McCain Investigated Obama Birth Claims

McCain Investigated Obama Birth Claims

Monday, July 27, 2009 8:08 PM By: Dave Eberhart

Lawyers for former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., investigated President Barack Obama’s citizenship during the 2008 campaign, according to a report in Political Wire. It’s the issue that won’t go away for the President – where is his birth certificate? Lou Dobbs, the anchor and managing editor of CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” recently revived the issue on his show, complaining to his audience that the certificate of live birth he was holding in his hand at the time referred to another document – a so-called long-form birth certificate. Dobbs went to note that in many states, a person cannot get a driver’s license without the original long-form birth certificate. Political Wire pointed to a recent report in the Washington Independent where Trevor Potter and other lawyers for Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign were questioned about whether the McCain camp looked into the issue. "To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” Potter explained. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. “On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii,” Potter added. “There was a certificate issued by the state's Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance." Potter, who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain Presidential campaigns, further noted to the Washington Independent that he and his staff were very much aware of the flurry of law suits filed to get the original Obama birth certificate made public. “We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” recounted Potter. “The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.” McCain, a member of a transient U.S. military family who was born at a U.S. military hospital in the Zone, later got a legal opinion stating that he fulfilled the Constitutional requirements of being natural born.