U.S. Justice Department Accesses Obama “Eligibility” Article

JUDGE’S FORMER LAW CLERK NOW AT THE DOJ

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 25, 2020) — Just after 3:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday, a reader logging on to The Post & Email from a “United States Department of Justice” IP address accessed an article from 2010 detailing the progress of a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Judge David O. Carter presiding, with the purpose of discovering whether or not Barack Hussein Obama was constitutionally eligible to serve as the nation’s chief executive.

The article, titled, “The strange case of Judge David O. Carter,” was written by citizen observer David F. LaRocque, who attended a hearing in the case on July 13, 2009.  At the time, LaRocque recounted, Carter indicated that the question of the eligibility of an elected president is a valid one, and after numerous disappointing rulings in similar cases elsewhere, the plaintiffs were encouraged that the question as to Obama’s eligibility might at last be heard on its merits.

The lawsuit, initially filed in California state court by Atty. Orly Taitz on January 20, 2009, named then-California Secretary of State Debra Bowen as defendant and presented two questions:

Does the burden of proof lie with the Petitioner to prove standing and evidence lack of qualification by a candidate/President elect, where election officers rely on a candidate’s declaration? OR Does the CONSTITUTION amend. 20 place the burden of proof on the President elect to provide objective government certified witnessed proofs, with election officers under oath to challenge, examine and declare that the President elect has or has not qualified, enforceable by petition for redress of grievances?

and

Should the “natural born citizen” presidential qualification be interpreted expansively to expand civil rights under the 14th Amendment? OR Should it be interpreted restrictively as an essential guard against tyranny by ensuring the Commander in Chief has only had undivided allegiance to the U.S.A., to safeguard the Constitution and the Republic?

Obama’s failure to produce a “long-form” birth certificate and other identifying documents during his presidential campaign, among other factors, led to the plaintiffs’ contention that he did not meet the presidential eligibility criterion of “natural born Citizen,” as Article II of the U.S. Constitution requires.

Questions as to Obama’s eligibility arose after he declared himself a presidential candidate in February 2007 as a first-term, little-known U.S. Senator from Illinois.  Previously, Obama had said publicly that he harbored no plans to run for president without completing his six-year term.

As The Post & Email has chronicled since 2009, a myriad of conflicting but credible reports identified Obama’s birthplace as Kenya or Indonesia and not Hawaii, as he claims.

Between 1991 and April 2007, Obama’s own literary agent reported him in a biographical sketch as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”  As Breitbart News reported in May 2012, the biography was changed to say that Obama was “born in Hawaii,” with the then-former literary agent claiming the “error” was due to her inexperience and her failure to “fact-check.”

In June 2008, an image appeared at a number of websites, including Obama’s campaign website, purported to be his “birth certificate” from the State of Hawaii. The image prompted a number of questions as a result of its blacked-out certificate number, reference to his father’s race as “African” and the lack of a doctor’s signature and other details normally found on a more comprehensive birth record.

In October 2008, Obama campaign surrogate and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told reporters in Spanish that Obama is “an immigrant.”

Less than four months after acknowledging the plaintiffs’ questions about Obama’s eligibility and pledging a swift resolution, Carter reversed himself and dismissed the case. In his summary of the events, LaRocque observed that Carter’s decision was made after his hiring of a new law clerk from the mega-firm Perkins Coie and an October 5, 2009 hearing in which Carter’s demeanor was markedly changed.

“Once the hearing commenced, a change in tone became immediately apparent,” LaRocque wrote. “It seemed that Judge Carter was much more skeptical of the plaintiff’s [sic] case, and noticeably more adversarial in his exchanges with Attorney Taitz. In an affidavit regarding this hearing which I provided in connection with the August 11 appeal, I stated that ‘I thought (the) change in Judge Carter’s demeanor from one hearing to the (October 5) hearing…was striking and quite surprising.’ Another affiant made a similar statement in her affidavit: ‘After the hearing a large group of people met outside and declared that we couldn’t believe the change in the judge’s demeanor. One of the gentlemen, who said that he had known Judge Carter for a long time, stated that he had never seen him like that before.’”

