In the year 2021, more than four years since former President Barack Obama left office — more than 13 since he was first elected president — we are still encountering claims questioning his U.S. citizenship and his birth certificate.
Over more than a decade, PolitiFact has fact-checked 30-some statements about Obama’s birthplace.
A Dec. 14 blog post that’s spreading widely on social media retreads familiar territory.
"Probe," the title says. "Obama certificate a fake." It goes on to claim that "an exhaustive forensic investigation into President Obama’s birth certificate has concluded that it is a fraudulently created document, which was represented as an official copy." The probe, according to the post, was led by Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., "chief investigator Mike Zullo and two forensic experts."
Arpaio did gather reporters with Zullo, a member of the sheriff’s Cold Case Posse, to announce that after investigating Obama’s birth certificate, they concluded that the document was forged.
But that was in December 2016. This is not new, and it’s been thoroughly debunked.
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Back in 2016 Arpaio, then still sheriff, summoned journalists to a press conference to talk about Obama’s "fake, fake birth certificate."
The Arizona Republic reported on the hour-long event, writing that "in exacting detail, Zullo explained how a careful analysis of the document’s typed letters and words, as well as the angles of the date stamps, proved forgery."
"According to the theory," the Republic said, "the birth certificate presented to the public was created after copying and pasting information from the legitimate birth certificate of a woman born in Hawaii" named Johanna Ah’Nee.