When President Obama released his long-form Certificate of Live Birth on Apr. 27, 2011, (Picture 1), everyone in the press and the public had forgotten about the other birth certificate he released in 2008: the short-form Certification of Live Birth that his campaign staff posted on its website (Picture 2).
Long-Form Certificate of Live Birth
Short-Form Certification of Live Birth
...Everyone, that is, except Obama, his White House staff and legal counsel, and CNN.At a press conference held the day before, 4/26/2011, a CNN reporter confronted Jay Carney with the following:
Jay, my colleague, Gary Tuchman, just went to Hawaii and established again that there's evidence suggesting that the President was born in the United States. However, Trump and others keep saying that that's not the actual birth certificate, and as you know, Hawaii Department of Health says that you can request a birth certificate; you put in a Freedom of Information request, and within a few weeks, you'll get a copy out of the vault. Why doesn't the President do that?On April 25, CNN had shown Part 1 of a two-part, two-day investigation into Obama's birth certificate. (The network had shown Part 2 on April 26.) The investigation focused exclusively on the short-form while briefly noting that the original vault birth certificate was still available to Hawaiians, but a person had to file a Freedom of Information Act and wait three to four weeks before receiving it. CNN insisted that the short-form was more legal than the long-form because the long-form "is no longer certified for use."
As for Carney, he angrily responded to CNN that "[t]his is a settled issue. The birth certificate that the campaign put up online has been available for everyone to see around the globe." Carney knew that two copies of Obama's long-form birth certificate had arrived two days earlier, but he kept silent on this fact until the following day, when a special press briefing, known as a "Press Gaggle," was held just prior to Obama's official press conference. No recording devices or photography was permitted. Only paper-and-pencil notes. (Banning physical recordings? What ever happened to transparency?)
The briefing was actually led by Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, with Carney and White House Counsel Robert Bauer there for support. After copies of the long-form and short-form birth certificates were handed out, Pfeiffer began to double down on the importance of the short-form; according to Pfeiffer, "the original birth certificate that the President requested and we posted online in 2008" had settled the issue of his birth place and presidential eligibility.
Pfeiffer then provided the press with a brief history of the short-form birth certificate:
In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President's campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. We received that document; we posted it on the website. ... To be clear, the document we presented on the President's website in 2008 is his birth certificate.When Robert Bauer got up to speak, one of the reporters asked him, "Bob, can you explain why President Obama let this drag on for four years? Was it Donald Trump who prompted you to issue this?" One month earlier, Trump was a guest on the TV show The View and had asked, "Why does Obama refuse to show his long-form birth certificate?"
Bauer let Pfeiffer, now noticeably more frustrated, answer the question:
I don't think this dragged on for four years because this was a resolved -- for those of you who remember the campaign, this issue was resolved in 2008. And it has not been an issue, none of you have asked about it, called about it, reported on it until the last few weeks.It was hardly a settled issue, though, since the short-form is what prompted calls for the release of the hospital-issued long-form birth certificate. Since June 2008, there have been more than 80 lawsuits filed to get it released and $2 million spent by Obama to keep it hidden.
Obviously, the White House wanted to make everyone think that the long-form birth certificate was "an unnecessary distraction," since his birth in Hawaii was a "settled issue" in 2008. When Obama finally arrived at the podium to discuss the release of his long-form birth certificate, he would never mention it by name. In his opening remarks, he said, "As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth." He did mention, however, that "[w]e've posted the Certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see. People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate."
This was the first time that Obama had ever personally stated, on national TV, that he had posted his birth certificate on the internet "for everybody to see" -- for everybody, that is, except Obama, who never said that he saw it. Anyone watching CNN the night before also had a chance to see it.
Here is a video capture from CNN's "Birther investigation" broadcast on April 26, 2011:
It has a date-stamp of "June 6, 2007," the date that the form was issued. The form itself is also a 2007 Certification of Live Birth (COLB) because, in 2008, the design of the form was significantly changed.
