Ann Coulter Raises “the Birth Certificate” on Fox News

REACHING THE MAINSTREAM?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 10, 2017) — On John Stossel’s Friday night program on the Fox Business Channel, his first guest, Ann Coulter, stated that “the birth certificate” was not discussed on “Fox News” and that Hillary Clinton allegedly began the controversy which persisted throughout Barack Obama’s two terms in the White House.

Her invocation of the subject came up in a discussion of issues dividing the political right and left and what Stossel termed “the mob.”

“It never came up on Fox.  No one on Fox ever pushed the birth certificate thing,” Coulter told Stossel.

Coulter’s reference to Clinton echoed that of Donald Trump, who stated on more than one occasion during his campaign that his then-opponent gave rise to the doubts that Obama was constitutionally eligible to serve as president because of an alleged birth on foreign soil.

Trump was the first public figure to openly question Obama’s eligibility as a “natural born Citizen” by demanding to see his “long-form” birth certificate.

Coulter and Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton began rumors of Obama’s foreign birth was supported in 2012 when filmmaker and 2008 primary observer Bettina Viviano came forward to say that former President Bill Clinton had contended in a conference call that he was almost certain that Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii as Obama claimed.

In a 2012 interview, Bill Clinton referenced the subject of presidential eligibility.

Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution contains three qualifications for the president and commander-in-chief:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

In a following segment of the show, Stossel discussed whether protesters or the police are “the mob.”

To date, no one on Fox has reported the details revealed in a December 15, 2016 press conference summarizing the findings of a five-year criminal investigation that the long-form birth certificate image posted at whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011 is a “computer-generated forgery.”

Since its beginnings, the birth certificate investigation has been mischaracterized by the media as one aimed at seeking confirmation of Obama’s birthplace when in fact, it was on the authenticity of the image.

Based on the findings of forgery, lead investigator Mike Zullo said that the image was published “with the intent to deceive” the American people.

On January 2, Bret Baier of “Special Report” obliquely mentioned the birth certificate in a segment focusing on the fact that Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, who commissioned Zullo to conduct the investigation, had left office after losing his re-election bid for a seventh term in November.  Without citing with whom he spoke, Baier claimed that “the White House” responded to Zullo and Arpaio’s claims that the birth certificate image is a forgery as “ridiculous.”

He did not detail the revelations Zullo presented that “nine points of forgery” were found by two forensics analysts to confirm that the birth certificate image released by the Obama White House cannot possibly be authentic.