In March 2019, an attorney familiar to those who follow the “birther” movement softened the ground for Joe Biden’s candidacy with a lengthy salvo in The Atlantic.
Bob Bauer used the pretext of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s House committee testimony to launch his attack on the president.
“Trump repeatedly hawked the lies that Obama was born in Kenya,” wrote Bauer. This was false. Trump did question the mystery surrounding Obama’s origins, but despite their digging, the media could find no instance in which he claimed Obama was born in Kenya.
No fewer than a dozen times in the course of this article did Bauer use the words “race,” “racist,” or “racism” to attack Trump. The article was well timed. A month later, Joe Biden would announce his candidacy for the presidency claiming that Trump’s racism motivated him to run.
Biden centered his charge on Trump’s reaction to a 2017 incident in Charlottesville, shamelessly misrepresenting Trump’s comments about the violent clash. But the birther issue was never far from Biden’s sights.
Trump “has sought to fuel racism and tear our nation apart,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said in August 2020. He referred to the “grotesque, racist birther movement” led by Trump that dated back to his questioning of Barack Obama’s birth certificate in spring 2011.
In 2007, the Clinton campaign understood that Obama’s dubious roots were a legitimate issue. “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light,” Clinton strategist Mark Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to Hillary.
“It also exposes a very strong weakness for him – his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
Of course, the Hillary campaign insisted it never attempted to follow Penn’s lead, but Penn never suggested it should. “We are never going to say anything about his background,” he added. “We have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans – the invisible Americans.”
Attorney Philip Berg took his doubts about Obama a step further. On Aug. 21, 2008, a week prior to the Democratic National Convention, Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.
A former deputy attorney general for the state of Pennsylvania and a credible pro-choice gubernatorial candidate in a Democratic primary against sitting Gov. Robert Casey, Berg expected to be taken seriously. He wasn’t. The media expressed zero interest in his suit.
Obama and the Democratic National Committee took a good deal of interest. Defending Obama’s interest was none other than Bob Bauer, a top gun from the Deep State’s go-to law firm, Perkins Coie.
On Nov. 12, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit, ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the suit. “I was deprived of my due process rights to be heard,” Berg would write. “Judge Surrick made some outlandish comments claiming Obama had been properly vetted, and that was completely untrue.”
If Berg were a racist, his lifetime membership in the NAACP made for good cover, and he was not the only one to file suit asking to see Obama’s birth certificate and passport. Obama’s lawyers fought the challengers at every turn.
The day after Berg’s suit was dismissed, the New York Times reported that White House counsel Gregory Craig was stepping down from his job and that Bauer would be taking over.
In 2011, when Trump started making noise about the birth certificate, Obama turned to the one man who knew his secrets. “Finally I decided I’d had enough,” Obama writes in his new memoir “A Promised Land.”
“I called in White House counsel Bob Bauer and told him to go ahead and obtain the long-form birth certificate from its home in a bound volume, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hawaii Vital Records office.”
Bauer dispatched Obama’s personal attorney Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, to secure two copies of the long form birth certificate. If it was all so easy, one has to wonder why Bauer did not get a copy when Berg first brought suit.
In 2016 Perkins Coie again showed its creativity when it retained Fusion GPS to create the infamous Steele dossier. A cynic might suggest that a firm capable of commissioning the Steele dossier would have no trouble dummying up a birth certificate.
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” said Biden in April 2019 in announcing his presidential bid. He warned that if President Trump were re-elected, “He will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Bauer could not stand by either. He and his wife, Anita Dunn, played major roles in Biden’s campaign. In fact, Dunn ran the whole show and is still running it, the Edgar Bergen to Biden’s Charlie McCarthy.
God help us all.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,” is now widely available. See www.cashill.com for more information.
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