January 18, 2011: Conservative News Blog Claims No ‘Long Form’ of Obama’s Birth Certificate Exists

WorldNetDaily, a conservative news blog, reports that Governor Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) says the Hawaii Department of Health may not be able to locate the “long form” birth certificate for President Obama that it is required to keep on file. Previously, Health Department chief Chiyome Fukino said that she has personally seen the “long form” certificate and can vouch for its authenticity (see October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). According to an article written by Jerome Corsi, Abercrombie tells a Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter that he intends to find “definitive valid records” that prove Obama was born in Hawaii in order to head off a possible controversy during Obama’s 2012 re-election bid (see December 24, 2010). Corsi has written numerous attacks on Obama in the past, and most have been found to have been riddled with errors and falsehoods (see August 1, 2008 and After, August 15, 2008, October 8, 2008, and October 9, 2008). Corsi also reports that Abercrombie intends to find and make public what Corsi calls “a recording of the Obama birth in the state archives,” presumably the long form. “It was actually written, I am told, this is what our investigation is showing, it actually exists in the archives, written down,” Abercrombie says. Corsi says that the “short form” birth certificate provided by Obama during the 2008 election campaign (see June 13, 2008) is fraudulent, and that though “two purportedly independent Web sites that have displayed a strong partisan bias for Obama—Snopes.com… FactCheck.org” have published photographs of the document (see August 21, 2008), WND reports have stated that “the Hawaii Department of Health has refused to authenticate the COLB [certificate of live birth] posted on the Internet.” Corsi goes on to say that Obama’s parents could have lied about his birth to Hawaiian authorities, and that newspaper announcements of his birth published in 1961 (see July 2008) “do not prove he was born in Hawaii, since they could have been triggered by the grandparents registering the birth as Hawaiian, even if the baby was born elsewhere.” Corsi also says that the address in the press announcements was that of Obama’s maternal grandparents, not his father’s, who maintained a separate apartment in Honolulu “after he was supposedly married to Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother.” He also claims that “Dunham left Hawaii within three weeks of the baby’s birth to attend the University of Washington in Seattle,” apparently in an effort to insinuate that she is not Obama’s actual mother. Corsi quotes Tim Adams, whom he identifies as “a former senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu in 2008,” as saying that “no long form, hospital-generated birth certificate” for Obama exists in the Hawaiian Department of Health, “and that neither Honolulu hospital—Queens Medical Center or Kapiolani Medical Center—has any record that Obama was born there.” [WorldNetDaily, 1/18/2011] The non-partisan fact-checking organization PolitiFact will investigate Corsi’s claims, and find them fraudulent (see February 14-27, 2011). Four months later, Obama will release the “long form” certificate (see April 27, 2011).