Birther Mythbusting: Leiutenant Quarles Harris Jr. & Passport Crimes

When Birthers attempt to change the subject during a debate they're losing, they usually resort to utilizing one of a number of standard Birther talking points. One such talking point, which has the added charm of being its own mini-conspiracy theory that attempts to implicate Obama in nothing less than premeditated murder, is the name-dropping of "Lt. Quarles Harris."

For instance, in a FreeRepublic thread about Ann Dunham's passport application, "conservativegramma" responds to an on-topic post by starting with this non-sequitur:

Have you not heard of Obama’s passport files break-in back in 2008? Then later a man who supposedly knew about this event or had information preparing to testify was found shot to death in his car??? Lt. Quarles I believe his name was.

First of all, as anyone who's made even the most cursory attempt to check their facts knows, the individual in question was not "Lt." He was not an officer at all, military or police. This error was first made by the Washington Times (thus illustrating how attentively the Times checks its facts), and has been regularly repeated since then, including in two WorldNetDaily articles.

No, his name was "Leiutenant Quarles Harris Jr." He's listed, with that nontraditional spelling of his first name, in the Social Security Death Index, where it also gives his birthdate in 1983 and his date of death, which was April 18, 2008.

Harris was shot and killed that day in Washington D.C. From WJLA, Channel 7:

Officers responding to a report of gunfire in the 2800 block of 12th Street, NE, found the body of 24-year-old Leiutenant Quarles Harris, Jr in a vehicle. Police say he had been shot several times.

And from a WJLA follow-up report:

Police stopped [Harris] and found 20 credit cards and eight completed passport applications. According to court documents, Leiutenant Harris told police he and someone inside the State Department were taking information off passport applications, which they used to get fraudulent credit cards. Another conspirator, inside the Postal Service, intercepted the cards before they could get to the actual people.

Leiutenant Harris was in court for that case three days before his murder. "He felt like he was going to do jail time. He was willing to do jail time."...

Police are investigating the murder, while State Department Diplomatic Security, Secret Service and the Postal Inspector are all investigating the fraud case. The only comment from law enforcement was that it's an ongoing investigation.

Leiutant Harris' murder comes after a spat of violence in the fifth ward. There were five homicides in a four day period.

You can read the actual criminal complaint filed against Harris here, wherein he was charged with credit card fraud.

You may notice something absent from both these articles and the complaint: any mention of the passport breach of the records of Clinton, McCain and Obama that broke in March 2008. It's absent for the simple reason that it's not related. At all.

In the case of the candidates' passport breach, three contract employees for the State Department improperly looked at the passport files of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. Two employees worked for Stanley Inc., and the third worked for Analysis Corp.*

In the case of Mr. Harris, he was charged with a credit card fraud scheme that he said involved a State Department employee who fed him passport information that Harris used to apply for credit cards, and a Postal Service employee who intercepted the cards before they were delivered. As I noted above, when he was arrested, Harris was found with 19 different credit cards (plus two duplicates) and 8 passport applications, none of which were in his name. None of the documents were said to be in the names of any Presidential candidates (who would be rather poorly chosen marks in an identity theft scheme).

Were the two cases related? No. There are no common facts or players between them. The Washington Times reported in November 2008 on precisely this question:

Mr. Harris was fatally shot in Northeast Washington in April. Police at the time said they had no information linking his shooting to his involvement in the passport case.

The breach came to light in March around the same time The Times first reported that three State Department contract employees were being investigated for improperly accessing the passport data of presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

[State Department spokesman Sean] McCormack said the cases are not related.

Harris had indeed provided help to federal investigators, but it was with regard to his crimes, not the breach of the candidates' passport files. As noted in his criminal complaint, right after his arrest, at the police station, Harris was questioned by agents of the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Department of State, and U.S. Postal Service.** As best I can tell, the only assistance provided to federal investigators by Harris was through this post-arrest interrogation.

Where, then, did the notion that the two cases were related originate? It was probably inevitable that conspiracy theorists would try to connect the two, but they were dealt an assist by the Washington Times article about Harris' death. In that article, the Times mentioned the paper's previous coverage of the Presidential passport breach, but drew no direct connection between the two. Readers, however, appear to have interpreted the mention of the passport breach as evidence of a connection between the two cases.

Conspiracists have been further emboldened by even more inaccurate reporting on the subject, such as that by Bob Unruh at WorldNetDaily. Unruh simply out-and-out falsely reports that Harris was a "key witness" in the breach investigation, based on Unruh's own misreading of the Washington Times article, which he cites as his only source for the connection.

So there you have it. Leiutenant Quarles Harris Jr. was a credit card fraudster and an identity thief, but he had no connections whatsoever with the breaching of the Presidential candidates' passport files, and the only assistance he provided to federal investigators was on his criminal case, not the breach-related misconduct.

