“Kenyan-Born Obama” Article Goes Viral

SOMETIMES OLD NEWS IS NEW NEWS

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 8, 2020) — In a surprising development, nearly every P&E reader over Saturday and Sunday accessed our September 17, 2019 article titled, “AP Reads its Own Story on ‘Kenyan-Born’ Obama.”

Written nearly six months ago, the column reported that on that day, a reader with an “Associated Press” IP opened The Post & Email’s October 14, 2009 article titled, “AP declares Obama ‘Kenyan-Born’!”

In a similar development from more than ten years ago, The Post & Email’s founder, John Charlton, wrote in a follow-up story on October 25, 2009 that his post from 11 days earlier “took off  and ended up being discussed on the Imus Show.  As the writing of this report, more than 27,000 individuals have viewed our coverage, making the single most read article of our site, all-time, and each day.”

Both Charlton’s and this writer’s articles highlighted one appearing in The Kenya Sunday Standard of June 27, 2004 citing “AP” as a source and stating that the then-U.S. Senate candidate, “Barrack Obama,” was unequivocally born in the nation of Kenya and not Hawaii, as he has claimed for an undetermined number of years.

As The Post & Email reported on September 19, the AP did not respond to our inquiry as to whether or not the attribution provided by The Sunday Standard, or the genuineness of the paper’s 2004 article, was in question.  The Standard‘s editor did not provide us with a response to the same question.

Credible news reports from 2007 and 2008, in addition to an unearthed biography by Obama’s first literary agent dating back to 1991, made the same claim, with some later altered to say that Obama’s birthplace was Hawaii.

Obama’s birth location is one of several elements both legal scholars and average citizens have sought to determine in regard to whether or not he meets the “natural born Citizen” requirement of Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution reserved solely for the president and commander-in-chief.

Although Obama left office at noon on January 20, 2017, the mainstream media continues to vouch for the authenticity of the purported “long-form” birth certificate posted at whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011 bearing the name “Barack Hussein Obama II,” later found to be a forgery by a 5+-year criminal investigation.

Authorized in August 2011 by then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio and conducted by former detective and private investigator Mike Zullo, the investigation concluded that Obama’s alleged Selective Service registration form was also fraudulent.

At a final press conference on December 15, 2016, Zullo revealed that two forensics specialists, Forlab of Italy and Reed Hayes of Hawaii, confirmed his findings that the “long-form” image cannot possibly represent a real, paper document, a fact the AP was particularly averse to reporting.

Prior to the release by the Obama White House of the image, members of the Kenyan Parliament had declared Obama as born in Kenya, while in late 2007 then-MSNBC “Hardball” anchor Chris Matthews said he was born in Indonesia.

Matthews would later become angry when a guest might suggest that Congress more carefully vet presidential candidates for eligibility.

In 2006, Will Hoover, then writing for The Honolulu Advertiser, stated Indonesia as Obama’s birthplace, but reworded it to say Obama was born in “Hawaii” after an internet furor ensued.

A commenter to our September 19, 2019 article correctly pointed out that The Sunday Standard took some information from an AP article by Maura Kelly Lannan about the fallout from the exposure of then-Illinois U.S. Senate candidate and Obama opponent Jack Ryan, who was forced to drop out of the race days later.

The heavy re-circulation of our September 17 article appears to have been generated primarily by Facebook readers, although some appear to have logged on from Twitter.  It is unclear what prompted the resurgence of the article over the weekend.

In August 2018, Zullo revealed on a radio show that two sources, both U.S. intelligence agents with considerable experience, informed him that it is considered “an open secret” in the nation’s capital that Obama was not born in the United States, placing his eligibility in doubt.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 4, 2019, Democrat-aligned attorney and political activist Pamela S. Karlan affirmed that “only American-born individuals can be president.”

On February 4, the AP reported that YouTube is banning videos from its platform whose subject is “eligibility” for elected office or “birtherism,” a term invented by the mainstream media for anyone questioning Obama’s constitutional eligibility, life narrative, or birthplace.