OBAMA'S "2007" CERTIFICATION
(arrow points to date-stamp printed on other side)
(arrow points to date-stamp printed on other side)
A GENUINE 2007 CERTIFICATION
(arrow points to date-stamp printed on other side)
(arrow points to date-stamp printed on other side)
A GENUINE 2007 CERTIFICATION
(Reverse side with official stamps)
(Reverse side with official stamps)
A GENUINE 2008 CERTIFICATION
(arrow points to date-stamp printed on other side)
(arrow points to date-stamp printed on other side)
A GENUINE 2008 CERTIFICATION
(Reverse side with official stamps)
(Reverse side with official stamps)
SECTION OF GENUINE 2008 CERTIFICATION ON TOP OF OBAMA'S "2007" CERTIFICATION
The scans listed herein are genuine 2007 and 2008 COLBs with their 2007 or 2008 date-stamps. The composite image above is a section of a genuine 2008 COLB overlaid on Obama's Certification to highlight how different the borders and the text placements are.These images prove that what Obama posted on the internet was an image of a 2007 COLB or short-form birth certificate, date-stamped June 6, 2007, and not a genuine scan copy of a genuine 2008 short-form. Had Obama ordered and received a short-form COLB in 2008, it would look like the 2008 COLB with the open border and realigned text as in the overlay above and have a date-stamp of June 6, 2008, not June 6, 2007.
From June 2008 until April 2011, the Hawaii Health Department refused to confirm that they had issued a short-form birth certificate to Obama or anyone acting on his behalf. They refused to authenticate the scan image posted on Obama's web site and the photos posted on Factcheck.org. Dr. Jerry Corsi, of World Net Daily, was the first to report that Hawaii refused to authenticate the online COLB. The reasons should be obvious by now: they never produced a genuine 2008 Certification of Live Birth for Obama, or even a genuine 2007 Certification of Live Birth; hence, there was nothing to authenticate.
The only way Obama or anyone could get a 2007 COLB, date-stamped June 6, 2007, in June 2008 is to have one forged, and that is exactly what they did. Normally, if you wanted to authenticate a birth document, you would have a forensic document expert compare the forged facsimile with the real document. However, if no real document exists, then there is nothing for a forensic document examiner to examine.
If Obama's short-form birth certificate does not exist, then any images of it cannot be authentic, either. However, how does one prove it? The first step is to answer the question, "Was the online image made naturally by an image scanner using a genuine paper COLB, or was it fabricated by human intervention and graphics software?"
I spent six months in 2009 reverse-engineering the online image to determine exactly how it was made. I attempted to make it naturally using three different scanners and three genuine 2007 COLBs. After several hundred hours of making trial images, I concluded that no scanner on the planet could ever have made the Obama COLB image, and the image did not look like any genuine 2007 COLB ever made. This was a one-of-a-kind image that Factcheck photographed as a printout and not as a real paper birth certificate.
After deconstructing Obama's online COLB image, I forensically reconstructed an exact duplicate of it using Adobe Photoshop. The reason why I created a clone of Obama's online COLB was to achieve two objectives.
First, it demonstrated that the online image was a fabrication made by someone using pieces of other people's COLBs and then assembled to look like an original 2007 COLB. I created a video on how I reconstructed it and posted it on my YouTube channel.
Secondly, I wanted to demonstrate that a person looking at my COLB clone could not tell it apart from Obama's COLB. I managed to get my image listed by Snopes.com as being Obama's actual COLB, and it worked. Millions of people have viewed it, posted links to it, and commented that my forgery was sufficient proof that Obama was born in Hawaii.
I started writing about Obama's COLB from the first day the Obama campaign posted it. I included a high-resolution copy of the image on my blog, and Snopes decided to post a link to it instead of linking to the original image posted on the Obama campaign website.
At the Press Gaggle, the White House distributed to reporters copies of both the long-form birth certificate and the short-form birth certificate. Although both certificates were printed on the same kind of green-patterned security paper, the copies given to the media had no backgrounds. The long-form birth certificate was a high-resolution bluish copy, while the short-form was a low-resolution black-and-white copy taken from a printout of the Obama COLB as shown on the Snopes website. The Snopes printout is on the White House website, and the COLB image is the one I made, and not one by the campaign. More proof that the campaign never had a genuine paper short-form to scan and post.
