How the Birth Certificate Con Backfired on Obama and His Lawyers

Trump Cancels "The Dishonest and Dangerous" Folks at Perkins Coie

As I documented in a previous article, Perkins Coie, the same law firm that commissioned the notorious Steele dossier, took the lead in protecting Barack Obama from having to produce his birth certificate. What has not been told before is how Obama’s gamesmanship with Donald Trump backfired in a spectacular way, both for him and especially for Perkins Coie.

Of course, if Obama were born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, as claimed, there would have been no reason to hire a high-end law firm to resist legitimate inquiries into his background. As I have argued in these pages, the real question may well have been when Obama was born, not where, but whatever the explanation, there is no denying the pricy legal resistance.

The first serious challenge came from Philip Berg, a Democrat and former deputy attorney general for the State of Pennsylvania. A week prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president. A Hillary supporter, Berg expected to be taken seriously. He wasn’t. The media promptly dismissed him and others who questioned Obama’s background as “birthers.”

On November 12, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the suit. “I was deprived of my due process rights to be heard,” Berg would later write. “Judge Surrick made some outlandish comments claiming Obama had been properly vetted, and that was completely untrue.” Indeed, the media proved as incurious about Obama’s birth as they would about Biden’s brain a dozen years later. In both cases, they played defense for the president.

Berg would file additional suits, as would others. With little in the way of explanation, Obama’s attorneys resisted at every turn. These attorneys included not only Perkins Coie top gun, Bob Bauer, but also US Attorney General Eric Holder. “What a tragedy,” wrote a disillusioned Berg, “that our government with an opportunity to resolve this issue one way or the other, did not do so to protect Obama.”

“Birtherism” would remain in the shadows until Donald Trump cast some light on the issue beginning with his speech at the CPAC convention in February 2011. “Our current president came out of nowhere, came out of nowhere,” said Trump. “Nobody knew who the hell he was. He’s now our president; he’s our president.”

Trump said so little about Obama at the 2011 CPAC that it is hard to understand why Obama wrote at length about his CPAC remarks in his 2020 memoir A Promised Land. As the readers of the memoir had to notice, Donald Trump haunts Obama’s imagination the way Kong did the natives’ of Skull Island. At first, Obama claims to have paid no attention to Trump’s questions. As he saw things, his life story had been “exhaustively documented,” and his birth certificate remained on file in Hawaii.

In April 2011, his mood changed, and the timing was not coincidental. “Finally I decided I’d had enough,” wrote Obama. He called his consigliore 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.”

According to official White House documents, Obama’s personal attorney, Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, sent a letter to Hawaii’s Director of Health, the late Loretta Fuddy, on Friday, April 22, 2011. Using Perkins Coie stationery, Corley requested two copies of Obama’s original certificate of live birth and concluded the letter saying, “I will be coming to your offices to pick up the copies of the certificates.”

On Monday, April 25, Fuddy sent Obama a letter granting his and Corley’s request, saying, “Enclosed please find two certified copies of your original Certificate of Live Birth.” For whatever reason, perhaps for added drama, the White House felt compelled to create at least the impression that Corley had flown to Hawaii to retrieve the documents.

Others have detailed the apparent flaws in the retrieved birth certificate, but the undeniable problem with this document is its provenance. We have no more reason to trust the legitimacy of the Perkins Coie birth certificate than we do that of the Perkins Coie Steele dossier.

In the same year as the Steele dossier, 2016, Perkins Coie responded to an alleged hack of DNC servers by blocking the FBI from investigating. Instead, they recruited their friends at CrowdStrike to review the breach. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for all of this. CrowdStrike’s predetermined conclusion that “the Russians did it” is no more convincing than that Russian hookers peed on Donald Trump. The media swallowed it, the conclusion that is.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 27, 2011, Obama walked to the podium in the White House briefing room and shared the results of the Perkins Coie research. Obama wrote of the occasion, “I began by remarking on the fact that the national TV networks had all decided to break from their regularly scheduled programming to carry my remarks live—something they very rarely did.”

Yes, very rarely. The last comparable breakaway for a personal matter took place on July 25, 1969, when the networks gave Sen. Ted Kennedy fifteen minutes to assure America there was “no truth whatsoever” to any rumors of immoral conduct between him and the late Mary Jo Kopechne. like Fuddy, a drowning victim.

“Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now,” Obama told that slice of the citizenry that watches TV in midmorning. “I think it started during the campaign.”

Obama knew when it started. He knew very well that Bauer and other Perkins Coie attorneys had been fighting off legal challenges since Philip Berg first filed suit in August 2008. At the briefing, he skipped those details. “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.” Obama did not have to name the carnival barker. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” he huffed.

Obama was not finished with Trump. Immediately after the press briefing, he flew to Chicago to mock Trump again on the Oprah show. While Obama was going about his business the next two days. his young gag writers worked on his presentation for the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Donald Trump would be the target.

Speaking of distractions, on April 29, the night before the Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama had given the green light to whack Osama bin Laden. Still, Obama appears to have lost more sleep over Trump than he did Osama. As he had to concede, Trump had managed to spin the release of the apparent birth certificate to his advantage. Trump’s effrontery could not stand. It was time for revenge.

“Donald Trump is here tonight!” said Obama to his many media fans at the Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30. “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. (Laughter.) And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

“The audience howled as Trump sat in silence, cracking a tepid smile,” wrote Obama. “I couldn’t begin to guess what went through his mind during the few minutes I spent publicly ribbing him.” The minutes were more than “few.” The media would later speculate that Trump’s “humiliation” at the 2011 dinner prompted him to seek revenge by running for president.

On the day after the dinner, May 1, at about 1:30 p.m. eastern time, Obama gave his final approval for the attack on the bin Laden compound. A half hour later, two Black Hawk helicopters carrying twenty-three SEAL team members took off from Jalalabad Airfield in Afghanistan and launched Operation Neptune Spear into the history books.

What happened in those twenty minutes, especially after the SEAL team entered the house, Obama chose not to discuss, not even in retrospect. The details were not pretty. Nor did they align with the information Obama and his people supplied the media in the immediate wake of the assault. No one in the media really cared.

The timing of all this was strategic. To understand Obama’s latitude in choosing a date, please see “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” by Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh. Obama requested his birth certificateon April 22, received it on April 25, presented it on April 27, humiliated Trump on April 30, killed Osama early on May 1, and later in the same day, May 1, the high holy day on the communist calendar, covered himself in glory in an address from the White House. Obama had earned his manhood merit badge. No one would dare question his origins now.

Obama’s victory, of course, was a Pyrrhic one. As Coca-Cola famously did in its war with Pepsi, Obama made the amateurish marketing blunder of accepting the Trump Challenge. Obama would live to regret it. Starting in 2015, Trump has had a ten-year run to say whatever he pleased about Obama, and those comments have not left Obama smiling, not even tepidly.

As to Perkins Coie, payback time began in earnest on March 6, 2025. On that day, President Trump issued an executive order denying the law firm access to the government trough. In the way of irony, the “egregious activity” the EO cited did not include the hiding of the birth certificate or its subsequent well-timed production. It should have.

Each week, as a special bonus for paid subscribers, I will be rolling out in serial form my current book-in-progress: THE EMPIRE OF LIES: THE LEFT’S 30-YEAR WAR ON TRUTH, 1994-2024.