Will Dinesh D’Souza Find Anything on Obama at Columbia?

OR IS THERE NOTHING TO FIND?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 18, 2017) — In a tweet on Saturday afternoon, film producer, commentator and author Dinesh D’Souza announced that he will be speaking at Columbia University on Tuesday, where Barack Hussein Obama’s life narrative says he attended from 1981 to 1983.

“If I have time I’ll look for his ‘buried’ thesis & grade transcripts,” D’Souza wrote in an apparent reference to the dearth of evidence that Obama ever attended Columbia.

A second tweet provided readers with a link to the announcement and details of the event, which is sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation (YAF).

Some, including former presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, have publicly asked how Obama could have been admitted to the Ivy League institution after he reportedly earned poor grades at Occidental College in Los Angeles between 1979 in 1981.

To this writer’s knowledge, the Obama White House never released any proof of Obama’s purported attendance and graduation from Columbia University with a degree in political science.

Early in Obama’s occupation of the White House, Rev. James David Manning, whose office is in close proximity to Columbia, dispatched a team of volunteers to look for evidence of Obama’s presence there during the early 1980s. Manning subsequently reported that his investigators were unable to find any trace of Obama at Columbia.

Both Columbia University and Harvard Law School have been unresponsive to this writer’s requests for documentation on Obama.

In August 2012, Columbia graduate Wayne Allyn Root wrote:

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia has ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.

In October 2012, then-businessman and current President of the United States Donald J. Trump brought attention to questions he had about Obama’s citizenship status by offering Obama $5 million for a charity of Obama’s choosing if he would release his passport and university applications.

“He’ll be doing a great service to the country if he does this,” Trump said at the time.

The White House ignored Trump’s challenge, which Trump increased to $50 million with the same result.

In early 2011, Trump had begun openly questioning Obama’s claim to have been born in Honolulu, HI given that the only “proof” was an image posted at several websites deemed a “Certification of Life Birth.” Trump also cited a report that Obama’s step-grandmother declared through an interpreter that she had been present at his birth in Kenya.

Between January and early April 2011, Trump unapologetically appeared on high-profile shows such as Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone,” CNN’s “Newsroom” and “The Today Show” during which he called for Obama to release his “long-form” birth certificate which would presumably contain the signature of the delivery doctor and other details not present on the short-form image.

On April 27, 2011, the White House released what it said was a scan of a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH).  Later that day, Trump gave a press conference in New Hampshire wherein he claimed credit for the White House’s release of the image and which he said his associates would examine for authenticity.

Within 24 hours, however, the image was declared a forgery by graphics and computer experts unrelated to Trump.

Several days after the White House released what it said was a PDF of a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, Obama ridiculed Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where Trump was in attendance and did not appear amused.

Obama also joked about those questioning his place of birth, projecting that challenge onto other possible 2012 presidential candidates whose birthplace and eligibility might be questioned.

In August of that year, then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio commissioned his “Cold Case Posse” to launch an investigation into the long-form birth certificate image at the request of 242 constituents concerned that their votes in the 2012 presidential election would be disenfranchised if the image proved to be fraudulent.

Within several days, posse members consisting of retired or former law enforcement officers, a detective, and attorneys concluded that the image presented problems requiring further investigation which ultimately spanned more than five years.

On March 1, 2012, lead investigator Mike Zullo and Arpaio presented at a press conference evidence indicating that the long-form birth certificate image is a “computer-generated forgery.” Also studied and found to be fraudulent during the initial six months was Obama’s Selective Service registration form.

On July 17, 2012, Zullo and Arpaio gave a second press conference in which they announced that the “probable cause” standard had been surpassed in regard to the long-form birth certificate image. Arpaio called upon Congress to launch an investigation, but neither the media nor Congress did so.

In an address at the National Press Club in late May 2014, Trump was asked if he regretted questioning Obama’s constitutional eligibility, to which he responded in the negative.  From there, Trump expounded on several theories pertaining to Obama’s origins, including that Obama was born in the United States but misrepresented himself as a foreign-born student in order to obtain college financial aid designated for non-U.S. citizens. Alternatively, Trump mused, Obama could have been born in Kenya, about which he would have been truthful in obtaining such financial aid while studying in the United States.

“I offered $5 million to just see the records…” Trump explained to his audience, acknowledging people he said he had encountered who reportedly encouraged him to continue to probe Obama’s birthplace and other details.

“A lot of people are questioning the birth certificate; they’re questioning its authenticity…” he acknowledged, reiterating that he had wanted to see “some basic things” in Obama’s college applications in making his offer. Eighteen months afterward, Trump remained incredulous that Obama had not accepted either offer in exchange for releasing the requested records.

Prior to Obama’s announcement that he would run for president in February 2007, a number of credible news reports stated that Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia. Several such reports were quietly changed at some point after Obama became a presidential candidate to say that he was born in Hawaii.

Trump’s nominee for HUD Secretary, Dr. Benjamin Carson, similarly told radio host Alan Colmes the day after Trump’s National Press Club event that he believed Obama should release all of his records, if only to counter the “racisim” and “soft bigotry” Holmes raised as possible motives for those questioning Obama’s life narrative.  “I would say that the best way to put that to rest is to expose everything, including your academic records,” Carson said.

In September, left-leaning CNN compiled a list of “14 of Trump’s most outrageous ‘birther’ claims” in which Trump is shown saying, “If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility, then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”

The mainstream media is aware of the U.S. Constitution’s Article II requirement mandating that the president and commander-in-chief be a “natural born Citizen,” which is always been understood by virtually all Americans to mean “born in the United States.”

Substantial research on the part of citizens, scholars, and constitutional attorneys has revealed that the Framers likely considered the citizenship of a person’s parents to be equally important in determining whether or not a person is “natural born.”

In the 1875 case of Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion stated:

…The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their [p168] parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens…

Throughout the Obama years, however, the high court has declined to hear oral argument alleging that Barack Obama was ineligible for the office of president for a variety of reasons, including that his claimed father was never a U.S. citizen.

For decades, Trump has berated the media for misrepresenting facts. Since taking office on January 20 as the 45th president, he has further termed the mainstream media as an “enemy of the American people.”  “The level of dishonesty is out of control,” he said.

At a press conference on Thursday, he declared CNN the purveyor of “very fake news.”