Exclusive Interview with CDR Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret) on His New Book, Part III

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 16, 2025) — [See Part I and Part II of this series here and here.]

Last week The Post & Email interviewed CDR Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret), one of the earliest legal challengers to Barack Hussein Obama’s constitutional eligibility to serve as president and commander-in-chief, about his latest book, “Kerchner v Obama & Congress/Petition for Certiorari (10-446)/To The U.S. Supreme Court -/The Public Advertorial Campaign,” available here.

Beginning with Obama’s first presidential campaign, Kerchner and his co-plaintiffs became concerned that Obama did not qualify as a “natural born Citizen” as required for the president in Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.

Filed early in the morning on inauguration day, January 20, 2009, before Obama was sworn in and took office, and making its way through the federal courts from New Jersey without success, in October 2010 the Kerchner v Obama case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court with a petition for Writ of Certiorari.

Distributed for conference among the justices on November 23, 2010, the case was denied Certiorari six days later on the grounds the plaintiffs lacked “standing.”

Kerchner announced the book’s publication on January 6, 2025 in an early-morning press release.

After conceiving of the idea last spring to preserve the relevant material, much of which was in hard-copy format from publication in the Washington Times National Weekly Edition, Kerchner spent several months digitizing and organizing hundreds of pages into documents and folders on his computer.  A retired engineer, retired Navy commander, writer and citizen genealogist, Kerchner approached the task methodically, dividing the future book into sections to include a substantial preface explaining his motivation for writing it; Kerchner v Obama as it was filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010; the entirety of full-page, paid advertisements appearing in the Times between 2009 and 2013; and the “Sheriff’s Kit” endeavor aimed at informing all county and state elected officials of the determination from a criminal investigation that the “long-form” birth certificate image posted by the Obama White House in April 2011 is a forgery.

The book additionally serves as a compendium of the many radio shows on which Kerchner and his attorney, the late Mario Apuzzo, were guests to discuss their constitutional challenge to Obama’s eligibility during a time when the media demonized anyone daring to ask questions about Obama’s background and eligibility despite credible reports having declared him foreign-born.

Further complicating Obama’s presumed but unproven claim to be a “natural born Citizen,” he has said his father is Barack Hussein Obama Sr., who was never a U.S. citizen nor legal immigrant to the United States. Admitted to the country on a student visa in 1959 to study at the University of Hawaii, Obama Sr. later entered Harvard but was forced to leave in 1964 when his visa was non-renewed at the urging of Harvard officials due to his womanizing.

While some legal observers believe the citizenship of a presidential candidate’s parents to be immaterial to the “natural born Citizen” question, others interpret the term to mean, “Born in the United States to parents who at the time of the birth are themselves U.S. citizens.”

Over the last 15 years, some legal commentators point to another term, “citizen at birth,” equating it to “natural born Citizen,” which the Framers adopted from simply “a Citizen” during the 1787 Constitutional Convention.  Per those commentators, anyone considered a citizen “at birth” via the 14^th Amendment or via the congressional statute USC Title 8, Section 1401 is a “natural born Citizen” and eligible to the presidency. They would assert that as long as the person did not have to file for naturalization later as an adult, he or she would be eligible. However, USC Title 8, Section 1401 is a “naturalization statute” that “naturalizes” certain persons at birth.

Conversely, they say, a person born outside the U.S. to citizens of a foreign country, even if later naturalized as an American citizen, is ineligible.

“There was no disagreement by our side of the debate on that point when someone is born outside the country and later naturalizes,” Kerchner remarked during our interview. As for the invocation of the 14th Amendment in regard to presidential eligibility, he said, “The adjectives ‘natural born’ do not appear in the 14th Amendment or in Title 8, Section 1401, and adjectives mean something.”

“Gray” areas most likely not contemplated by the Framers encompass a child born overseas to one U.S.-citizen parent or within the territory of the United States to illegal-aliens, persons visiting the United States on a temporary student visa or tourist visa, or legal-resident parents who are not yet U.S. citizens. 

As has been expounded upon at length at The Post & Mail over the years, the 1790 Naturalization Act passed by the first Congress declared, “…the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens: Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States:…”

Five years later, however, Congress fully repealed the statute and replaced it with language containing no reference to “natural born Citizen(s).”

