For the last couple of years, ever since Obama became a serious candidate, the birthers have charged that he has paid his lawyers huge sums of money to hide his birth certificate and all his other records. The sum keeps going up. It was one million, then a more precise sounding $1.4 million, and now it is two million dollars, and sometimes “more than two million”.
I’m putting this is GQ because I don’t want a debate on his birth certificate or anything else. I want a factual answer to something I can’t find by Googling. There’s an old thread on this but it doesn’t answer the money part.
Is there a birther text that lays out who these lawyers are, how they are “building walls” to hide his records, or anything else that says what exactly they are spending all this money on?
It can’t merely be that this is the sum of money he has spent to defend cases. As far as I can tell, he has never been the defendant in any case, such as the Supreme Court battles to get his “real” birth certificate made public. Besides, the numbers appeared long before any of these cases went to court.
Have the people making this accusation ever given any facts to support this? An “ur” document, so to speak, that everybody has been parroting since? Any source that somebody can cite?
I realize that I may be offending someone by using the term birther. Tough. This is no different from using terms like “moon hoaxer” or “truther” or “goldbug”. They are crazy conspiracy theories, not political beliefs.
It is not a crazy conspiracy theory. It is a knowing adoption and repetition of an untrue position. Done in order to establish conservative credentials. Each and every birther is, without exception, adamant President Obama is a natural born citizen and will be enraged, almost to violence, if you privately suggest to them an actual belief in a single word they are saying.
The c. $2million figure is arrived at largely from thin air, but sometimes there is an airy connection attempted to a total billings figure from a law firm retained in some capacity for several years. (Perkins Coie?)
Of course the amount that he spends to keep his private records out of the grubby hands of conspiracy theorists is constantly going up–he’s being constantly barraged by lawsuits.
That is, if it is true, and not just another lie perpetuated by the birthers.
I’ve read the sentence above five times and I still can’t parse what you’re trying to say.
Did you perhaps mean to add the word ‘not’ before ‘a natural’, use ‘disbelief’ instead of ‘belief’, and ‘any’ instead of ‘a single’?
Maybe you meant the opposite, where the word ‘sure’ would replace the word ‘adamant’, the word ‘publicly’ would replace the word ‘privately’, and the word ‘privately’ would be added after the word ‘saying’?
No, he’s saying that every single birther is lying about their belief in the “birther theory” for political purposes. Which is farther than I’d go…I do think there are a lot of poor souls who’ve been rooked into actually believing that tripe.
Yeah, I’m with you. I think many actually do believe Obama’s not a natural born American, but are strongly motivated to do so by a deep-seated racism that precludes the possibility of a black person being president of the United States. However, some definitely are using it for political purposes, and to rally their base.
As far as the ever-increasing lawyers fees meme is concerned, this just helps boost the narrative that Obama must be spending more and more to hide the facts, otherwise they surely would have been uncovered by now.
You and indeed I, lack the mental capacity, discipline and time to undertake the necessary meditations and alpine retreat to become as one with the Shaolin monastery. Thereby achieving in the spiritual realm what can never be found in this material world: Transcendent and eternal certainty, including the central truth of birtherism that President Obama is a Natural Born Citizen of the United States.
And that’s the one I referred to in the OP, mentioning that the question was never answered because it was hijacked by glurge. As is this one.
Look, I can accept that the number was pulled out of thin air. I can get that the normal records processes won’t allow them to be released, as with Hawaii and the original long form birth certificate. But what I don’t get is the assertion that lawyers are protecting his records. Where did that come from? Who started that meme? It’s everywhere and has been around for years. Somebody must have investigated it by now. This isn’t like figuring out where a common slang usage came from. It has to have left a paper trail. It’s weird that nobody has ever said a word about it, even on the debunking pages.
Obama For America has paid the law firm Perkins Coie $2.3 million since they announced his campaign for president according to the federal election commission. There is no real reason to doubt that is true. And Perkins Coie has defended the campaign against eligibility suits, whether filed by birthers or on whatever other grounds. However, it is very hard to imagine that all those fees went purely to defending against birther lawsuits. Common sense would dictate that there are many other reasons a PAC would need to retain the services of a law firm. Ironically even if the entire 2.3 million really did go to defending against birther lawsuits then all that proves is that the birthers forced him to waste all that money defending against frivolous lawsuits - hardly a smoking gun. As for documentation here are a few: $205k, $688k, $270k, etc.
As I mentioned in thread on the UK and Holacast, the tendency to believe what we would like to be true without troubling ourselves about evidence.
So good question, as much as many, including me, want anything negative about Obama, what is the straight dope on this? Better to forget about where he was born and watch what he is doing about Libya.
That’s what I was thinking. If I had the money (or a backer who wanted to annoy the President via proxy) I could file lawsuits claiming the Obama is a Romulan and therefore ineligible to be President. And once those lawsuits reach a courtroom, Obama has to make some kind of defense against them or take the chance that I’ll win by default (while claiming my allegations have been proven in a court of law after Obama was unable to defend his human origins).
Beating these frivilous lawsuits may be as easy as swatting flies, but it serves the purpose of annoying Obama, making him spend a fortune on legal fees, and allowing me to claim that he’s spending millions hiding the truth.
I’ve seen the name Perkins Coie mentioned in some birther postings, of course. But seeing the name doesn’t tackle the real problem.
For all we know, the meme was out there first for a long time before somebody questioned it. After the fact somebody might have come up with a name of a law firm. Without seeing the original posts we can’t know whether Perkins Coie was the source the entire time.
And speaking of time, those expenditures are post election. But the accusations started appearing before the election. There probably were earlier filings but those particular ones don’t make the case.
It may possibly go back to Philip J. Berg, who filed the original birther lawsuit in August 2008, although he had been making the claims for months. He did say in one interview:
That might have gotten transmogrified into lawyers spending millions to defend.
There is a meticulously updated page of all the birther lawsuits (takes forever to load) that shows that out of 74 cases, Obama was only a defendent in three, one of them being Berg’s. The comments seem to begin when Berg started his campaign so I’m betting there is a connection. What the exact connection is, though, I can’t find and apparently no one else has searched.
Some of the payments to Perkins Coie were as far back as Oct. 2008 which could include work they were doing in Aug. 2008 or even earlier. The campaign has spent just over 2.3 million at a law firm who was incidentally responsible for defending eligibility suits (among the many other things they probably did) and the birthers claim that he has spent just over 2 million defending his eligibility. Maybe I am just seeing this as something simpler than it really is but my take is that the birthers claim whatever the current total amount spent at Perkins Coie is entirely due to birther-related issues. I don’t think there is a reasonable basis for the claim since the entire premise of the birther issue is unreasonable to begin with. As the tab at Perkins Coie goes up, the number the birthers claim seems to roughly track along with that amount. This pro-birther piece on World Net Daily seems to corroborate this theory. They are just taking the grand total Obama has spent on all legal representation and claiming, with no real basis, that the whole amount was due to eligibility suits.
That’s an interesting page and thanks for finding it.
The problem remains, however. That article never gives the magic phrase. You could infer that someone reading it might make the claim, but they are careful not to come out and say it. And it is also a year after the election. You are making the inference that there is continuity between the original use and what the birthers adopted as their argument after the election. You may very well be correct, but I was hoping for something more than inference.
