Vet Raising Money For Trump’s Wall Has A History Of Attacking Innocent People And Grifting

This week has had a multitude of headlines and stories about Donald Trump’s controversial border wall. The Senate passed a continuing resolution to keep the “lights on” in the Federal Government but rejected the POTUS’s border funding demands. The House, led by outgoing GOP Speaker Paul Ryan, have hastily thrown together a bill that includes Trump’s demands and also tacks on some disaster relief funding that Democrats have been begging for, but have been thus far ignored by the Republican-controlled chamber.

Most experts see little chance of the bill making it through the Senate unless GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “goes nuclear” and drops over 200 years of Senate rules to push this one petty bill through.

So one man, being heralded as a “hero” by conservatives and Trump supporters, decided to start a crowdsourced fund to raise a billion dollars for Trump’s border wall.

That man is Brian Kolfage Jr.

On the surface, Kolfage seems like the perfect hero for this sort of thing. He’s a military veteran. He lost 3 limbs in his service. Indeed, any American with a heartbeat should be able to stand up and salute this hero without reservation, right?

Well, not so fast.

Kolfage’s past may not be as stellar and heroic as advertised. Let us start with how he became a triple amputee. It was not, according to an archived report from Patheos, because Kolfage was performing heroic acts or rescuing fellow soldiers:

While in Iraq he lost three limbs when he was hit either by a rocket or a mortar. It’s hard to figure out which one because he has multiple conflicting stories. Nonetheless, he was inside the base when the attack happened and failed to follow proper protocol and take cover under the concrete bunkers that are spaced throughout all FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) in a combat theater. Between those conflicting stories it is stated he was either on his way to the bathroom or he ran out to get a bottle of water during the attack. Regardless of which one it was, he ended up losing all but one arm.

But that isn’t really why one might not be as impressed with Kolfage as Trump’s supporters want us to be. After all, many soldiers are wounded, lose limbs, or even die in positions that aren’t exactly what we think of when we think of “heroic acts in the theater of combat.”

It is what Kolfage did when he got stateside that should worry the people who are donating to Kolfage’s crowdfunding effort, that by simple math can be shown to not be capable of reaching the “5 billion dollar goal” at Kolfage’s desired pace of a million dollars a day till Trump will be well out of office by my calculations.

Kolfage had a couple of Facebook pages a couple of years ago and on one of those pages, Kolfage used it often to attack Democrats, President Obama, and seemingly anyone who disagreed with him.

Of course, anyone who has been in “political debate” on Facebook knows it can get rude, even distastefully obnoxious at times. Most of us would walk away from such things, or use that handy “block button” to remedy the situation. But when a “rival” satirical page, called “Republican Family Values” posted a meme in response to Kolfage’s meme which pictured Obama photoshopped on the body of the Kool-Aid mascot, and had a caption referring to liberals “drinking the kool-aid” — Kolfage responded in not only an improper way, by many folk’s measure, but in a criminal way, harassing and threatening another vet, Janet Vrotsos and her 82 year old mother — as reported by the Rock Beyond Belief blog:

The Friday after Christmas 2013, senior citizen Mrs. Vrotsos began receiving threatening calls. They started all at once and escalated in nature, as anonymous callers told the 82 year old to “get her affairs in order” and made threats on her life. One female caller, hearing Mrs. Vrotsos’s obvious terror at the abusive phone campaign, calmed down long enough to explain why she was calling—she was trying to reach Mrs. Vrotsos’s daughter, Janet , who earlier that day had “posted an inflammatory remark” on Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage Jr.’s Facebook page; attacking him and other disabled veterans, calling them worthless taxpayer burdens and wishing death on them, and Kolfage in particular. When a screencap of the post, along with Janet’s personal information broke on the rightwing blog Patdollard.com, it spread like wildfire across the conservative blogosphere and incited readers to a rage that would lead them to begin a systematic harassment of Janet, her former workplace, her family, and many of her friends.

What did Jan and her elderly mother do to deserve this treatment? The short answer is nothing. Certainly, her mother never did anything to Kolfage, his family, or anyone associated with him. She never even heard of him.

Odds are Jan Vrotsos never actually heard of him either. The only thing that she did “wrong” was to get a notification on Facebook that someone had replied to a comment she made on a group page earlier and properly respond to it, as Facebook asks users to in their TOS.

That reply was from Brian Kolfage’s father, Brian Kolfage Sr.

