Two weeks after the report that Obama’s passport records had been breached, candidate Obama made the surprising disclosure at a private fundraiser April 7, 2008, that he had traveled to Pakistan during his college years.
Jake Tapper, then senior White House correspondent for ABC News, commented that Obama’s disclosure that he had taken a college trip to Pakistan was “news to most of us.” Tapper said “it was odd we hadn’t heard about it before, given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign.”
Tapper reported that, according to the Obama campaign, Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, the year he transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University, and that he had visited his mother and sister Maya in Indonesia on the same trip.
Why was Obama disclosing now, for the first time, that he had traveled to Pakistan with his roommates from Occidental College?
Did Obama use an Indonesian passport to travel to Indonesia and Pakistan in 1981, and was he concerned the breach of his passport records might end up disclosing such information, if true?
The attempt to preempt such a disclosure might explain the timing of Obama’s decision to suddenly reveal, at least to the friends assembled for the fundraiser, the previously undisclosed trip to Indonesia and Pakistan.
“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college,” Obama is heard saying on the poor-quality audiotape that survives from the San Francisco fundraiser. “I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
