I see it differently - the two appear to conflict. The statute forbids anyone to even allow viewing of the certificates, so I have a hard time believing it would approve issuing noncertified copies to nonqualified applicants. Rather than asserting that I understand the legal ramifications when a statute forbids things that departmental rules from half a century ago allow, I’d like to hear from a lawyer on this.
If the HDOH had issued noncertified copies for other COLBs than Obama’s, you’d have a case for conspiracy and illegal behavior. You haven’t cited any instances of that. Until you do, I can’t see it as a conspiracy, but rather departmental mismanagement and confusion between the 1955 rules and the more recent, more restrictive statute.
The Ombudsman told me - and should also have told the HDOH - that non-certified abbreviated certificates are disloseable to anyone who asks for them. That is because HRS 338-18(a) only forbids what isn’t already authorized by the laws or rules.
The rest of this post will address the question of whether Obama’s records are being treated differently, and what is being done to try to hide whether (that) his records are being treated differently.
Verifications are also lawful to be disclosed to people who meet the qualifications, but Janice Okubo told me that they don’t issue verifications.
I can’t disclose specific details without the permission of the person who has the experience, but I can say that according to a worker at the HDOH, the HDOH refers qualified verification requests to the AG to figure out how to handle a dilemma they have: the feds have told the HDOH they can’t release anything of Obama’s and if they release a verification for somebody else as prescribed by law it will prove that they are treating Obama’s records differently. So the only way to hide that they are treating Obama’s records differently is to refuse to make disclosures for ANYBODY. How to justify that when it is clearly in violation of the law is the dilemma the AG is trying to solve.
The last I had heard, they were telling my colleague that their office is so backlogged that they can’t get to her request. How long do you think that can go on? (And I’ve got postmarked proof that their office was NOT too “backlogged” to fill a request of mine within the 10-day deadline required by the OIP, in the same time period that her request was made).
Notice that’s what they did with long-form birth certificates also. They SAID to us haoles that they don’t issue long-form BC’s any more. But there is video footage of them doing just that in their office. Why did they tell the whole world something that wasn’t true? Because they had to provide a (false) excuse for why Obama wouldn’t release his long-form. They can’t say that they don’t print OBAMA’S long-form any more, which is what they really mean - because it would prove they are treating Obama’s records differently, so they lied to the whole world by saying they can’t disclose ANY long-forms.
Furthermore, I spoke to a worker at the vital records office myself. When we couldn’t find any record of my request in the system even though I had received e-mailed responses from hdohinfo, the worker suddenly asked me if the request was about Obama. I asked if it would make any difference. She said that all requests about Obama are supposed to go through Okubo’s office instead of to the fulfillment department to be filled according to the laws and rules. Okubo is the watchdog for Obama’s records. She’s “Baghdad Bob”.
And BTW, Okubo considers all index data requests to be “about Obama” - according to her own words in a UIPA response to the AP’s Mark Niesse - a copy of which I got through my own UIPA request. And index data requests, incidentally, are required to be snail-mailed, which means that if you don’t sent it with delivery confirmation you will never hear back from them (speaking from my experience and that of others; and even with delivery confirmation the HDOH has denied that they’ve gotten requests), and you are subject to the delays of the postal system. So what Okubo considers to be requests about Obama ARE treated blatantly differently.
Furthermore, in a single day a colleague sent in 2 separate index data requests - one for someone having the last name of Dunham and the other being a control group with no visible connection to Obama. She received a response for the non-Dunham name a month earlier than for the Dunham request, as she was told the Dunham one had experienced a “delay”.
What’s going on at the HDOH is NOT just an administrative SNAFU. The rule-breaking and law-breaking is too pervasive and targeted, and the lying too blatant for it to be just a SNAFU.