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Subscribe to RSSPHOENIX – Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Thursday unveiled preliminary results of an investigation, conducted by members of his volunteer task force, into the authenticity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate, a controversy that has been widely debunked but that remains alive for the so-called birther movement.
At a news conference, Arpaio, whose office is facing a federal inquiry involving alleged racial profiling, said the probe revealed that there was probable cause to believe Obama's long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April is a computer-generated forgery. He also said the selective service card completed by Obama in 1980 in Hawaii also was most likely a forgery.
"We don't know who the perpetrators are of these documents," Arpaio said, although he said he doesn't think the president forged the documents.
On Thursday, Obama's campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt offered a light-hearted dismissal of Arpaio's probe — he tweeted what he referred to as a "live link" to the sheriff's news conference, but instead provided a link to a snippet of the old conspiracy-theory based TV series, "The X-Files."
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio talks to reporters about the birth certificate investigation.
The sheriff said a forensic examination of the electronic document that the White House provided last year proves that it was not simply scanned to create a computer file but rather assembled from several pieces, East Valley Tribune.com reported.
Arpaio's probe comes amid a federal grand jury investigation into the sheriff's office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009, focusing on the sheriff's anti-public corruption squad. Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has accused Arpaio's office of racially profiling Latinos, basing immigration enforcement on racially charged citizen complaints and punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish. Arpaio denies the allegations and said the investigation is politically motivated.
Earlier Thursday, the 79-year-old Republican sheriff defended his need to spearhead the investigation into Obama's birth certificate by saying that nearly 250 people connected to a conservative Arizona Tea Party group requested one last summer.
"I'm not going after Obama," said Arpaio, who has criticized the president's administration for cutting off his federal immigration powers and conducting the civil rights investigation of his office. "I'm just doing my job."
Speculation about Obama's birthplace has swirled among conservatives for years. "Birthers" maintain that Obama is ineligible to hold the country's highest elected office because, they contend, he was born in Kenya, his father's homeland. Some contend Obama's birth certificate must be a fake.
Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed that Obama was born there, meaning he's a native-born American, and Obama released a copy of his long-form birth certificate in April. Courts also have rebuffed lawsuits over the issue. Of late, the president's re-election campaign has poked fun at it, selling coffee cups with a picture of the president's birth record.
Some critics suggest Arpaio's aim is to divert attention from his own legal troubles while raising his political profile as he seeks a sixth term this year. The sheriff vehemently denies such strategies are in play.
Critics also have sought Arpaio's resignation over allegations that more than 400 sex-crimes cases over a three-year period ending in 2007 were either inadequately investigated or weren't investigated at all by the Sheriff's Office after the crimes were reported. The Sheriff's Office said the backlog was cleared up after the problem was brought to Arpaio's attention.
Arpaio has said he took deliberate steps to avoid the appearance that his investigation is politically motivated. Instead of using taxpayer money, the sheriff farmed it out to lawyers and retired police officers who are volunteers in a posse that examines cold cases for him. Other posses assist deputies in duties that include providing free police protection at malls during the holiday season or transporting people to jail.
The sheriff remains popular among Republicans. GOP presidential candidates have courted his endorsement throughout the primary season. At last week's Republican presidential debate in Arizona, Arpaio won loud cheers. During a question about Arizona's border woes, former Sen. Rick Santorum said the government ought to give local police agencies the chance to enforce immigration law as Arpaio has.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Leave a Comment:
One reader posted
"I cannot attest to the validity of the sheriff's claims, but my college student son found something interesting with the PDF of the birth certificate that the White House uploaded to the Internet ( gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer /birth-certificate.pdf) (please remove spaces) using Inkscape, which is an open source vector graphics editor, like Adobe Illustrator.
