on the president,” says Haggard. “She is dangerous in that she attracts people who might.”

But Taitz’s following still appears to be strong, possibly because she’s the most omnivorous eligibility activist around: She simultaneously makes demands for Obama’s birth certificate while also arguing for a narrow reading of “natural-born citizen.” In addition to her lawsuits on behalf of failed presidential candidates, she says, she has rounded up more than 100 military officers—many of whom are retired—to sign on to her quo warranto legal pleadings that challenge the president (the argument being that a military officer has a right to know if the commander in chief is legit). And she has participated in quasi-legal activities, such as the “citizen grand juries” that trace their legal authority back to the Magna Carta’s rules about lords and barons.