By David Edwards
Wednesday, August 1, 2012 11:15 EDT

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) recently speculated that
President Barack Obama’s family could have conspired to fake his
citizenship by announcing his birth with a “telegram from Kenya.”
During a tele-townhall event recorded last week, King was asked why he wasn’t “investigating Obama’s ineligibility.”


“Before he was sworn in for the presidency, we went down into the
Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers —
only two newspapers in Hawaii — each of them had published the birth of
Barack Obama,” the congressman explained. “It would have been awfully
hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in
Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they
keep of all the newspapers published.”King
added: “That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how
they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on.”
But the Iowa Republican concluded that there was no point “drilling
into that now” because “even if it turned out that Barack Obama was
conclusively not born in America, I don’t think we could get that case
sold between now and November.”
During his 2008 run for president, Barack Obama released his certificate of live birth. After so-called birthers continued to question his citizenship, the White House made the president’s long form birth certificate available in 2011.


“I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched
with bemusement, I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing
just kept on going,” the president said last year.
“We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every
news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I
was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.”
“We’ve posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii
on the Internet for everybody to see. People have provided affidavits
that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate. And yet this
thing just keeps on going.”
Watch this video from Rep. Steve King, uploaded Aug. 1, 2012