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.”
-snip
“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.”
-snip
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
Filed under: Birth Certificate, Citizenship, Politics, True!
CHIYOME LEINAALA FUKINO M.D., DIRECTOR, HAWAI’I DEPT. OF HEALTH
Phone: (808) 586-4410
Fax: (808) 586-4444
For Immediate Release: October 31, 2008 08-93
STATEMENT BY DR. CHIYOME FUKINO
“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate. State law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record.
“Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawai‘i, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawai‘i State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.
“No state official, including Governor Linda Lingle, has ever instructed that this vital record be handled in a manner different from any other vital record in the possession of the State of Hawai‘i.”
Confirmed by Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo:
Does this mean Obama was born in Hawaii?
“Yes,” said Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo, in both email and telephone interviews with the Tribune. “That’s what Dr. Fukino is saying.”
And again by Dr. Fukino:
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
News Release
LINDA LINGLE
GOVERNOR
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
CHIYOME LEINAALA FUKINO M.D.
DIRECTOR
Phone: (808) 586-4410
Fax: (808) 586-4444
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release: July 27, 2009 09-063
STATEMENT BY HEALTH DIRECTOR CHIYOME FUKINO, M.D.
“I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, Director of the Hawai‛i State Department of Health, have seen the original vital
records maintained on file by the Hawai‘i State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama
was born in Hawai‘i and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement
or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago.”
Hawaii.gov
Filed under: Birth Certificate, Citizenship, True!
The state Department of Health no longer issues copies of paper birth certificates as was done in the past, said spokeswoman Janice Okubo.
The department only issues “certifications” of live births, and that is the “official birth certificate” issued by the state of Hawaii, she said.
And, it’s only available in electronic form.
Okubo explained that the Health Department went paperless in 2001.
“At that time, all information for births from 1908 (on) was put into electronic files for consistent reporting,” she said.
Information about births is transferred electronically from hospitals to the department.
–
Asked for more information about the short-form versus long-form birth documents, Okubo said the Health Department “does not have a short-form or long-form certificate.”
“The birth certificate form has been modified over the years and decades to conform to national standards and models,” she said.
Okubo also emphasized the certification form “contains all the information needed by all federal government agencies for transactions requiring a birth certificate.”
She added that the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the state’s current certification of live birth “as an official birth certificate meeting all federal and other requirements.”
The issue of what constitutes an official Hawaii birth certificate received national attention during last year’s presidential campaign. Those who doubted Barack Obama’s American citizenship called the copy of the Hawaii birth document posted on his campaign Web site a fake.
Asked about that document, Okubo said, “This is the same certified copy everyone receives when they request a birth certificate.”
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 6, 2009
Filed under: Birth Certificate, True!
First Read makes an important point about the appointment of Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) to be ambassador to China:
“Whether it is Specter switching parties, Judd Gregg accepting the Commerce post (even for a few days), or this appointment — it’s going to be hard for Republicans to make the public case that somehow Obama hasn’t attempted to reach across the aisle. Of course, the White House has been very strategic in its attempts at bipartisanship, which no doubt frustrates many Republicans because the president isn’t being bipartisan on everything.”
Remember what Rahm Emanuel told the New Yorker a few months ago: “The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don’t have to succeed.”
Political Wire
Filed under: Bipartisanship, True!
President Barack Obama will announce plans on Tuesday for a national fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas standard for automobiles in an effort to give more certainty to car companies as they struggle for survival, industry and administration sources told POLITICO on Monday.
The administration will bill the tailpipe-emissions announcement as historic, because it avoids a patchwork of standards and has won agreement from so many stakeholders, including automakers, state governments, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The national emissions policy for autos, which will ramp up to a new mileage-per-gallon standard in 2016, will harmonize the CAFE standard and the EPA’s greenhouse-gas standard, so that industry will not have to worry that the administration will regulate those on separate tracks.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Energy, True!
January 22, 2009 • 3:10 am
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release January 22, 2009
EXECUTIVE ORDER
ENSURING LAWFUL INTERROGATIONS
By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to improve the effectiveness of human intelligence gathering, to promote the safe, lawful, and humane treatment of individuals in United States custody and of United States personnel who are detained in armed conflicts, to ensure compliance with the treaty obligations of the United States, including the Geneva Conventions, and to take care that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed, I hereby order as follows:
Section 1. Revocation. Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, is revoked. All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order. Heads of departments and agencies shall take all necessary steps to ensure that all directives, orders, and regulations of their respective departments or agencies are consistent with this order. Upon request, the Attorney General shall provide guidance about which directives, orders, and regulations are inconsistent with this order.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Executive Order, Intelligence, Justice, Military, National Security, True!
December 24, 2008 • 9:43 pm
Obama Attends Service for Grandmother
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; Page A03
HONOLULU, Dec. 23 — President-elect Barack Obama and his family joined close friends Tuesday to pay tribute to the woman he called his “rock,” his maternal grandmother, who provided stability in his young life and made possible his rise to the nation’s presidency.
The Obamas attended a private memorial service for Madelyn Dunham, who lived in a modest apartment here and died of cancer at age 86 two days before the presidential election.
The service was held at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, a two-story house converted into a place of worship. The service was closed to the media.
Washington Post
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu is where the funeral for President Obama’s grandparents and mother were held. It was here he attended Sunday School as a boy.
Obama’s Neighborhood
When Obama was in elementary school in Honolulu, Young recounted in a telephone phone interview, either his grandmother or grandfather (there’s confusion over which one) brought him to Sunday school there for several years.
The Dunhams had attended a Unitarian church in the Seattle area when Obama’s mother was a teenager. Although there’s no record of their attendance at the Honolulu church, Obama writes about it in his memoir “Dreams From My Father,” and one family who still attends the church remembers him.
When Young reminded Obama at the memorial service, “his eyes lit up, and he turned to Michelle and said, ‘Hey, that’s right. This is where I went to Sunday school.’”
Obama spent some time on the second floor, where Sunday school is held, but didn’t recognize anything. That’s not surprising, Young said, because the church has been renovated over the years.
The 100-year-old building had been an estate of the Cooks, a well-known family in Hawaii.
Tampa Bay Online
Filed under: Biography, True!
August 23, 2008 • 3:08 pm
However, FactChecker.org says it obtained Obama’s actual birth certificate and that the document was indeed real. The site discredited some of the claims of Internet bloggers, such as that the certificate as viewed in a scanned copy released by Obama’s campaign lacked a raised seal. FactChecker.org also established that many of the alleged flaws in the document noted by bloggers were caused by the scanning of the document.
A separate WND investigation into Obama’s birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic.
World Net Daily
Here is a cached copy, just in case.
Here is the FactCheck referred to in the WND article above.
Filed under: Birth Certificate, Internet News, True!
