No, this old news footage doesn’t prove former President Barack Obama wasn’t U.S.-born

Almost a decade after Joe Arpaio, then sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, hosted a news conference to further and falsely cast doubt on former President Barack Obama’s citizenship, some social media posts are reframing the event as new news.  

"Wow! About time!" a Feb. 19 Facebook post said. "The media is showing how Obama’s birth certificate was changed! He was never born in the U.S. so was never a real president! Everything he signed will be reversed!"

The post included news footage of the press conference. 

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First: Obama is a U.S. citizen who was born in the United States. But that hasn’t stopped people from baselessly claiming he was born in Kenya. Over more than a decade, PolitiFact has fact-checked 30-some statements about Obama’s birthplace.

Arpaio is among those who have made such false claims. In 2016, he summoned journalists to a press conference to talk about Obama’s "fake, fake birth certificate." Mike Zullo, a member of Arpaio’s "Cold Case Posse," "explained how a careful analysis of the document’s typed letters and words, as well as the angles of the date stamps, proved forgery," the Arizona Republic reported at the time. 

"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." 

But that’s wrong. 

After the Obama campaign released a copy of his "Certification of Birth" from Hawaii, posting the document online in June 2008, FactCheck.org reporters went to the campaign’s headquarters to hold the document and examine it closely. They concluded that it was legitimate. 

A few months later, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, then director of the Hawaii Department of Health, issued a statement saying that he and the registrar of vital statistics "who has the statutory authority to oversee and maintain these types of vital records" had personally seen and verified that the health department had Obama’s original birth certificate on record. 

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Janice Okubo, a health department spokesperson, told PolitiFact that birth certificates evolve over the decades, and there are no doubt differences between what Obama’s looked like when he was born and the documents issued today. 

And if there was a plot to forge a birth certificate so that Obama could run for office, it went back decades — to the month he was born in 1961. 

Will Hoover, who wrote a 2008 story for the Honolulu Advertiser about Obama’s childhood in Hawaii, told PolitiFact that he reviewed microfilm archives and found two birth announcements for Obama. One was in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, and the other was in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin the next day. They both said the same thing: "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug. 4." They were both submitted to the newspaper by the health department — not Obama’s family.

"Take a second and think about that," PolitiFact reported in 2009. "In order to phony those notices up, it would have required the complicity of the state Health Department and two independent newspapers — on the off chance this unnamed child might want to one day be president of the United States."

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