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* Analysis Corp.'s President and CEO is John O. Brennan, an advisor to Obama during his campaign and administration. Birthers have yet another conspiracy theory about his supposed involvement in the passport breach, but that it wholly unrelated to Mr. Harris, and thus irrelevant to this post.

** To preempt the obvious and inevitable conspiracist response, among the roles of the U.S. Secret Service is to investigate credit card fraud.

Keeping the White House White

FreeRepublic poster El Gato writes:

We're not talking about citizen at birth, but rather Natural Born Citizen, which remains what it was in the late 1780s when the Constitution was written and ratified. No meer [sic] law, which is what the US code is, can modify the meaning of a Constitution term.

Another relevant quote from El Gato is "Congress has no other power to confer citizenship, except via naturalization."

As one might expect, Gato is a Birther who subscribes to the standard Birther belief that natural-born citizenship requires birth to two citizen parents. (I disagree with this belief, but all that matters in this post is that El Gato holds this opinion, whether or not it's based in fact.)

These two beliefs taken together, however, create a rather unfortunate, and perhaps telling, consequence.

The Constitution did not establish any rules or guidelines regarding naturalization, instead stating in Article I, Section 8 that Congress shall have the power "To establish a uniform rule of naturalization." Pursuant to this authority, the United States' first law governing the granting of U.S. citizenship was the Naturalization Act of 1790. For the first time, the United States provided a means for persons other than those born on U.S. soil to become U.S. citizens. To quote from the Naturalization Act of 1790:

An Act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization

Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term for two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof...

This same language, "any alien, being a free white person," was repeated and reiterated in the Naturalization Act of 1795.

Thus, during the decade following the passage of the Constitution, the time specified by "El Gato" as strictly defining the meaning of "natural born citizen," only immigrants with white skin could become naturalized U.S. citizens. Asian immigrants could not be naturalized citizens. African immigrants could not be naturalized citizens. Arab immigrants could not be naturalized citizens. Naturalization was an institution strictly limited to whites, and only whites.

It follows then that if non-white immigrants could not become naturalized citizens, then their native born children could never be born to two citizen parents. Such would be a legal impossibility. Thus, according to "El Gato," if "Natural Born Citizen...remains what it was in the late 1780s when the Constitution was written and ratified," and if he believes that the Founders intended natural-born citizenship to require two citizen parents, then he is categorically proposing that no child of a non-white immigrant is eligible to be President.

Children of white immigrants? Sure. That's fine. But children of non-white immigrants need not apply. According to El Gato, that is.

Polarik's Newest Conspiracy Theory

So Polarik gave an unduly long "interview" to the Birther press the other day. And in addition to referring to yours truly as "the most clueless, irresponsible, deceitful, egotistical, and flat-out fraudulent person in the history of the Internet," Ron also introduced a brand-new conspiracy theory of his to a wider audience.

Specifically, towards the interview's end, this wild claim is advanced:

First of all, one of my two biggest discoveries that I made in the two years that I have been researching this birth certificate controversy has nothing to do with the birth certificate. It was discovering that Politifact had started the false rumor that Obama's middle name is Muhammed, and used it to endlessly "debunk" it in conjuction with facts about Obama.

This is a rather specific allegation, and since it's called a "discovery," that implies there's some kind of evidence to support it. (As opposed to it being just random speculation.) But no supporting evidence is identified; just the conclusion.

In fact, and contrary to the claim as made, the "Obama's middle name is Muhammed' rumor did not originate with Politifact. As far as I can tell, it started with this e-mail forward in December 2007. It started hitting a lot of websites in early January 2008 (for instance, it was posted at FreeRepublic on January 4), and got relatively major exposure via Bill Cunningham on January 6.

Politifact did indeed move to debunk the rumor quickly, but their article about it came on January 11, 2008, five days after Cunningham's usage on the radio, and nearly three weeks after the e-mail forward that was submitted to About.com.

So unless the allegation is that Politifact created the email forward in mid-December 2007, filling it with talk about Trinity Church, and using it to introduce a fake rumor that it would then shoot down a month later, this conspiracy theory simply has no legs to stand on.

And if the allegation IS that Politifact secretly created an email rumor about a Presidential candidate just to debunk it a month later, well, it's hard to imagine what secret evidence could have possibly been "discovered" to validate such a hypothesis.

Fake Certificates, Fake Court Cases, and Fake News

Lucas Smith is, among other things, a novelist. Supposedly. On his YouTube profile, Smith says he "Penned my first book in the year 2002 and went on to publish it the year 2005. Murder By Tejuana & Treachery By Bush And The Supreme Court: A document in the form of a novel, Volume 1 of 4."

A couple of years ago, he created a Wikipedia page about this book. It was eventually deleted, but Deletionpedia saved it.

