Thread: Sheriff Arpaio: Obama birth certificate a ‘forgery’ WASHINGTON TIMES

Sheriff Arpaio: Obama birth certificate a ‘forgery’

By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Updated: 4:05 p.m. on Thursday, March 1, 2012

PHOENIX — Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Thursday he suspects the birth certificate President Obama released last year is a “computer-generated forgery” — and also raised questions about the authenticity of the president’s Selective Service card.

“Based on all of the evidence presented and investigated, I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic,” Sheriff Arpaio said. “My investigators believe that the long-form birth certificate was manufactured electronically and that it did not originate in paper format as claimed by the White House.”

Questions over Mr. Obama’s birth certificate have been a political sideshow for the last four years, and have persisted despite repeated denials by the White House, and despite the release of evidence he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961. That evidence included both a certificate of live birth released during the 2008 campaign and the long-form certificate last year.

Fact-check organizations have concluded the certificates are authentic, and Mr. Obama has joked about those who questioned his birth. At last year’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner, soon after releasing his long-form certificate, he mocked Donald Trump, who had said his own investigators were looking into the matter.

Now Sheriff Arpaio, who first built his national profile by creating tent cities for jail inmates and later by taking a tough stance on illegal immigration, could reignite questions among those who continue to believe Mr. Obama was born outside the U.S., and therefore is ineligible to be president under the Constitution’s provision that the officeholder be a natural-born citizen.

Sheriff Arpaio said at least two crimes could have been committed in his view through the forgery. He repeatedly said he is not questioning whether Mr. Obama was born in the U.S., but instead is challenging the authenticity of the documents themselves.

He released a 10-page report detailing what his investigators said were “inconsistencies” in the text characters of the birth certificate image the White House released, and also questioned details of the computer file itself.

Some of those claims had earlier been raised on the Internet as well, and both the White House and independent fact-checkers have dismissed those questions, saying the computer file is consistent with the version of events the White House has detailed.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It released the long-form certificate last year after repeated questions were raised by conservative activists and conspiracy-theory websites questioning the authenticity of the short-form certificate Mr. Obama released during the 2008 campaign.

The Justice Department has accused Sheriff Arpaio of civil rights abuses within his department, but he said he began his investigation before that — in August 2011, after tea party members from Surprise, Ariz., a town within Maricopa County, signed a petition challenging the certificate.

Sheriff Arpaio detailed former law enforcement officers who constitute what he called his “cold case posse” to do the investigation. He said no taxpayer dollars were spent.

He was joined in his press conference by Jerome Corsi, an author who has been critical of Mr. Obama. He was also one of those who took a critical look at Sen. John Kerry’s military service during his 2004 presidential bid.

Mr. Corsi made headlines when he traveled to Kenya, saying he wanted to track down where he thought Mr. Obama was really born.

Sheriff Arpaio said he went into the investigation with an open mind, and would have been happy to clear Mr. Obama.

His investigators said the computer file released by the White House appears to have been created on a computer, rather than having been originally made on paper and then scanned.

The investigators said they have identified “a person of interest” in the birth certificate.

Sheriff Arpaio’s chief investigator on the project said there are so many questions that he couldn’t have cleared Mr. Obama to be an employee of Maricopa County.

Pursuing questions over the birth certificate has been a thorny issue for the GOP. State lawmakers in several places, including Arizona, have pursued laws that would have imposed checks on any presidential candidate’s qualifications to get on their state ballots.

One such proposal in Arizona, which became known as the “birther” bill, was vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer last year.

Sheriff Arpaio: Obama birth certificate a 'forgery' - Washington Times

I think arrest warrants are being issued for the person(s) of interest

Mar 01, 2012

Obama team makes light of latest birth certificate claims

By David Jackson, USA TODAY Updated 1h 27m ago

The issue of President Obama's birth certificate won't go away, so Obama's re-election team decided to have a little fun with it.

As an Arizona sheriff held a news conference claiming evidence that the birth certificate released in April is a fake, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt tweeted out what he called a "live feed" of the presentation -- which turned out to be a clip of the theme song from the old science fiction series The X Files.

LaBolt also told Twitter followers "birth certificate available here" -- and linked to an ad for an Obama coffee mug with the birth certificate emblazoned it.

The birth certificate shows that Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, said Thursday: "Based on all of the evidence presented and investigated, I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic ... My investigators believe that the long-form birth certificate was manufactured electronically and that it did not originate in paper format as claimed by the White House."