One of the proponents of the “citizen at birth” theory of “natural born Citizen” is former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who co-authored the essay, “On the Meaning of Natural Born Citizen” published at the Harvard Law Review Forum in March 2015. The article appeared just days before Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), born in Canada in 1970 to a Cuban-citizen father and presumed U.S.-citizen mother, announced his presidential campaign.  Katyal served under Obama as acting solicitor general, representing the government in Kerchner v Obama at the Supreme Court.

During our interview Kerchner compared his case to several the high court agreed to hear after it dodged the “natural born Citizen” issue.  Unlike his case, Kerchner told us, “The Supreme Court took jurisdiction in the abortion case (Dobbs, 2022) and environmental cases because it was the thing to do, not politically dangerous in that ‘100 cities could burn.’ Bill Cunningham said that on his radio show when he interviewed me as to what could happen if Obama were found not to be eligible.”

Kerchner further elaborated:

“That’s the noble lie they’re telling the world, to keep everybody at bay, in fear,” I told Cunningham. And all these Republican people said, “We’re not going to bring this up because we’re protecting the people from extreme violence from the left.” It’s called ‘the noble lie.’ They thought they were doing good for the country.  No, they weren’t doing good; they were protecting an evil person and letting him get away with it.

As it said in my Certioriari application, it isn’t the last time this is going to happen; it’s going to happen again, and it happened with Harris as vice president.  So the Court kicked the can down the road, so to speak, and the country is suffering for it.

I gave them the perfect case to take jurisdiction, as Chief Justice John Marshall had written about back in 1821.  It was a first-impression case, but the Court looked for reasons to evade it.

The Supreme Court Justices all got the Washington Times National Weekly Edition.  I deliberately chose that paper because it was conservative and it went to every mover and shaker in the country, all the key members of Congress, the executive branch, the Supreme Court; they all got courtesy copies sent to them every week. People like Rush Limbaugh used to write editorial pieces there.  Everybody read it, and I placed my ads many times. They were full-page, directly opposite the editorial page, so they couldn’t miss these ads, not only because of positioning, but because I’m sure they were talked about, too.

“And to think every member of Congress saw the ads and didn’t question it,” The Post & Email remarked, to which Kerchner responded:

That’s what I put right on my title page:  Everyone in Washington, DC knew but did nothing. There are people who have told me that congressmen actually said to them, “Everybody down here knows Obama is a fraud, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” or “People are afraid to do something about it.” I’m paraphrasing here.

Also in the book is the Sheriff’s Kit campaign with Mike Volin. I was a major funder of that, and I also helped make some of the DVDs and mail them out.  We both were making them; I bought several DVD printers, and together and with the help of volunteers, we produced and labeled and mass-mailed them. It was quite a project; it took several months, and they went to every sheriff in the country and to every member of Congress, where they were hand-delivered. Every governor in the country, every AG in the country…we got the list, and over a matter of months, we just sent them out to everybody.

Everybody knew; everybody knew or should have known. And then we had the radio shows. I think the MAGA movement grew up knowing all this.  There was a survey done that said over 50% of the Republicans in the country believed Obama was a fake, a fraud and a usurper.

Kerchner then recalled the April 8, 2011 meeting at Trump Tower with then-businessman Donald J. Trump and several Arizona state legislators and citizens to air their concerns about Obama’s possible ineligibility.  

One of the attendees, Jeff Lichter, later wrote a book about that experience and the criminal investigation launched several months later by Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio into the birth-certificate image released by the White House just 19 days after the Trump Tower meeting.

During the months leading up to that event, Trump was the lone high-profile voice questioning Obama’s eligibility stemming from his declination to release his “long-form” birth certificate.  Rumored to be considering a run for president, Trump made public both his “short-form” and “long-form” birth records to bring further attention to the issue. While ridiculed and excoriated in the press, Trump’s unrelenting calls for Obama to produce the long-form document appeared to result in the White House’s compliance when on April 27, 2011, it posted what it said was a PDF of Obama’s long-form birth record indicating he was born in Honolulu, HI on August 4, 1961.

Kerchner revealed a previously unknown fact to this writer as he recounted the Trump Tower meeting:

The delegation from Arizona went to New York to meet with Trump at his invitation, and I was invited with Attorney Mario Apuzzo to be on standby to talk to Donald Trump about my lawsuit. They ran out of time, so we never got to talk to him, but he asked that I fax him my lawsuit and anything else I wanted to send him. So I spent two days faxing him things. As a matter of fact, his attorney called an attorney friend, who I had also put in contact with Donald Trump, and said, “Stop faxing now; we have enough.”

To be continued.