Obama: True and False

McCain Campaign Investigated, Dismissed Obama Citizenship Rumors
Frivolous ‘Birther’ Lawsuits Fuel Conspiracy Theories, Media Coverage

By David Weigel 7/24/09 8:38 AM

In the final months of the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign learned of a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that asked the state to strip Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of the Democratic nomination on suspicion that he was not an American citizen. The complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief was filed by Phil Berg, a former deputy state attorney general who left government in 1990 for a series of gadfly political campaigns. His last round of notoriety had come when he filed RICO complaints against George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and multiple members of the Bush administration for “accountability” for the 9/11 attacks. Still, Berg’s complaint had gotten glancing local media attention, and the Democratic National Committee’s counsel had filed a motion to dismiss it. One lawyer who was doing some work for the campaign was tasked with reading Berg’s lawsuit and gauging its chances of success.

“The conversation was along the lines of ‘this is idiotic, but explain to me why,’” said the lawyer, who spoke under condition of anonymity to TWI. “I looked at whether the lawsuit was going to be dismissed. I said yes.”

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“We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” said Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain presidential campaigns. “The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.”

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While they ruled out any chance of the ‘birther’ lawsuits holding up in court, lawyers for the McCain campaign did check into the rumors about Obama’s birth and the assertions made by Berg and others. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” said Potter. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

Washington Independent

Keyes and Birthers, Buckley and Birchers
By Bill Pascoe | July 28, 2009 12:30 PM |

As one of the GOP operatives whose job it was to defeat Barack Obama in a campaign for federal office (there have only been three GOP campaigns run against him, and I’ve been involved with two of them), I can attest to the fact that [b]nowhere in our opposition research did we find any reason to believe that the man was not a natural born citizen of the United States[/b].

I can also attest to the fact that this man — who, at about 1:22 into this video, shot on February 20 of this year, lays out the Birther case against Obama — never raised any doubts about Obama’s alleged overseas birth while he was running against Obama for the United States Senate in Illinois in 2004.

Oh, Alan Keyes said all sorts of other nutty things while he was the GOP Senate nominee in 2004, the kinds of things that cause campaign operatives to go gray prematurely — “Jesus Christ would not vote for my opponent,” Second Daughter Mary Cheney was a “selfish hedonist,” and other such bon mots — but he never once challenged Obama’s place of birth.

CQ Politics