Email: "Quietly Obama's Citizenship Case Reaches The Supreme Court"
The following email has been widely forwarded and has been reposted numerous times on conservative blogs. Media Matters Action Network has written a response to the text below. Please feel free to copy and past it and send it to your friends.
Quietly Obama's Citizenship Case Reaches The Supreme Court
[note - all mistakes below are original to the text]
From: XXXXXXXXX@aol.com
To: XXXXXX@gmail.com
Date: Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:48 PM
Subject: Fwd: Fw: QUIETLY OBAMA'S CITIZENSHIP CASE REACHES THE SUPREME COURT - Sharin...Question:Will anything come of this or is it another uptown two-step?
Subject: QUIETLY OBAMA'S CITIZENSHIP CASE REACHES THE SUPREME COURT
QUIETLY OBAMA'S CITIZENSHIP CASE REACHES THE SUPREME COURTAP - WASHINGTON D.C. -
In a move certain to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications for the presidency, the group "Americans for Freedom of Information" has Released copies of President Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College . Released today, the transcript school indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate. The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California. The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program. To qualify, for the scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship.
This document would seem to provide the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking. Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya and there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship, this is looking pretty grim. The news has created a firestorm at the White House as the release casts increasing doubt about Obama's legitimacy and qualification to serve as President article titled, "Obama Eligibility Questioned," leading some to speculate that the story may overshadow economic issues on Obama's first official visit to the U.K. In a related matter, under growing pressure from several groups, Justice Antonin Scalia announced that the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear arguments concerning Obama's legal eligibility to serve as President in a case brought by Leo Donofrio of New Jersey . This lawsuit claims Obama's dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. Donofrio's case is just one of 18 suits brought by citizens demanding proof of Obama's citizenship or qualification to serve as president.Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has released the results of their investigation of Obama's campaign spending. This study estimates that Obama has spent upwards of $950,000 in campaign funds in the past year with eleven law firms in 12 states for legal resources to block disclosure of any of his personal records. Mr. Kreep indicated that the investigation is still ongoing but that the final report will be provided to the U..S. Attorney general, Eric Holder. Mr. Holder has refused to comment on the matter...
LET OTHER FOLKS KNOW THIS NEWS, THE MEDIA WON'T !
Subject: RE: Issue of Passport?
While I've little interest in getting in the middle of the Obama birth issue, Paul Hollrah over at FSM did so yesterday and believes the issue can be resolved by Obama answering one simple question: What passport did he use when he was shuttling between New York , Jakarta , and Karachi ?
So how did a young man who arrived in New York in early June 1981, without the price of a hotel room in his pocket, suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip just a month later?
And once he was on a plane, shuttling between New York , Jakarta , and Karachi , what passport was he offering when he passed through Customs and Immigration?
The American people not only deserve to have answers to these questions, they must have answers. It makes the debate over Obama's citizenship a rather short and simple one.
Q: Did he travel to Pakistan in 1981, at age 20?
A : Yes, by his own admission.
Q: What passport did he travel under?
A: There are only three possibilities.
1) He traveled with a U.S. .. Passport,
2) He traveled with a British passport, or
3) He traveled with an Indonesia passport.
Q: Is it possible that Obama traveled with a U.S. Passport in 1981?
A: No. It is not possible. Pakistan was on the U.S. .. State Department's "no travel" list in 1981.
Conclusion: When Obama went to Pakistan in 1981 he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport.
If he were traveling with a British passport that would provide proof that he was born in Kenya on August 4, 1961, not in Hawaii as he claims. And if he were traveling with an Indonesian passport that would tend to prove that he relinquished whatever previous citizenship he held, British or American, prior to being adopted by his Indonesian step-father in 1967.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the American people need to know how he managed to become a "natural born" American citizen between 1981 and 2008..
Given the destructive nature of his plans for America, as illustrated by his speech before Congress and the disastrous spending plan he has presented to Congress, the sooner we learn the truth of all this, the better.
IF YOU DON'T CARE that Your President is not a natural born Citizen and in Violation of the Constitution, then DELETE this, and then lower your American Flag to half-staff, because the U.S. Constitution is already on life-support, and won't survive much longer.
IF YOU DO CARE then FORWARD this to as many patriotic Americans as you can, because our country is being looted and ransacked!
Response
Hey, thanks for sending this my way.
That Associated Press article is pretty intense stuff! I decided to go look it up for myself. And I'm glad to tell you that the Associated Press never wrote any such article.
If our president wasn't actually born in the country, that would be a huge problem. But it isn't true. That email makes up an "April Fools" article with some explosive allegations, but nothing of the sort has actually happened.
It turns out that FactCheck.org has looked into the article you sent me. (Do you use FactCheck? They're nonpartisan, and they do a great job of pushing through the nonsense from both sides in Washington to get to the facts.)
Here's what FactCheck.org says about the whole thing. (You can read the full take on it here: http://www.factcheck.org/2009/05/was-obama-born-in-the-usa/index.html)
April Fake
We contacted The Associated Press just to confirm what should be obvious, that no such news story ever appeared on the news agency's wires. Jack Stokes, the AP's manager of media relations, gave us this statement:
AP: The story purported to be from The Associated Press on April 1 is fake.
CBS News has looked into these charges, too. And they decided that it's just not true. CBS concluded that since you can actually see the president's Certificate of Live Birth online (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/BarackObamaCertificationOfLiveBirthHawaii.jpg) AND some non-partisan fact-checking organizations have investigated this stuff thoroughly (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jun/27/obamas-birth-certificate-part-ii/) that the issue is settled. Barack Obama is as American as you or me. PolitiFact.com even had one of their employees from Hawaii bring in her birth certificate to compare it, and they say it looks exactly the same as the president's!
So I guess some people with a wicked sense of humor, or an axe to grind with President Obama, put together a pretty sneaky April Fools joke and started sending it to their friends. A month later, it's still bouncing around, partly because the fake article sounds so convincing!
FactCheck.org goes on to debunk each of the pieces of the article, one by one:
No Fulbright: Contrary to what this e-mail claims, Obama's scholarship wasn't a Fulbright. It's true that many foreign students come to the U.S. under the Fulbright program, sponsored by the United States Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. But Fulbrights for foreign students are primarily intended for graduate students studying for masters' degrees or Ph.D. degrees, not for college freshmen and sophomores.
No "Soetoro": Another false claim is that Obama attended and received financial aid "under the name Barry Soetoro," using the surname of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro. The college's Director of Communications Jim Tranquada told us there's no record of that. He told us in an e-mail:
Occidental spokesman Tranquada: Contemporary public documents, such as the 1979-80 freshman 'Lookbook' published at the beginning of President Obama's first year at Occidental, list him as Barack Obama. All of the Occidental alumni I have spoken to from that era (1979-81) who knew him, knew him as Barry Obama.
So it's pretty clear from looking around a little bit that this stuff just isn't true. Maybe you could send this email to everybody else who's gotten that fake AP article? I hate to think of people being lied to about such an important issue.
Thanks. Talk to you soon,
