reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
The briefing opens with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and chief investigator Mike Zullo describing their investigation into a birth-certificate document released publicly by the White House, stating that the inquiry was never about where President Obama was born but about whether a purported factual document was fraudulently created. Bob Corbin is introduced as a former county attorney, former board of supervisor, former attorney general for Arizona, and past president of the NRA. Media relations director Dak says the media has mischaracterized the investigation and emphasizes that technical evidence will be presented, including two separate experts on different continents reaching similar conclusions.
Sheriff Arpaio says that in 2011 about 250 members of the Surprise Tea Party asked him to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate because they believed evidence showed it was fraud. He says he agreed to look into a possible government-forgery document and that from day one he stated he did not care where the president was born, focusing instead on the document. He says the investigation has concluded the long-form birth certificate posted on whitehouse.gov (April 27, 2011) is a fraudulently manufactured document. He also says people who questioned the document were maligned and criticized, and he frames the briefing as setting the record straight based on evidence. Arpaio says he will present an executive summary and then turn the presentation to Mike Zullo.
Mike Zullo describes his approach as letting the evidence lead rather than aiming to clear the document. He says the mandate was to clear the document, but investigation results changed. He recounts contacting document examiner Reed Hayes, describing Hayes as having decades of experience and being court-recognized, and says Hayes said he could not clear the document and found something wrong with it. Zullo states that the investigation involved forensic document examiners and a European media forensic team, including Four Labs in Italy, and that he used a method intended to have independent experts from different disciplines reach conclusions. He says he and Mark Golar collaborated over years using digital analysis tools.
Zullo’s presentation includes a video demonstrating comparisons between two long-form birth certificates from the state of Hawaii: one assigned to Barack Obama and one assigned to Johanna Ani, both described as births in Honolulu during August 1961, 16 days apart. The video claims nine points of forgery, stating that words, letters, and hand-placed date stamps were digitally copied from the Ani long-form birth certificate and pasted onto the Obama long-form birth certificate. It highlights matching angles of date stamps in specific boxes (including boxes 20 and 22), claiming two separate document examiners in different disciplines and continents agree the angles are identical across both documents. The video also contrasts this with Susan and Gretchen Nordyke being born five minutes apart with consecutive serial numbers and claims their date stamps do not show similarity in angles.
The presentation further claims that specific “X” marks and related elements in the Obama PDF were taken from box 6D in the Ani long-form birth certificate, and that the box, the X, and the word above were taken together. Zullo says these findings are distinct from prior “digital forensics” issues involving a 7655 Xerox copier. He claims that attempts to replicate features using a Xerox 7655 copier with 2011 software were not exact, and he says he shifted methodology by obtaining an overlay video from Mark Golar. Zullo states that after adjusting a degree-and-a-half offset for the original certificate, the date stamps lined up perfectly, and he sent the analysis to Italy and Hawaii for independent assessment. He then says Reed Hayes and the Italian team concluded the document was inauthentic, with the Italian team concluding it was “a thousand times more probable” the document was inauthentic, and that greater sampling would increase that number.
Zullo describes additional claimed matches: he says alignment of serial-number and text elements occurred across documents, and he says the concept of “textural juxtaposition” was used to describe the relationship between elements when moved. He says Reed Hayes concluded the Obama certificate posted on whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011 is “a fraudulently manufactured document,” and that evidence indicates the Ani certificate was used as a source. Zullo says he believes this is not explained by the Xerox copier and he attributes the investigation’s conclusions to multiple independent forensic findings.
He then discusses investigative steps in Hawaii, describing a meeting with Jill Nagamini, a Deputy Attorney General for the state of Hawaii, and says the dialogue indicated no validation of the image itself—only validation of information supposedly on file. Zullo adds that he, and Detective Makowitz, attempted to clarify the situation by reviewing birth announcements and consulting records sources, but encountered refusals at Kapalani Medical Center and did not receive cooperation from organizations he approached.
Zullo says Johanna Ani maintained that her birth certificate was in her possession since 1995 in a locked file cabinet and was only shown to Jerry Corsi about 10 days after the Obama certificate release. He says Corsi confirmed he took possession of Ani’s document at that time. Zullo states that he does not consider Ani a suspect because we are “in possession of the document” as a source document in their analysis, while naming Mickey Booth (the friend who requested that Ani show the document to Corsi) as labeled a suspect by others but also stated as “not a suspect.”
In additional technical claims, Zullo says the state of Hawaii did not create the PDF file because they do not create PDFs legally, and he says evidence pointed to manual creation and alteration. He claims there were issues related to date stamps, clipping masks, pencil markings concealed under a mask, unique ghosting around letters, anti-forensics steps (starting as a PDF, printing it out, then re-scanning), erased metadata, and altered White House handout JPEG images that he says were edited with Photoshop. He says these findings led to the conclusion the document was “digitally created” and “not real.”
Sheriff Arpaio concludes by stating he plans to turn the investigation over to the federal government and Congress this month, and he says he hopes Congress will pass a law requiring presidents should be vetted and hold public hearings. Arpaio says they will not answer questions due to sensitive information and thanks the media while reiterating that he believes the briefing has presented evidence about a “fake” birth certificate.