WorldNetDaily teased the Dec. 15 press conference by Joe Arpaio and Mike Zullo by rehashing a lot of the old, discredited birther hits. We got more of the same from the press conference itself — not that WND will tell you that, of course.
Instead, Bob Unruh breathlessly wrote in a Dec. 15 WND article:
A years-long forensics investigation into the computer image of the long-form Hawaiian birth certificate image that Barack Obama released during a White House news conference during his first term and presented to the American people as an official government document concluded it is “fake.”
[…]
The probe also confirms that those who were subjected to the derogatory “birther” label from many media outlets and Democrats were right – at least regarding the document used to establish Obama’s eligibility to be president.Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., WND senior staff writer and author of “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” was credited by sheriff’s officials with contributing to the investigation.
Corsi said Mike Zullo, head of the Cold Case Posse, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio “have done the United States a heroic service demonstrating by forensic analysis that the long form birth certificate produced in a White House news conference on April 27, 2011, as Barack Obama’s authentic birth certificate is a forgery.”
“The nine points of forgery between the Johanna Ah’nee birth certificate and Obama’s [long-form birth certificate] prove convincingly that the Ah’nee birth certificate was the source document from which the Obama LFBC was created.”
Corsi said Arpaio’s five-year effort “vindicates the extensive research WND conducted over years to bring this issue to the attention of the American public.”
“The inescapable conclusion is that the Hawaii Department of Health has not shown the American public the original 1961 birth records for Barack Obama, if they actually exist,” he said.
“That President Obama’s birth certificate is fake, as proven now by a legitimate law enforcement examination raises serious questions that high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed at the highest level of government. The clear conclusion is that the Obama presidency may have been illegitimate, having violated Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution. Impeachment procedures may be required, even if those procedures are conducted after Obama leaves office.”The sheriff’s video said there were nine images on the Obama birth certificate that appear to be identical to, and copied from, another birth certificate issued in Hawaii just days after his birth.
That certificate belongs to Johanna Ah’nee.
Get a commemorative “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” T-shirt – sure to be a collector’s item.
The copied items include the word “Honolulu,” “Oahu” twice, three different Xs. Their identical nature raised serious questions since they would have been applied to original documents by moving a typewriter carriage and roller at the time, a left date stamp and a right date stamp.
Well, no. As birther myth-buster Dr. Conspiracy explains:
In several instances, Zullo misrepresents the facts to make things sound suspicious, and as he has done in previous presentations, he carefully words things that technically say one thing, but leave the impression of something else. He says something extremely suspicious: that the Italian forensic laboratory claimed that if they had a larger sample size, the probability that Obama’s document is a forgery would increase, but of course that would only be true if there were consistency in the sample and variation from the Obama certificate, which one wouldn’t know without looking at the sample.
[…]When all of the rhetoric a[nd] conspiracist language is stripped away, all that actually remains is a couple of date stamps being at the same angle, and a box with an X in it is the same. It’s not much.
Dr. Conspiracy points out that Arpaio and Zullo have so far refused to make any of its supporting evidence for its current birther claim public beyond the video — specifically, the analyses from Reed Hayes (who, as we’ve noted, is a handwriting expert, not a digital document expert) and the Italian forensic laboratory Forlabs. If Arpaio and Zullo are so certain their evidence is solid, why not make it public? Unruh doesn’t bother to answer the question, nor did he note that Arpaio refused to take questions during the press conference.
Unruh also completely ignored how Zullo botched one key part of his evidence. We’ve noted that the purported anomalies in the PDF of the Obama birth certificate that Zullo, Corsi and others have pounced on are easily replicated by scanning the image into a Xerox Workcentre 7655 multifunction printer — something WND has never told its readers about. Dr. Conspiracy notes that Zullo touched on that in his presentation: “Zullo goes to some lengths to emphasize that the Xerox machine which he admits replicates ‘some’ of the characteristics of the Obama PDF is irrelevant to this new analysis, but he fails to acknowledge that in previous presentations, he claimed that those same characteristics, now known as normal, were marks of forgery.”
Zullo also doesn’t explain how Obama’s nefarious forces could have gotten Johanna Ah’nee’s birth certificate to crib images from since, as Dr. Conspiracy notes, Ah’nee’s certificate came to the posse through Corsi.
So Zullo still doesn’t know what he’s talking about — which, as before, puts a cloud over his purported fundings. But Unruh is willing to overlook such things to keep the birther conspiracy alive (after months of silence for fear of hurting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign).
As a bonus, WND is laughably promoting Corsi’s “Where’s the Birth Certificate” as being “vindicated” by Arpaio and Zullo (see image above). In fact, Corsi’s book was written well before, and released about three weeks after, Obama released his long-form birth certificate that was the subject of the Arpaio-Zullo investigation; it contains no information about the long-form certificate. Thus, the findings — even if they were legitimate — cannot possibly vindicate anything in Corsi’s book.
The image also insists that Corsi’s book was a “No. 1 Bestseller,” even though Obama’s release of his birth certificate decimated sales of the book. WND does not explain when, and on what planet, Corsi’s book was ever a “No. 1 Bestseller.”