Imagine if there were a story presenting two very striking possibilities:
1. The president of the United States is perpetrating a fraud, in a con job of historical proportions.
2. A major law-enforcement agency is making, perhaps knowingly, an untrue and seriously damaging allegation against a sitting president.
Wouldn’t you say that, either way, it was a big story warranting further investigation?
We don’t have to imagine, however, because this is precisely the case with the investigation of Barack Obama’s birth certificate by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), the largest sheriff’s department in Arizona. Yet this huge story is treated like a non-story.
Nonetheless, chapters are still being written, with MCSO’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio (shown) recently announcing that he’s still investigating the Obama “birth certificate” produced in 2011, which his team of experts had previously determined is a forged document.
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Arpaio’s comments were made last Tuesday while speaking to the Surprise Tea Party Patriots (STPP), the group within his jurisdiction that petitioned him to investigate the certificate in 2011. Reassuring the STPP he wasn’t shirking his duty, he said, “I’m not going to give up, and we’re looking into it. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” reported the Arizona Republic.
The birth-certificate issue was also raised recently in the first presidential debate, with GOP nominee Donald Trump seeking to put the matter to bed and declaring that Obama was born in the United States. Yet last week Arpaio reiterated his long-held position, telling the crowd of approximately 200, “I don’t care where he’s from. We are looking at a forged document. Period.”
This was the determination of his aforementioned experts — the “cold case posse” he assembled — that the long-form certificate released by the White House is fraudulent. Below is video of the sheriff’s 2012 announcement of the findings.
Given this, the current phase of the investigation appears to involve, perhaps among other things, a search for the forger, with posse leader Mike Zullo telling the STPP, “I am closer than ever.”
But the head-in-the-sand instincts are as strong as ever, with Arpaio also telling the STPP that “all the politicians say, ‘Sheriff, don’t talk about it.’” This is despite the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign apparently considered the matter serious enough so that it advanced the “birther” issue in 2008 and that a Kenyan ambassador claimed the president was born in Kenya. But then there’s the man who, it seems, really started the “birther” story: Barack Obama himself. (More on that momentarily.)
Moreover, while Trump now wants to put “birtherism” — which is better described as birth-certificate realism (BCR) — behind him, consider the testimony of Jeff Lichter, an STPP member who asked Arpaio to investigate. As the Arizona Republic reports:
During a presentation to the Surprise Tea Party Patriots, Lichter said that, when he and two state lawmakers traveled to New York in April 2011 and met with Trump in Trump Tower, the businessman told them he anticipated Obama would be releasing a fake birth certificate.
“My sources in D.C. are telling me there is going to be a fake birth certificate,” Lichter quoted Trump as saying.
Yet, again, related allegations come not from just anonymous sources. First there’s the testimonial of the aforementioned Kenyan ambassador, Peter N.R.O. Ogego, on a 2008 Detroit radio show. When asked about “President-elect Obama’s birthplace over in Kenya,” he replied, “It’s already an attraction. His paternal grandmother is still alive.… It’s already well known” (video below).
There’s also the claim (there’s a question of interpretation) that Obama’s Kenyan step-grandmother said in a 2008 interview that Barack was “born in this village” (in Africa). Yet the most striking BRC evidence apparently came from Obama himself. As I reported earlier this month:
The story originated during Obama’s early days as an author. As Breitbart reported in 2012, “Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’” The booklet, which was distributed to ‘business colleagues’ in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.”
The individual who helped edit the booklet, Miriam Goderich, came forward and claimed that the information about Obama was merely a “mistake.” Yet this doesn’t ring true — and not just because Acton & Dystel is a big-money, professional publishing outfit. As Breitbart also wrote, “Goderich’s statement fails to explain why the ‘fact checking error’ persisted for 16 years, through at least three different versions of Jane Dystel’s website, and through at least four different versions of Obama’s biography. It persisted, in fact, more than two years after Obama became a United States senator, and until after Obama had declared his campaign for the presidency in 2007.” Moreover, as American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson deduced at the time, “There is no plausible explanation of how the literary agency came to believe Obama was born in Kenya, other than that Obama told that to his agency. They could not make a mistake ‘fact checking’ without an initial fact to check. Only Obama could have supplied such information.”
For certain. As someone widely published, I can tell you that while author bios are written in the third person, the information comes from the author himself — in fact, bios may even be composed by the author.
So what’s the truth? Mike Zullo told WND.com in 2013 that when his posse’s BCR “information is finally exposed to the public, it will be universe-shattering. This is beyond the pale of anything you can imagine.” And last Tuesday he told the STPP that “an unnamed official high up in Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, the hospital listed on Obama’s birth certificate, has ‘assured me that birth never took place there, and I believe him,’” reports the Arizona Republic.
Of course, there are other explanations for all the allegations. Perhaps the unnamed official is mistaken about something occurring five decades ago. It’s possible Obama’s step-grandmother misunderstood a question or really was misinterpreted. Maybe Ambassador Ogego both misunderstood the radio host’s query and misspoke, as his office later claimed. Perhaps Obama’s Acton & Dystel bio claim is explainable by way of his wanting to exploit a politically correct cachet and market himself with exoticism “born in Kenya.” And there could be other reasons for forging a birth certificate, such as hiding paternity. Anything is possible.
But none of this matters for Sheriff Arpaio; the issue for him is a forged document. But then there’s that issue for everyone else: Either a major law-enforcement agency is making, perhaps knowingly, an untrue and seriously damaging allegation against a sitting president. Or the president of the United States is perpetrating a fraud, in a con job of historical proportions.
Given this, is it really true that media figures, politicians, and other pseudo-elites won’t investigate the birth certificate because BCR is “tinfoil-hat nuttiness,” much ado about nothing, or yesterday’s news? Or is it that they’re afraid of what they may find?
