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This exchange simply did not happen. No one looked harder than I for this when the rumor first appeared. I am not going to get into it too much at this point in my life but think about these points.

Keyes hated Zippo and I am sure would have remembered the exchange.
There was an audience and personnel present and no one remembered the exchange.
And at that point in time who was aware of his heritage?
And if Keyes knew of heritage he would not of let it go.

Just a few off the top of my head.

This exchange simply did not happen. No one looked harder than I for this when the rumor first appeared. I am not going to get into it too much at this point in my life but think about these points. Keyes hated Zippo and I am sure would have remembered the exchange. There was an audience and personnel present and no one remembered the exchange. And at that point in time who was aware of his heritage? And if Keyes knew of heritage he would not of let it go. Just a few off the top of my head.

To the contrary, Keyes made a number of specific attacks on Barry's birth issues. His initial argument was that Barry was not eligible to the Senate seat because Barry was not a citizen at all.

If he was born in Kenya as he often said he was, his father Obama Senior; his mother Stanley Ann Dunham; he would not have been a citizen of the United States at birth. Citizenship, not necessarily at birth, is a required element of eligibility to sit in the Senate.

Over the years, we accumulated a number of affidavits from people who attended campaign coffee hours in Illinois at which Barry said he was born in Kenya.

Legally, statements against interest are admissible evidence in a court proceeding. And in fact, those statements are the only admissible evidence in existence of the place of Barry's birth.

People who do know where Barry was born know that he was not born in Kenya; but the citizenship constraints which would have been applicable had he been born in Kenya are applicable wherever he might have been born outside the US.

Stanley Ann was not yet 19 when Barry was born. So had she been his mother, as the legend would have it, she could not have met the five years after 14 requirement of the citizenship statute to pass citizenship at birth to Barry in a birth outside the US.

If the facts instead were a father who was a long term US Citizen; and the mother was a citizen of Great Britain with no citizenship claim or connection with the US, Barry also loses a citizenship claim with a birth in Canada. Didn't help his claim in any way that he had ten or twelve first cousins living in the Seattle area.