President Obama only has 35 days left in office, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., is still pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that Obama’s birth certificate is fake and therefore he isn’t eligible to be in office.
During a press conference Thursday, Arpaio claimed that after a five-year investigation into the validity of the White House-produced birth certificate for President Obama, he has determined that it is an invalid document.
The investigation concluded that the birth certificate was a “fraudulently created document, which has been represented as an official copy of the original birth certificate of President Obama,” Arpaio claimed. “We and anyone else who dare to question the document have been maligned, falsely labeled, grossly criticized in the bulk of the media, certain Internet sources, for years.”
Chief investigator Mike Zullo told the press he had asked Reed Hayes, a forensic handwriting expert who voted for Obama in both presidential elections, to inspect the document, as well as world-renowned experts in Italy. They claimed Obama’s certificate is an amended copy of another woman’s.
During 2011 and 2012, President-elect Trump spent time claiming Obama’s birth certificate was counterfeit. He later reversed course, acknowledging in September that Obama was born in the U.S.
Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Arpaio, sometimes called “America’s toughest sheriff,” is in the middle of a court battle over his office’s alleged profiling of Hispanics in order to target illegal immigrants.
