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

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 30, 2025) — Earlier this month The Post & Email published three installments from its interview with CDR Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret) regarding the January 6, 2025 release of his book, “Kerchner v Obama & Congress/Petition for Certiorari (10-446)/To The U.S. Supreme Court -/The Public Advertorial Campaign.”

Parts I, II and III can be found here, here and here.

As we reported, the book is an anthology of all the advertisements Kerchner published in the Washington Times National Weekly Edition more than 16 years ago with the purpose of bringing attention to questions about Barack Hussein Obama’s constitutional eligibility or lack thereof to serve as president and commander-in-chief even as he occupied the Oval Office.

It also contains a substantive foreword in which Kerchner presented his reasons for taking on the Obama “eligibility” issue which has to date not been resolved.

Copies of the book can be obtained here and here.

After Obama announced his presidential candidacy in February 2007, over a period of time Kerchner became increasingly concerned Obama was not constitutionally qualified given the number of credible reports and even a publisher’s biography stating he had been born outside the country. As a retired 33-year member of the U.S. Navy and Reserves and sworn to support and defend the U.S. Constitution, Kerchner felt it his duty to call attention to what he viewed as impending irreparable harm to the nation and the military were a usurper to ascend to power as the Commander-in-Chief.

Representing Kerchner and three other plaintiffs while working pro bono, just before Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, Atty. Mario Apuzzo of New Jersey (now deceased) filed Kerchner, et al v. Obama & Congress, et al, to obtain proof of Barack Hussein Obama’s claimed constitutional eligibility to serve as the President and Commander-in- Chief. The case would eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court but be denied a hearing.

Along with Apuzzo, Kerchner appeared on dozens of radio shows to explain the premise of his lawsuit as it progressed, a complete compilation of which he included in his January 6 publication.

Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires the nation’s chief executive to be a “natural born Citizen,” a term the Founders did not define but which has generated considerable controversy throughout history and particularly in recent years.

Some believe a “natural born Citizen” is an individual born within the geographic confines of the United States without regard to his or her parents’ citizenship or status in the country; others believe the Framers intended the office be held only by an individual whose undivided loyalty stemmed from not only a birth within the nation’s boundaries, but also from U.S.-citizen parents.

Although credible reports of a foreign birth abounded prior to and during Obama’s meteoric rise from Illinois state senator to U.S. Senator to presidential candidate to president (Jan. 2009-Jan. 2017), very early in 2006, his birthplace seemingly changed.

After reporting Obama’s birthplace to have been Indonesia, an altered version of the January 8, 2006 article at The Honolulu Advertiser claimed an error had been made and that Obama was born in Honolulu, HI.

The hospital where Obama said he was born has never confirmed the birth, purportedly out of “privacy” concerns. Raising even more questions, a 5+-year investigation by the office of Sheriff Arpaio into the long-form “birth certificate” image posted by the Obama White House in 2011 reporting his birth in Hawaii determined the image to be a “computer-generated forgery” released “with the intent to deceive.”

Mike Zullo, the lead investigator in the probe launched in August 2011 by then-Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, also reported having been told by two U.S. intelligence agents it is “an open secret” that Obama was not born in the United States.

“Despite Obama’s claimed birth in Hawaii, no hospital there will confirm it, and lead criminal investigator Mike Zullo has said that there is no evidence that Obama was ever in Hawaii ‘before the age of five,’” The Post & Email reported on December 15, 2015.

Obama’s “public life narrative” is false, Zullo emphasized on a number of occasions. Further, he said in regard to Obama’s true history, “all the roads are going to lead back to John Brennan,” Obama’s CIA director and initially campaign adviser in “intelligence and foreign policy,” according to the Washington Times.

Brennan is one of 50 former intelligence agents whose security clearance was revoked by President Donald Trump immediately after taking office.

In 2011, Trump was likely the earliest high-profile voice calling on Obama to release his “long-form” birth certificate, as Kerchner detailed in our interview.

Interestingly, on his 2008 “Fight the Smears” campaign website, Obama claimed presidential eligibility via the 14th Amendment and his presumed birth within the United States. The amendment, however, was passed in 1868, long after the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 in which the term of art “natural born Citizen” was inserted for the president alone. Also, the 14^th Amendment does not mention the constitutional term “natural born Citizen” whatsoever, and did not amend the presidential eligibility clause in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution.