Here’s how it all went down, according to RBB:

Janet Vrotsos will be the first one to admit she is not particularly computer savvy. In interviews she has given to Rock Beyond Belief and others, it becomes clear that she is not a frequent Facebook user. She mostly uses Facebook to “play Bejeweled, talk to friends, and look at pictures.” She had, however, been following the story of Delaney Brown, an 8 year old girl diagnosed with leukemia. When a friend of Vrotsos shared a link from RFV about the child’s death, it appeared on her timeline, and she posted a sympathetic message,

I have been following her story too[..]I am so very sorry for your loss…[S]he and you are in my prayers[..]I hope you find some peace,.

This comment appeared on the RFV page during Sr.’s attack, and he responded with a plighty

Go fuck yourself, Jan.

Addressing the attack like any sensible person would, she clicked on the fake RFV page, reported it, and then left a message,

Stay off my page…I have reported you.

Kolfage Sr. took this, somehow, as an admission from Vrotsos that she was the admin of the RFV page. He then used her open Facebook page to phish for information, purchased a background check on her in order to collect even more information, and then he prepared his doxx.

“Doxxing” is revealing a private person’s name and address — more often than not to encourage others to gang up on the person and harass them or some nefarious purpose. As of this writing, we know of no case where someone was doxxed in this manner so people could do nice things for the victim.

Kolfage then decided to sue Vrotsos for “defaming him” on Facebook. The problem though, one that would be revealed later as people dug into the story to get to the facts, is that the original post that Kolfage was convinced was created by Vrotsos was a photoshopped job that she never had a thing to do with.

When others revealed what Kolfage was doing and that he was attacking an innocent person, Kolfage sued them too for defamation. In total, Kolfage served four more people with lawsuits.

The people being sued weren’t wealthy and couldn’t even afford legal representation when they put all their nickels together. But they knew they weren’t in the wrong and were simply defending an innocent victim, so they fought the suit using the best methods they had available. One man, who was a legal aid, stepped up and prepared all the affidavits and other required court filings and responses.

Finally, after all the legal wranglings, a judge ruled for the defendants, with prejudice. The judge effectively neutered Kolfage and made it so he couldn’t go after the people who had defended Jan Vrotsos again.

So, it turned out that the “wounded warrior” who had been so “victimized” by all these mean liberals and another veteran, was just a butthurt attack dog who got bettered and didn’t like it. His reaction was to abuse our court system to “get” the people who he felt wronged him — when all they did was tell the truth about him.

This is not the character that one thinks of when they think of a “war hero” — is it?

Now Kolfage is attempting to raise 5 billion dollars for Trump and his wall. Yet, let us keep in mind that there are no guarantees that the money will ever go for that purpose. There is also the possibility that Kolfage could take that money and head off to some non-extraditing country and enjoy whatever millions are raised.

Already, Kolfage has raised over 11,000,000 (that’s 11 million) dollars through GoFundMe.

That isn’t the only thing that Kolfage has done. When a fellow vet needed money to have a brain tumor removed, Kolfage agreed to sell shirts for him. It is not known to this day how much money was raised because Kolfage never turned over any of the funds to the ailing vet.

Thomas Clay Jr. isn’t as polite as is being put forth in this article about Kolfage’s past activities, of which we have only briefly highlighted some of. Kolfage tried to include Clay in the lawsuit and there is no love lost there:

At no time did the coward Kolfage ever apologize to Jan for what he did to her. He never righted the wrong he did because he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and that’s why the thousands of people who have put him in control of millions of dollars now will hear some lame excuse like, “I cannot donate this money to the government to help build the wall because only congress can pay contractors” or some other horse shit excuse where he will want to donate the millions to some charity like the Foundation for Freedom to stuff Brian Kolfage’s Wallet.

What I have said here is the truth and you will know this because the coward Kolfage who is as sue happy as anyone ever, will not ever file a suit against me. I double dog dare him to sue me but I know the coward and the grifter he is. He is treacherous human scum without a lick of probity or basic human decency. He is the victimizer and if you were dumb enough to donate to his gofundme, then you richly deserved it. A man of honor and integrity would NEVER profit off the victimization of a woman who did nothing to him. Coward Brian Kolfage Jr. did and like all sociopaths, he feels no shame at all about it.

No one here is saying what will or will not happen. But it is important to consider that the man raising these funds has already been found to be someone who is not above trying to ruin innocent people’s lives. A person who has been found by the courts to falsely attack and try to use the courts to go after people who don’t deserve it. AN alleged grifter. A person who is not quite the prototypical “war hero amputee” that most think of when thinking of such a person.

As some might say — he’s deceived before and did things most of us would consider highly immoral and unethical, what is to stop him from doing it again? This one would be on a much larger scale, however.

No one is saying that one should not donate to Kolfage’s fund either. It is important to consider who they are giving the money to and do it with eyes wide open.