The Associated Press notes that Arpaio is a controversial public official:

America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff finds himself entangled these days in his own thorny legal troubles: a federal grand jury probe over alleged abuse of power, Justice Department accusations of racial profiling and revelations that his department didn't adequately investigate hundreds of Arizona sex-crime cases.

Rather than seek cover, though, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is seeking to grab the spotlight in the same unorthodox fashion that has helped boost his career as a nationally known lawman.

Arpaio scheduled a news conference Thursday to unveil preliminary results of an investigation, conducted by members of his volunteer cold-case posse, into the authenticity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate, a controversy that has been widely debunked but which remains alive in the eyes of some conservatives. Last year, Donald Trump most prominently revived the issue while entertaining a possible bid for the presidency.

LaBolt also made a political tweet on Arpaio's claims, referecing Republican opponent Mitt Romney:

Still want it? Romney has called Arpaio for his endorsement, his aides called "weekly" and Arpaio was his honorary Chair in 08.

Obama team makes light of latest birth certificate claims

C.B.S. NEWS

Sheriff Joe Arpaio suggests Obama's birth certificate is a forgery

By Brian Montopoli

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, announced Thursday that his six-month investigation had found that "probable cause exists indicating that forgery and fraud may have been committed" in the release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate.

The publicity-hungry Arpaio, a strong opponent of illegal immigration who calls himself "America's Toughest Sheriff," said the evidence gathered by his investigators suggests Mr. Obama's birth certificate and selective service registration card are fakes.

"Based on all of the evidence, I cannot in good faith report to you these documents are authentic," Arpaio said at a press conference in Phoenix, adding that his "investigators believe that the long form birth certificate was manufactured electronically and that it did not originate in the paper format as presented by the White House."

The 79-year-old Arpaio, who has been accused by the Justice Department of racial profiling and who is being probed by a federal grand jury over potential abuse of power, said he told his investigators to examine the president's documents with "no preconceived notions," adding that he "felt that this investigation could clear President Obama's name and put people's minds at ease."

Arpaio became Maricopa County sheriff in 1993, and has been elected five times. He said the investigation, undertaken by his five-member volunteer "Cold Case Posse" at the request of an Arizona Tea Party group, did not involve any cost to taxpayers.

(Credit: AP)
Arpaio's press conference puts him in league with the "birthers," the conspiracy theorists who claim - against overwhelming evidence - that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States and thus is not eligible to be president. (Many "birthers" believe the president was born in Kenya.) The White House's decision to release the president's long-form birth certificate in April has quieted such claims, though it did not extinguished them.

"We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers," Mr. Obama said at the time. "We've got some enormous challenges out there. There are a lot of folks out there still looking for work...We do not have time for this kind of silliness."

Mike Zullo, the lead investigator for Arpaio, on Thursday presented a series of videos that he said showed that the president's documents were likely forgeries. He suggested the investigation showed that Mr. Obama's long-form birth certificate, which was released electronically, "never existed in paper form," and said the evidence had led him to recommend to Arpaio "a full-blown criminal investigation."

Zullo also said his team came to the conclusion that the Hawaii Department of Health and Hawaiian officials "may have intentionally obscured 1961 birth records and procedures" to keep them from being adequately examined.

Arpaio said last month he had briefed GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum on his investigation, and that Santorum said he "had no problems with what I told him that I may be doing."

Also present at the news conference was Jerome Corsi, author of the book Where's the Birth Certificate?, which was published last May. Corsi writes for the website WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that has long pushed the notion that the president was not born in the United States. WorldNetDaily livestreamed Arpaio's press conference and teased it with a story that complained that mainstream media reporters have "mostly have giggled when talk turns to the serious question of just what the U.S. Constitution requires of presidents."

"This was not a politically motivated inquiry," Corsi said Thursday. "It is an inquiry for truth."

Arpaio's biography on the Maricopa County sheriff's website notes that he oversees chain gangs, "started the nation's largest Tent City for convicted inmates," makes all inmates wear pink underwear, posts mug shots of all those arrested in the county and has reduced crime using "hard-hitting enforcement methods."

"No wonder Sheriff Arpaio has been profiled in over 4500 U.S. and foreign newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs," the bio reads.