After Donald Trump again took office on January 20, 2025 and signed an executive order ending the practice of awarding “birthright citizenship” to all infants born within the territorial U.S., the 14^th Amendment became front and center of a debate about the intention of its framers when they wrote in Section 1, as ratified by Congress and the state legislatures:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

At the conclusion of Part III, CDR Kerchner recalled the April 8, 2011 meeting at Trump Tower organized by none other than Donald Trump to discuss Obama’s eligibility, for which Kerchner was asked to remain on standby with Apuzzo in the event there was time to discuss the lawsuit.

The event took place approximately four months after Trump, then a real-estate developer and star of the popular NBC show, “The Apprentice,” began publicly raising questions about Obama’s eligibility in light of reports Trump had apparently seen indicating Obama was foreign-born and therefore presumably not a “natural born Citizen.”

Several citizens from Arizona, two of them state legislators, were invited to attend to detail their efforts to pass legislation requiring that all presidential candidates be vetted for constitutional eligibility prior to placing their name on the state ballot. Ultimately, the bill did not pass out of committee.

One of the citizens testifying in favor of the bill at the time, Jeff Lichter, wrote a book about the Trump Tower meeting and the Arpaio investigation launched that summer following the White House’s release to the world of a digital image it said was a PDF file scan of Obama’s original, “long-form” birth certificate.

The White House uploaded the image to its website on April 27, 2011, a mere 19 days after the Trump Tower meeting took place.

Interestingly, Kerchner said Jeff Lichter told him later that at the meeting in New York with Donald Trump, Trump said he had heard rumors that Obama was at that very time having a forged long-form birth certificate prepared.

“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,” Kerchner told us in Part III.  As time ran out and Kerchner did not have the opportunity to speak, at Trump’s request he faxed the entire lawsuit and other related legal documents and writings he and Apuzzo had authored about the constitutional term “natural born Citizen” to Trump’s office over the next two days.

The ads Kerchner placed in the Washington Times began in the late spring of 2009.  Of the time when the “long-form” birth certificate digital image appeared on the White House website, Kerchner recalled:

My newspaper ads were running every other week or every week. In fact, the two weeks right before Obama killed Osama bin Laden, I had run ads — the dates are in the book — talking about Obama using a stolen Social Security number, so the pressure was on. The big megaphones at this time in the history of events were Dr. Corsi’s book, Trump’s public statements, and my steady barrage of full-page newspaper ads in the Washington Times National Weekly edition. That’s when Obama decided to distract the world’s attention with the killing of Osama bin Laden. The birth certificate being a forgery started appearing in my ads shortly after Obama released the forged long-form birth certificate and then Obama subsequently announced Osama bin Laden’s demise. He used the timing of executing a long-planned and previously having been put on hold event to target and kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan to divert media attention away from the newly released long-form birth certificate, being immediately determined to be a forgery by digital image experts, from gaining any traction in the mainstream media.

On a more mundane point, we asked Kerchner about his system of organizing electronically his thousands of pieces of information which went into the book, and he said:

To retrieve things, you have to organize them correctly first. I have many gigs of data, maybe 50 gigs, and I organized it by creating files for major categories. I have lots of subcategories and sub-sub-categories so that when writing an article, I can cross-file things. It’s like when you’re writing an article, you can check off more than one category.  You can use your search tools in Windows and all that. It’s just a matter of planning to set it up to be searchable in the future.

One thing I learned was that things were disappearing online very quickly, especially as of August 2008, when Wiki started changing things. In October 2008, I noticed Google was changing things, and the AP stories started to get retroactively rewritten.  I said, “I have to start saving this stuff myself.” The radio shows I did would often not be available very long online, so I would record them and make them into MP4 files myself and save them on my hard disk. I’m glad I did, because with many of them, the podcast services no longer exist.  And the Obots were out there trying to hide everything.

Even the Wayback Machine has been scrubbed.  The lawyers just write a letter saying, ‘This is a violation of copyright’ or whatever, and they get it taken down. They have lawyers using the AI tool looking for everything they can find to take it off the internet, so I’m glad I saved everything.