Several weeks later, Carter dismissed the suit, a decision which Taitz appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Of Carter’s abrupt about-face, LaRocque wrote, “To say that the Barnett plaintiffs were stunned on hearing this news is putting it mildly. This astonishing new development was not only unbelievable; it was incomprehensible. How could this happen in America? On the face of it, this surprising action by Judge Carter was so far outside the norm of appropriate judicial conduct that it seemed unimaginable. It even gave off an odor of corruption and manipulation of the judiciary that was so out of character with what we knew of Judge Carter that one had to wonder – what was the nature of the pressure that was brought to bear on Judge Carter that he would even entertain such a course of action?”

The DOJ reader on Tuesday searched the article under the tag “Siddharth Velamoor,” Carter’s new law clerk at the time. Velamoor is now an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, a position he has held since at least 2017.

Fast-forwarding to late 2010, when then-businessman Donald Trump began stridently demanding that the White House release Obama’s original birth certificate to prove his eligibility, on April 27, 2011, the White House released what it said was a certified copy of Obama’s “long-form” birth record to much media fanfare.

Later that morning, Obama himself hosted a brief press conference at which he said, “As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now. I think it started during the campaign. And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going. We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.”

The “briefing” to which Obama referred likely was an off-the-record session provided to reporters shortly before, during which then-White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said that Obama would not be “holding” the document while delivering his remarks that morning.

When a reporter challenged Pfeiffer with the claim that he released only “a photocopy” of one of two purported certified copies of Obama’s original birth record, Pfeiffer responded, “It has a seal on it.”

Also present at the time was then-White House counsel Robert Bauer, a co-founder of Perkins Coie, who returned to the firm just six weeks later.

In an editorial dated March 4, 2019, Bauer recounted his role in procuring the more “long-form” birth record from the Hawaii Department of Health as part of the “consequences” of Donald Trump’s alleged “racism.”

The Obama White House archives continue to show documentation outlining the dispatching of Judith Corley, then of Perkins Coie and serving as Obama’s personal attorney, to the HDOH, purportedly to obtain the two certified copies of Obama’s birth record.

Within hours of the White House’s revelation on April 27, experienced computer-graphics professionals reported numerous anomalies in the image.

In August 2011, at the request of 242 of his constituents, then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio commissioned former detective and then-lead investigator of Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse” Mike Zullo to conduct what Arpaio believed would be a short review of the image to “clear the president.”

However, Zullo was forced to inform Arpaio that the image was problematic and could not be considered genuine. A 5+-year investigation ensued in which Zullo, working virtually alone, declared the birth-certificate image a “computer-generated forgery.”

Also found fraudulent is Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form.  As for the birth-certificate image, Zullo has reported that the investigation found no indication of a “raised seal,” as Pfeiffer and NBC News’s Savannah Guthrie claimed.

Zullo brought the investigation to its conclusion in December 2016 with a third and final press conference during which he revealed that two forensic analysts, each examining the image from a different discipline and unaware of the another, reached conclusions similar to Zullo’s own.  The media noticeably failed to report the striking findings or their potential ramifications.

Prior to the March 2019 conclusion of the Special Counsel “Russia collusion” investigation, which turned up no evidence of an FBI-alleged conspiracy between 2016 Trump advisors and Russian operatives, Perkins partner Michael Sussmann was noted to have met with then-FBI General Counsel James Baker to allege communication between a Trump Tower computer and the Russian Alfa Bank, an allegation which also was never substantiated.

Sussman was previously an attorney for the Justice Department.

While representing the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Perkins was responsible for acting as a conduit for the transfer of funds from the Hillary Clinton campaign/DNC to the private firm Fusion GPS to commission opposition research on Trump and Russia.  Fusion accomplished the task through then-FBI source and British citizen Christopher Steele.  The now-infamous “dossier” was used to obtain four FISA surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign adviser Carter W. Page, the latter two of were deemed by the U.S. Justice Department and FISA Court to have been the results of faulty evidence supplied by the FBI.

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