“To this day I stated that I did not care where the president was born," Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said on Thursday. "We were going to investigate a government possible forged document."
Arpaio said that he and other government officials that make up the Cold Case Posse Team "concluded" that the online version of Obama’s birth certificate is a “forgery.”
Showing a video that compared Obama’s birth certificate with another Hawaiian birth certificate from weeks after the president's birth, claiming that digital elements were copied and pasted from the latter to the former.
Arpaio concluded the news conference by saying that he will turn over the investigation to the federal government and Congress.
A short form of Obama's birth certificate was posted on the internet during his 2008 election campaign but his origin was repeatedly questioned by President-elect Donald Trump. In 2011, the White House released Obama’s birth certificate which indicates that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump acknowledged during a campaign event in September that Obama was born in the United States.
The US Constitution requires the president to be a US citizen from the time of birth.