About two years ago, all of a sudden, I started getting Google alerts that my name or Mario’s was in an article. I would go and click on it, and it was something I wrote years ago. But now they’re releasing it, and to people using Google, those articles are what I would call “newly unhidden.”

In our wide-ranging interview, another revelation Kerchner made was that he was once a newsletter editor.  “When I was in the Navy, as a collateral duty, I took the opportunity to become editor of Submarine Squadron 10’s monthly newsletter. That submarine squadron had about 10 subs or “boats” as we called them, about half conventionally powered and the other half were the early nuclear powered subs. The very first operational nuclear powered submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), was assigned to our squadron. I did communications service work on all the subs at various times and temporarily stood on top of the Nautilus’ nuclear reactor compartment’s very substantial and radiation symbol marked access hatch several times during my work visits. Some of the nuclear “boats” were making history. The Nautilus was the first submarine to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole. The squadron command had lost its newsletter editor and was looking for one. At age 19, I didn’t have much of a writing background, but I knew I was planning to go to college one day, so I thought the challenge would be great way to improve my writing ability, plus it gave me ‘open gangway’ as a benefit so I could get liberty every weekend.  It was a great learning experience. 

“I had to use a thesaurus and taught myself publishing.  I decided I wanted to leave of the active duty Navy after my two-year tour of active duty and continue serving in the Naval Reserves so I could go to college using the newly provided GI Bill benefits. I knew when I went to college, even as an engineering student, I would have to do a lot of reading and writing.  Some people joined the service and took the ‘party’ route; I joined the U.S. Naval Reserve at age 17 and got very serious about my life goals and career path. I volunteered for temporary active duty for training to attend electrical and electronics school for several months, before I even went on my contracted two year regular active duty commitment tour, in order to learn the initial skills required to serve as an Interior Communications Electrician on board ships. As an example, on the aircraft carriers, for the aircraft landings and takeoffs, there was a TV system that recorded all the planes landing and taking off for use in continued pilot training and in investigating accidents or crashes on the flight deck. Our “rating” (occupational specialty) would maintain and repair that, and all the interior communications systems within the ship. We would also work on the gyro-compass which is an integral part in tracking the location of the ship on the high seas.”

“Even in high school – I came from a rather poor family — I didn’t think I was going to get to college; that’s why I joined the Navy because I didn’t know what I was going to be doing in life. In high school I took a business course and learned how to type, bookkeep and do business and financial math; all of those things came back to help me later when I started my business.”

“What was it like to work with The Washington Times?” The Post & Email asked.

“The Washington Times Daily is different from The Washington Times Weekly. The Weekly is very conservative, much more so than the Daily, and much more independent, and nationally focused. I had a very good marketing and advertising sales agent with them; he was very receptive to my publicity campaign and let me know if a specific page position I wanted was open for the coming week.  Of course, he was getting a sale, too. I did have to run them as advertisements. It says “Advertisements” on the ads, but he came up with the term, “Advertorial.” That’s where the word came from, and I put it in my book.”

We asked CDR Kerchner if he received any feedback from any of the ads, to which he replied:

“Yes, especially with the ad on page 35. That one made the leftists go berserk. They got back to the national editors and managers.  Think Progress, John Podesta’s progressive movement think-tank organization in Washington, DC, claimed the ad was ‘racist’ because it showed the three chimpanzees; it was a takeoff on the Japanese pictorial maxim or proverb, about see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing, and I labeled it, ‘Congress,’ ‘Courts,’ and ‘Media’ because it wasn’t a personal attack; it was an institutional attack.”

“I didn’t use monkeys; I used chimpanzees because the three relevant poses for the images I wanted were easier to find at the time,” Kerchner continued. “I put the signs on the images as to whom they were referring, but boy, did the far-left react, and they got all the black businessmen in Washington, DC to call the editor of the Daily telling them that if the ad ran again, they were going to cancel all their local advertisements in the Daily. The Daily managing staff then contacted and pressured the National managing staff and insisted they not run the ad again for fear of losing local advertising revenue for the Daily. So, my marketing and advertising contact guy at the National told me, ‘We cannot run it again’ even though he said it was a very effective ad and ‘wished we could.’

