The first image that we ever saw of the COLB had a black bar covering the certification number. At the bottom of the document it stated ‘Any Alterations Invalidates This Document’. The blacked out numbers invalidated the document.
Then when that was called out, the next image we see are two FactCheck hippies in a picture holding what appears to be Obama’s COLB with a alleged authentic seal. What we do know is that those two hippies were not qualified in any type of professional forensic attestations of documents. They wouldn’t have known if it was authentic or not. The Hawaii Dept. Of Health officials were asked numerous times to confirm if those images was Obama’s authentic COLB. They refused to acknowledge it.
Oops. I meant to say ‘Any Alterations Invalidate This Certificate’.
Ah, where to even start.
First of all, you can’t be serious that taking a photo of a document with one field covered invalidates the document. As long as the document hasn’t been permanently defaced, it’s as valid as it ever was.
Next, you are right, we see what are undeniably photos of a piece of paper that looks like a COLB and bears what appear to be a seal and a stamp.
I’m afraid that’s all it takes. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, the piece of paper in those photos is a self-authenticating document. You may not like it, but the law is absolutely clear (FRE 902). That law will be applied even if those reporters are hippies.
And you are foolish to fault them for not being document experts. They were there not to analyze the document but to photograph it. There’s no questions that they did that. No one is relying on their words for anything except that they took the pictures.
And Hawaii has frequently confirmed that the information in the documents is correct.
Other than the preposterous pretense that covering a document temporarily magically renders it invalid, what do you see as actual evidence that the COLB is fake? Not things that makes you suspicious, like hippie photographers, but things that would actually qualify as evidence?