Various details are included about the plot and whatnot, but the most interesting section is "Litigation concerning this book." There, he writes:

The manuscript of this book was originally banned from publication by a US District Court whose ruling was affirmed by a US Circuit Court of Appeals. Due to a US Supreme Court ruling, this book was allowed to be published provided it would be "...published as a work of fiction..."

There is no Supreme Court case with that quote. I checked. The Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases he mentions here simply don't exist. Given that he provides no citations or details as to any of these three cases, there's no reason to believe that any of them ever actually existed.

Similarly, in August 2007, Smith added citations to two supposed Australian newspaper articles about his book. As far as I can tell, neither of those articles are real either.

So to anyone inclined to believe that Smith really possesses secret evidence that supports his claims, remember that he's manufactured and promoted other fake stories in the recent past.

McRae/Shuhubia Affidavit Comparison

You may recall that in Berg v. Obama, two affidavits were filed relating to the infamous telephone conversation with Sarah Obama. One affidavit was from Ron McRae, and the other was from the pseudonymous "Kweli Shuhubia".

It should be noted upfront that there are several glaring deficiencies in the latter affidavit. First, "Kweli Shuhubia" is a pseudonym, and not a real name. Second, nowhere in the affidavit does it mention that the name is fake. Third, the document is not notarized. Fourth, the document is not actually signed at all; the 'signature' is actually just a jpeg of an unintelligible signature cut-and-pasted onto the document. Fifth, unlike McRae's affidavit, Shuhubia's is not hand-dated; the alleged date of signature is pre-printed on the form.

But there is another facet of the Shuhubia document that I believe has long been overlooked: most of it is copied, wholesale, from McRae's affidavit. Shuhubia's description of the conversation is almost word-for-word identical to McRae's, with only occasional minor changes and the necessary shifts between first and third person.

To illustrate their similarity, I have produced this handy comparison sheet:

McRae-Shuhubia Affidavit Comparison

Thus, it's abundantly clear that one affidavit was drafted from the other. And given that McRae's is dated October 27 whereas Shuhubia's is dated October 30, and that Shuhubia's is hardly signed at all, I believe one could draw a reasonable conclusion as to which was the original, and which was the second draft.

Nancy Pelosi: Natural Born Citizen?

When Birthers fantasize about what would happen if Obama were removed from office, they tend to ultimately put Senator Robert Byrd in the Oval Office. Joe Biden is deemed ineligible because he was elected as Obama's running-mate, and Nancy Pelosi is deemed ineligible due to some pseudo-legalistic arguments surrounding her signature on Obama's qualification form.

Curiously, in the seventeen months since Obama took office, I've never yet seen a Birther ask or answer what I should think would be a top priority for them: is Nancy Pelosi a "natural born citizen"?

After all, Birthers can talk a blue streak about why Obama's dual citizenship at birth or his father's citizenship makes him Constitutionally ineligible under their fabricated definitional scheme, but no one ever applies that to Speaker Pelosi.

The reason that is so curious is because, like Obama, Nancy Pelosi is the daughter of an immigrant. Her mother, Annunciata M. Lombardi, was born in Italy in 1909, and immigrated to the United States as a child.

Pelosi's paternal grandfather was also an Italian immigrant, and thus like Tom Tancredo, Pelosi may possess Italian citizenship.

Now I've checked, and in the 1930 census, Pelosi's mother is listed as a naturalized citizen. But I had to research that myself; Pelosi's mother's origins are publicly known, but no Birther has ever expended any effort to learn when or whether Annunciata naturalized. Birthers did not subject Pelosi to their "natural born citizen" standard and, after historical research, find her satisfactory; no, instead they've never bothered to check at all.

And thus, Birthers accidentally betray the truth. The reason they have never checked the citizenship of Nancy Pelosi's parents is because the citizenship of Nancy Pelosi's parents doesn't matter. Not Constitutionally, at least. And neither does the citizenship of Barack Obama's parents, or of any President's parents for the past two centuries. That's why prior to 2008, even the Birthers themselves never concerned themselves with the citizenship of the parents of Presidential candidates. Birthers have created an imaginary definition that they say disqualifies Obama, but they can't manage to employ it consistently even now.

Happy Birther-Versary!

We all missed the occasion, but yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the ostensible birth of Birtherism. Although the 'born in Kenya' rumor had found its way onto a scant handful of websites during the prior three months, it didn't garner any attention or following until after Obama clinched the party nomination, when Jim Geraghty wrote this post on June 9, 2008.

Some people still claim that questions were being raised earlier in the campaign, back into 2007 or earlier. Simply put: they're wrong. Their memories deceive them. The story of Ann Dunham traveling to Kenya and secreting a baby back wasn't even created until after Super Tuesday 2008, and only the fringiest of bloggers paid it any heed until June.

This Saturday, June 12, is also the two-year anniversary of the publication of the Certification of Live Birth. Only three days after the issue broke. A very prompt response, and yet the nonsense lives on.