The Justice Department said in December that Arpaio has engaged in "a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law," and a federal grand jury is investigating his office for abuse of power over its anti-public corruption investigations. Arpaio has also been criticized for allegedly inadequately investigating hundreds of sex crimes cases.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio suggests Obama's birth certificate is a forgery - Political Hotsheet - CBS News

The press release containing links to the videos can be found here: http://www.mcso.org/MultiMedia/Press...mafindings.pdf .

I've viewed all the videos and have a few comments.

The intent of the videos of the birth certificate seems to be to show that the document wasn't scanned in from a single sheet of paper but was composed of various elements matted together and is therefore a forgery. The document is clearly composed of various elements matted together. If one looks at the left edge it is obvious that the ruled portion of the document is scanned from a document which wasn't quite flat whereas the background is perfectly flat.

I don't see how this is proof or even evidence of forgery. Did anyone ever claim that the online document was a scan of a single piece of paper? I'm guessing that the state of Hawaii information retrieval system generated this file with the intent that it be printed out on paper before leaving the office. I don't think the person developing the software ever intended this file to serve as an official document. The state of Hawaii gave this intermediate file to the Obama administration which then distributed it.

The ruled portion of the document was scanned from the original registry book. The retrieval program retrieved the original scan of the ruled portion and matted that together with the date stamp, signature stamp, and background pattern to produce the PDF file. More interesting is why the ruled area is broken up across layers. I'm guessing this is an artifact of how the original registry scan was processed when originally put into the database. The program processing the original scanned page attempted to break it up in order to automatically extract some data and store it separately into the database.

In my opinion this is not evidence of fraud but of poor decisions by the programmer writing the software. If I were the state of Hawaii I would not accept software of this poor quality. Even if the scan from the original registry was broken up in order to facilitate data extraction there should still be a single unbroken scan of that page in the database and it should be used to create the document. Why the heck did the programmer decide to have the date stamp and signature stamp matted in look like a rubber stamp? If it was generated by a computer instead of a rubber stamp it should look like it was computer generated. I'm guessing somebody made the poor decision that when the state went from manually generating forms to generating them from computer somebody made the decision to retain the look of a rubber stamp. To distribute any official government document as a PDF file is a poor decision--especially when it is divided into layers. Releasing it in this format invites fraud because it makes it easy to modify.

My speculations could easily be confirmed or disproved by examining the source code of the program used by the state of Hawaii to retrieve and generate the document.

Originally Posted by artclam

I've viewed all the videos and have a few comments.

The intent of the videos of the birth certificate seems to be to show that the document wasn't scanned in from a single sheet of paper but was composed of various elements matted together and is therefore a forgery. The document is clearly composed of various elements matted together. If one looks at the left edge it is obvious that the ruled portion of the document is scanned from a document which wasn't quite flat whereas the background is perfectly flat.

I don't see how this is proof or even evidence of forgery. Did anyone ever claim that the online document was a scan of a single piece of paper? I'm guessing that the state of Hawaii information retrieval system generated this file with the intent that it be printed out on paper before leaving the office. I don't think the person developing the software ever intended this file to serve as an official document. The state of Hawaii gave this intermediate file to the Obama administration which then distributed it.

The ruled portion of the document was scanned from the original registry book. The retrieval program retrieved the original scan of the ruled portion and matted that together with the date stamp, signature stamp, and background pattern to produce the PDF file. More interesting is why the ruled area is broken up across layers. I'm guessing this is an artifact of how the original registry scan was processed when originally put into the database. The program processing the original scanned page attempted to break it up in order to automatically extract some data and store it separately into the database.

In my opinion this is not evidence of fraud but of poor decisions by the programmer writing the software. If I were the state of Hawaii I would not accept software of this poor quality. Even if the scan from the original registry was broken up in order to facilitate data extraction there should still be a single unbroken scan of that page in the database and it should be used to create the document. Why the heck did the programmer decide to have the date stamp and signature stamp matted in look like a rubber stamp? If it was generated by a computer instead of a rubber stamp it should look like it was computer generated. I'm guessing somebody made the poor decision that when the state went from manually generating forms to generating them from computer somebody made the decision to retain the look of a rubber stamp. To distribute any official government document as a PDF file is a poor decision--especially when it is divided into layers. Releasing it in this format invites fraud because it makes it easy to modify.

My speculations could easily be confirmed or disproved by examining the source code of the program used by the state of Hawaii to retrieve and generate the document.

How come i can go to the county hall of records and get mine RIGHT NOW. And it is not a fake. And i am also a master at Adobe Acrobat Pro. I can make a document from anything.

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