by John Charlton
Mark J. Bennett, HI Attorney General
(Feb. 2, 2010) — While political momentum is building within the Democratic Party from coast to coast to make the issue of Obama’s claims to be born in Hawaii a litmus test for its political opponents in the 2010 general elections for Congress, a key component in such a strategy has been undermined by the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office.
In correspondence with The Post & Email, Jill T. Nagamine, Deputy Attorney General for the State of Hawaii, has made it clear that her office will not corroborate or back in any way the July 27, 2009 Statement of Dr. Chiyome Fukino, Director of the Hawaii Department of Health, which declared Obama Hawaiian-born and a “natural-born American citizen.”
The stunning admission was made in an email sent to the Editor of this paper yesterday evening.
The implications of this denial are catastrophic for the Democratic strategy.
The Hawaii Attorney General’s office has the duty to prosecute the laws of the State. Mark J. Bennett, the current Attorney General, was appointed to the office by Governor Lingle on Jan. 3, 2003. He is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Honolulu, and a graduate of Cornell’s Law School. Bennett is the first Republican to hold the office in 40 years.
According to published reports, Dr. Fukino has admitted that her July 27th statement received the verbal approval of the HI Attorney General, who “o.k.’d it.”
In an attempt to corroborate the contents of Dr. Fukino’s statement and understand better the value of that testimony, I put the following two questions to Nagamine, as a member of the press.
I am seeking some information in response to 2 questions I have. Please understand that your response(s) or non-response will be quoted by our paper.
Q. 1: Does the Director of the Hawaii Department of Health have any statutory duty or authority to define the citizenship status of anyone whose vital record(s) are kept by that department?
Q.2: According to the legal references employed by your office, what is the defition of a “natural-born citizen” of the United States of America?
I put my question to the Deputy Attorney General to avoid putting the Attorney General in a situation of a conflict of interest, if he in fact, did, as Dr. Fukino claims, advise her regarding her July statement.
Nagamine, in response, asserted that any answer to such questions given by her office would represent a conflict of interest for her office. And that is an explicit admission that Dr. Fukino had no statutory authority nor duty to make such a statement, and that the Attorney General’s office will not stand behind Fukino’s claim that Obama is a “natural-born American citizen.”
It is such, because if Fukino’s declaration had legal weight of any kind, surely a response to my questions would have corroborated that without such a conflict-of-interest scenario. You only have a conflict if the Fukino claim would not be supported by a Nagamine response.
In December, the Department of Health for the State of Hawaii issued its own dossier of excuses as to why they are also refusing to confirm, by documentation, the July Statement to Dr. Fukino.
Ironically, and quite oblivious to these developments, the Democratic Party in Tennessee issued a missive berating that state’s Republican Lt. Governor, Ron Ramsey, who yesterday publicly denied that he was certain of Obama’s birth-story claims:
Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey today questioned the president’s citizenship, offering further proof that the Republican leadership in the General Assembly is out of touch with real Tennesseans.
“I don’t know whether President Obama is a citizen of the United States or not,” Ramsey reportedly told the Nashville Republican’s first Tuesday Club after it was suggested that no one running for president be put on a Tennessee ballot unless proof of natural born citizenship is provided.
Mr. Ramsey would rather pander to a far-right wing group of conspiracy theorists than govern in a pragmatic approach that most Tennesseans expect from their political leaders.
Quite irrationally, the Democratic Party is now asserting an undocumented claim as political “truth” and doubt concerning the veracity of such an unsupported claim as a “conspiracy theory,” which indeed is more evidence of the Party’s withdrawal from a Main Street notion of reality.
The Post & Email recently published a report explaining why the electronic image promoted by the Obama campaign of a Hawaiian Certification of Live Birth is in fact a crude forgery and has been recognized as such for nearly two years.
In October, the Hawaii Attorney General’s office also refused to take a public stand on what the term “natural born citizen” means, raising further doubt about the value of any counsel offered by the Attorney General to the Fukino statement.
The Post & Email notes, furthermore, that the term “natural-born” is more commonly the medical term for a natural birth; whereas “natural born” is the constitutional term meaning born on U.S. Soil of two U.S. citizen parents.
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