Aug. 14, 2013

Reports 'natural-born citizen' question 'dogging' senator

CNN, which like other establishment media outlets largely has ignored questions about Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility, suddenly is concerned about whether Republican Sen. Ted Cruz would qualify for the Oval Office.

After noting that several constitutional law experts believe Cruz would be eligible, Wolf Blitzer and Athena Jones pointed out the firebrand who has challenged the Internal Revenue Service and Obama’s political appointees “wasn’t born in the United States.”

He was born in Canada to a U.S. citizen mother and a Cuban father.

“He’s taken the Senate by storm, stirring up controversy and ruffling feathers on both sides of the aisle in his first months on the job,” Blitzer said. “For that Ted Cruz is a tea-party favorite already generating lots of buzz about the 2016 race for the White House. However, the question isn’t only will he run, but can he run under the U.S. Constitution?”

Jones: “The big question here is whether Ted Cruz is a natural-born citizen. I spoke with several constitutional law experts about this today. And all of them believe that Cruz is. But it’s important to know the Constitution doesn’t define who is a natural-born citizen. And those are the only people eligible to run for president. Also I should add the Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue.”

While the Constitution doesn’t define natural-born citizen, other contemporary historical documents strongly suggest that the framers understood the term to mean the offspring of two citizen parents.

The report quotes Randy Barnettt of Georgetown University saying, “As long as he qualifies as a citizen of the U.S. by birth as he does by law, then that makes him a natural-born citizen.”

Cruz himself says he qualifies as a natural-born citizen because he’s a citizen by birth.

But those opinions assume that the authors of the Constitution used the terms citizen and natural-born citizen interchangeably.

CNN did note that the issue has followed Obama since before his first election, because he was born to a American citizen mother and a Kenyan father. Obama, they pointed out, even provided a copy of a printout of a purported Hawaiian birth certification.

See the reports investigating Obama’s birth certificate.

But there are many, including Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse, which concluded the document is fraudulent, who insist Obama’s eligibility has not been settled.

Among the biggest names to raise concerns is billionaire Donald Trump.

Trump repeatedly has insisted Obama has not documented his eligibility. At one point, he offered $5 million to the charity or charities of Obama’s choice if he would release his passport records and authorize the colleges he attended to release his applications and other records.

Trump argues that those documents would show whether or not Obama ever accepted scholarship or other aid as a foreign student.

Establishment media personalities long have ridiculed anyone who raises the eligibility issue, even though Obama himself held a White House news conference to present his purported Hawaii birth certificate. However, the Cold Case Posse team authorized by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio has concluded the document is fraudulent.

Obama’s recent conversation with ABC’s Jonathan Karl started with Karl noting that Trump took on the “not serious” issue of eligibility.

“Why does that make me not serious?” Trump demanded. “I think that resonated with a lot of people.”

Karl replied: “You don’t still question he was born in the United States, do you?”

“I have no idea,” Trump said. “I don’t know. Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. You know some people say that was not his birth certificate. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows, and you don’t know either. Jonathan you’re a smart guy, and you don’t know.”

When Karl admitted he was “pretty sure,” Trump jumped on the statement.

“You just said you’re pretty sure … you have to be 100 percent sure,” he said. “Jonathan, you said you’re pretty convinced, so let’s just see what happens over time.”

Trump then steered the conversation back to the lagging economy.

“My issue is economic,” said Trump. “Our country is being ripped apart by China and many other countries. That’s my issue.”

WND reported earlier that comic Bill Maher, in response to Trump’s challenge to Obama, offered to give $5 million to charity if Trump would release certain information.

He did, but Maher did not pay up, leading to a threat of legal action from Trump.

As WND reported in March 2011, Trump suggested Obama’s presidency could be “illegal” if legitimate proof is not provided demonstrating he is indeed a natural-born citizen of the U.S.

Trump also wondered why no doctors or nurses have come forward to claim they were present at Obama’s birth.

In March and April of 2011, Trump staged a weeks-long public campaign questioning Obama’s eligibility to be president. He rose to the top of the pool of potential candidates for the 2012 GOP nomination as a result, saying he believed the document presented by the White House was forged.

“I always said I wanted to know if it was real,” Trump told WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi, author of the best-seller “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President.”

In their conversation, Trump told Corsi his own computer expert told him that the image posted online was a computer-generated document.

Members of Congress also are beginning to raise questions.

WND reported Mike Zullo, the lead investigator for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse in Arizona, said interest in rising.

In 2011, a contingent of citizens in Maricopa Count asked Arpaio to look into the issue because they were concerned an ineligible candidate would be on their 2012 presidential election ballot.

Zullo has contributed evidence to a court case – now pending before the state Supreme Court in Alabama – on the dispute. He has testified that the White House computer image of Obama’s birth certificate contains anomalies that are unexplainable unless the document had been fabricated piecemeal by human intervention, rather than being copied from a genuine paper document.

“Mr. Obama has in fact not offered any verifiable authoritative document of any legal significance or possessing any evidentiary value as to the origins of his purported birth narrative or location of the birth event,” he explained earlier. “One of our most serious concerns is that the White House document appears to have been fabricated piecemeal on a computer, constructed by drawing together digitized data from several unknown sources.”

Zullo also has noted that the governor of Hawaii was unable to produce an original birth document for Obama, and it should have been easy to find.

See some of Zullo’s evidence:

Most recently, Grace Vuoto of the World Tribune reported that among the experts challenging the birth certificate is certified document analyst Reed Hayes, who has served as an expert for Perkins Coie, the law firm that has been defending Obama in eligibility cases.

“We have obtained an affidavit from a certified document analyzer, Reed Hayes, that states the document is a 100 percent forgery, no doubt about it,” Zullo told the World Tribune.

“Mr. Obama’s operatives cannot discredit [Hayes],” the investigator told the news outlet. “Mr. Hayes has been used as the firm’s reliable expert. The very firm the president is using to defend him on the birth certificate case has used Mr. Hayes in their cases.”

The Tribune reported Hayes agreed to take a look at the documentation and called almost immediately.

“There is something wrong with this,” Hayes had said.

Hayes produced a 40-page report in which he says “based on my observations and findings, it is clear that the Certificate of Live Birth I examined is not a scan of an original paper birth certificate, but a digitally manufactured document created by utilizing material from various sources.”

“In over 20 years of examining documentation of various types, I have never seen a document that is so seriously questionable in so many respects. In my opinion, the birth certificate is entirely fabricated,” he says in the report.

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http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/cnn-raises-alarm-over-cruz-eligibility/print/