Newsmax.com reported yesterday the following:

Obama’s top terrorism and intelligence adviser, John O. Brennan, heads a firm that was cited in March for breaching sensitive files in the State Department’s passport office, according to a State Department Inspector General’s report released this past July.

The security breach, first reported by the Washington Times and later confirmed by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, involved a contract employee of Brennan’s firm, The Analysis Corp., which has earned millions of dollars providing intelligence-related consulting services to federal agencies and private companies.

During a State Department briefing on March 21, 2008, McCormack confirmed that the contractor had accessed the passport files of presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and John McCain, and that the inspector general had launched an investigation.

Sources who tracked the investigation tell Newsmax that the main target of the breach was the Obama passport file, and that the contractor accessed the file in order to “cauterize” the records of potentially embarrassing information.

“They looked at the McCain and Clinton files as well to create confusion,” one knowledgeable source told Newsmax. “But this was basically an attempt to cauterize the Obama file.”

At the time of the breach, Brennan was working as an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. …

The passport files include “personally identifiable information such as the applicant’s name, gender, social security number, date and place of birth, and passport number,” according to the inspector general report.

The files may contain additional information including “original copies of the associated documents,” the report added. Such documents include birth certificates, naturalization certificates, or oaths of allegiance for U.S.-born persons who adopted the citizenship of a foreign country as minors.

The Obama campaign acknowledged at its “Fight the Smears” Web site [my links here and here] that Obama was a foreign national until the age of 18, by virtue of his father’s British then Kenyan citizenship. …

However, “native citizen” is a colloquialism, not a legal term. It is not the same as “natural-born citizen,” the requirement to be president set out in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution. …

The State Department chalked up the passport file snooping discovered in March 2008 to “imprudent curiosity” by contract employees hired to help process passport applications.

Asked by reporters during a campaign stop in Portland, Ore., to comment on the breach, Obama said that attempts to “tap into people’s personal records” were “a problem not just for me but for how our government functions.

“I expect a full and thorough investigation. It should be done in conjunction with those congressional committees that have oversight so it’s not simply an internal matter,” he added.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Obama and personally apologized for the breach. “I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice told reporters. She phoned Clinton and McCain and offered similar apologies. …

The State Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a 104-page report on the breach last July. Although it is stamped “Sensitive but Unclassified,” the report was heavily redacted in the version released to the public, with page after page blacked out entirely.

The problems posed by the breach were so serious that the inspector general recommended that the State Department conduct “vulnerability and risk assessments of all passport systems” to identify security weaknesses and suggest “a timetable for implementing corrective actions.”

Acting Assistant secretary for administration William H. Moser sent a six-page reply concurring with the recommendation, all but one paragraph of which was blacked out because of the sensitivity of the information it contained.

Had Brennan been appointed CIA director, as rumored in the Obama campaign shortly after the election, senators also would have questioned him about an article he wrote in an obscure foreign policy magazine over the summer.

The article, entitled “The Conundrum of Iran: Strengthening Moderates without Acquiescing to Belligerence,” appeared in the July issue of “The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.”

Among other recommendations, it argued that the next U.S. administration should grant political legitimacy to the terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas, and should exercise “strategic patience” with Iran rather than engaging in “bellicose” rhetoric and coercive diplomacy. [emphasis mine]

An interesting site to check out is eyeball-series.org’s research into the National Counterterrorism Center.

Is it possible that there is additional documentation — to include passport information — that points in the direction (especially as emphasized, above) that the President-Elect is not a natural born citizen? Absolutely. However, at this point, we continue to sit in a position of looking at unverified, circumstantial evidence; it’s by no means enough to draw firm conclusions, but it is enough to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, the legitimacy of asking the President-Elect:

Can you prove that you are, in fact, a natural born citizen and subsequently eligible to hold the office of the American presidency?

Update: Jeff has some interesting comments about this, including the following:

From the beginning, this controversy to me has not been about Barack Obama. It’s never been a question of Democrat versus Republican, conservative versus Marxist. It’s been about the Constitution and the guidelines set forth by our founders in Article II, Section 1. It’s been about simple yet unanswered questions as to straightforward and innocuous aspects of the personal history of the man who next week will be the most powerful man in the world. Nothing groundbreaking. Just standard information generally known about high-profile world leaders, especially in this age of technology.

Good on Ken Timmerman and Newsmax for picking up on the story and bringing it out again at such an appropriate time. I had known about the breach–and may have written about it here a few months ago–but did not know that an Obama surrogate was there in the background. I may be a skeptic by nature, and I still may be unsure about the conspiratorial aspects of many of the claims put forth by Philip Berg and Leo Donofrio and Orly Taitz and others, but this just seems a little tooconvenient, even for me.

I know I saw a Drudge headline on this back in the beginning of 2008; a cursory search of his archives turned up nothing.

-Phil