‘This Is Not a Legitimate Birth Certificate’: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Claims He Proved Obama’s Birth Certificate False

AP

Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeared on the Mike Broomhead show today to discuss the results of an investigation he had conducted into President Obama’s alleged birth certificate, including a trip to Hawaii to try to gain access to the documents.

Characteristically, Arpaio did not hedge his statements with any qualifiers, stating unequivocally that the document released to the public was a fraud, and that “anybody [who's] an adult can get a birth certificate” in Hawaii, presuming you live there for a year and pay your taxes and phone bill. Arpaio did call for an investigation into this, at minimum, suggesting that even if President Obama’s birth certificate is left off the table, it should be a relevant question why Hawaii is allegedly issuing birth certificates to anyone who lives there for a year. Arpaio has also issued a press release to this effect.

AP

No matter what happens regarding the Congressional investigation, one has to note that, if the practice Arpaio alleges actually happens, then it also introduces a thorny problem for those who argue that the President’s birthplace is not a settled issue. Clearly, Obama spent more than a year in Hawaii, and if the government is willing to retroactively issue birth certificates to anyone of whom this is the case, then it is effectively impossible to prove whether the certificate on record for Obama is, in fact, the one that was issued at his birth, since it would be dated and filed retroactively as though it had happened immediately.

Arpaio must have been aware of this problem, because when asked about what he wanted to happen to the President, he replied only, “I’m not telling him what to do, to tell him that he committed a crime. But someone had to be behind this forged document.”

In other words, Arpaio only wants a prosecution of the person responsible for creating the allegedly fraudulent copy of President Obama’s birth certificate, not of the President himself. In either case, however, he is unlikely to get it.

Thunder