“The Daily was much more sensitive to the advertising revenue from the locals than the National, which served a national readership and attracted nationally focused advertising. I had to come up with another way of describing the message I was conveying about the three institutional power bases for our government down there in DC; the Congress, Courts, and Major Media, that I was targeting refusing to see, hear, or talk about anything regarding the problems with Obama’s lack of constitutional eligibility questions and his use of stolen and forged key identity documents. If you look at page 81, there’s one example of my new approach, and if you look at page 87 you will see another, where I was trying to get to key people at those three institutions more directly.  But for that series of ads, I was clearly targeting institutions, not any person in particular.”

There was a silver lining in the left’s operatives dramatized outrage in their blogs and websites and blocking re-running of that ad, Kerchner recalled. “The attention that particular ad got because of the left’s antics got the ad millions of hits in various online sites where I had uploaded a copy of it because the left went crazy about it,” he told us.

“Were there any publications you approached which declined to run the ads?” we asked, and Kerchner said there were not.

“Were there any other publications besides the Washington Times National Weekly Edition that you approached to run the ads?” we followed up, and Kerchner replied, “A couple of local papers approached me about running ads, and I ran some ads in a couple of them. If you go to my website, protectourliberty.org, you can see them in the archives there.”

Concluding our interview, The Post & Email asked Kerchner what it was like to work with Apuzzo, who tragically passed away in October 2021 at the age of 65, and how he found him in the first place.

I found Mario via a person I was talking to regarding my search for an attorney who would take the case, and at that time about a dozen high-profile attorneys, both local to my area and also with well-known national conservative advocacy groups, had turned me down, some for political fear reasons, in my opinion, and others unwilling to do the case on a patriotic, pro bono basis.

That person told me about an attorney in New Jersey who was commenting online about Obama’s lack of constitutional eligibility. That attorney’s name was Mario Apuzzo. I then got his phone number and contacted him with my proposal. He told me he had to think about it for 24 hours and discuss it with his wife and that I should call him back the next day. I did, and he agreed to take the case pro bono as I had requested, with me as the lead plaintiff and an “active plaintiff,” meaning I would be speaking out about and doing a publicity campaign about the case. I also wanted to have co-plaintiffs as a sort of insurance policy such that if I got taken out in an “accident” the case would not easily end, and thus it would be far less likely anyone would try that m.o. A volunteer helped us find co-plaintiffs, and they were added to the case. You can see the co-plaintiff’s names here. And the rest is history, as they say.

Kerchner also told Atty. Apuzzo that if he agreed to take on the project, he would provide any needed out-of-pocket funding and/or as needed seek donations to help with such needs, and be an active lead plaintiff in the case. Apuzzo would bring his “time, talent, and sacred honor to the fight,” and Kerchner would bring his “time, talent, treasure as would be needed, and sacred honor to the fight.”

“Mario was a true patriot with a love for the Constitution,” Kerchner said.  “He was a naturalized citizen, and he thought the evading of the ‘natural born Citizen’ issue by the U.S. Supreme Court was terrible; he often said that while he was alive. You can see on pages 31 and 32 where I cite Chief Justice John Marshall, there is also a summary of the lawsuit on those and many other pages where I referred people to Mario’s constitutional legal writings about the issues and the case.

“Without him, I could never have done this; without me, he wouldn’t have had a reason to do it at that time,” Kerchner said. “I was the prime mover behind bringing the case and making it happen and to be filed when it was, i.e., while Obama was still the President-Elect and not yet sworn in and vested with the power of the office of the Presidency.”

“Like me, he was a night owl; he’d be up until all hours of the morning working on the case,” Kerchner fondly recalled.

As for the length of time he has pursued the truth about Obama’s background and eligibility, Kerchner observed, “One thing is I am very persistent. I’ve been at this for 18 years; you’ve been at it about 17 years.  And there have been a lot of people who have come and gone…”

In closing, Kerchner indicated that he hoped his latest book would help preserve the history of the legal and publicity battles and fights to support and defend Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, the presidential eligibility clause, of the United States Constitution, and to expose the truth about “the fraud and usurper, Barack Hussein Obama.”

“Hopefully in the end, when the history of the events over the last 18 years is written by significant historians, the truth will win out!” he concluded the interview.

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