PDFs can hold image data or text data. In President Obama's case, as this was supposed to be a scanned birth certificate, it should have been a single layer of image data. However, when opened up in Inkscape, the multiple layers are obvious".
please refer to, which what an Abobe expert said
After reading the above article, which concerns the investigation by Joe Arpaio of the Obama birth certificate and draft card, I took the time to read through the first page of comments on the article. I was truly disturbed, though not terribly surprised, by the tone of both the discussion and the article itself.
Snide and dismissive, but irrelevant comments such as "a controversy that has been widely debunked" and "whose office is facing a federal inquiry involving alleged racial profiling" in the introductory paragraphs reveal the liberal bias of MSNBC.
Firstly, a lot of people are not quite sure the "birther" conspiracy, as MSNBC declares, has been debunked. The first and only expert verification of the Whitehouse Long Form Birth Certificate (LFBC) I ever heard about was on FOX news, of all places. I don't remember the name of the "expert" but I did look him up and confirmed his expert authority. It is my understanding, however, that this expert later retracted his opinion because he wasn't really sure. Since that time, many "experts" have said various things such as the LFBC could not be a scan of an original as the Whitehouse has claimed.
I'm not an expert but I have worked extensively with Adobe software, specifically Photoshop and Acrobat, which is the software used to create and display PDF files, the format in which the LFBC was released. I went to the Whitehouse web site and downloaded the PDF, then took a close look at it. I really think I could have made a more convincing forgery than the one posted on the Whitehouse web site.
As to the accusations by the Justice Department, ever since Arpaio refused to ignore violations of federal immigration laws currently on the books, the Obama administration has been at odds with both Arpaio and the State of Arizona, against which the President filed a suite to prevent the enforcement of HB 1070, a law passed by the people of Arizona to protect its citizens and enforce existing federal immigration law. Obama's position regarding enforcement of immigration law in Arizona has been clear for some time. Please note that these new, highly publicized accusations (these unsubstantiated accusations (no charges have been filed) got much more media attention than the hard evidence presented by Arpaio's posse), came on the heels of Arpaio's announcement that he was investigating the LFBC (perhaps the Justice Department's investigation was in response to Arpaio's investigation; perhaps it was meant as a warning or threat or to discredit Arpaio in the eyes of the public?).
Considering the tone of the original article and the comments I read on the first page, I doubt that my "opposing view" will be posted. But just in case it is, I want to make it clear to the liberals and socialists out there that big business, which the liberal mind seems to vehemently abhor, has made us the richest, most powerful nation on Earth. Big business and industry pay the salaries that make the poor in the USA wealthier than all but the elite of most countries in the world. Big business and industry also pay the taxes that support the welfare culture, which liberals seem to find so morally gratifying.
Yet big business has been vilified at every turn by the liberal establishment who thinks that the government should tightly regulate the workings of business, confiscate their profits and redistribute them to people who have done nothing to earn them, unionize the workforce, and if possible, take over operations. The government has done so well with the post office and social security (both of which are pretty much in the crapper financially), let's let them ru(i)n business, too. Oh yes, and health care.
It seems to me that MSNBC and the rest of the liberal media intends to continue ignoring anything anyone has to say about this president that is negative in the least. If Obama was a conservative Republican, the media would have gone on full court press, reporting with fanfare every juicy detail, demanding a full investigation and making a spectacle out of it. done everything in their considerable power to shred his public image and defile his character.
The impact of Arpaio's investigation, should charges be filed, could be far bigger than Watergate or anything George W. Bush did in his tenure as president. This president, who has spent a small fortune in our tax money to conceal details of his past, was challenged to present "real" proof of his citizenship qualification to hold the office, and the best he could come up with was what appears to many an amateurish forgery.
In this article I do not see anyone addressing the real issue; Is the man occupying the Whitehouse qualified to be there? I see Obama being defended and Arpaio vilified. I have an idea; let's shoot the messenger, I've heard bad things about him (he IS a Republican after all), and I don't want to believe his message is true; the Emperor has no proof of citizenship.