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A 22-year-old Minnesota man has pleaded guilty to using a computer at his former university to access the federal student loan website in an attempt to obtain President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Justin Hiemstra, of St. Paul, told U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe that he and another Haverford College student schemed to use “a school computer and someone else’s username without that person’s permission” on the Free Application for Student Aid website to acquire Trreturns from the IRS, according to the Department of Justice.
Hiemstra tried creating a fictitious FAFSA application only to discover someone else already had a username and password for Donald Trump, according to the DOJ.
“In order to reset the password, the defendant was prompted to answer challenge questions, which the original person had created when setting up the account,” the DOJ said in a statement. “The defendant was able to answer the questions and reset the password, and then used the President’s personal identifier information, including his social security number and date of birth, to attempt to import the President’s federal tax information into the bogus FAFSA application.”
The attempt failed.
It’s unclear from the DOJ statement what happened to Hiemstra’s alleged co-conspirator.
“No matter what you think about the President’s tax returns, clearly this kind of illegal activity cannot be tolerated or condoned,” U.S. Attorney McSwain said in the statement. “Unauthorized or false attempts to obtain any citizen’s IRS filings are a serious violation of privacy rights and a federal crime, and there’s nothing funny about it.”
