A Boston Globe reporter sympathetic to Barack Obama apparently received favored access to the immigration file of the president’s father.
In writing her biography of Barack Obama’s father, Boston Globe reporter Sally H. Jacobs had access to what appears to be the father’s unredacted Immigration and Naturalization Service file. The documents cover the time Barack Obama Sr. arrived in Honolulu in 1959 until he was forced to leave the United States in 1964.
However, the redacted file the Department of Homeland Security provided in an Freedom of Information Act request to independent reporter Heather Smathers whited-out key facts about the president’s birth narrative, judging from the one unredacted page WND has obtained.
Jacobs, in a telephone interview with WND, said she got a “less redacted” file than Smathers appears to have received.
Jacobs refused to share with WND the less-redacted file or to post it on the Internet as Smathers has done with her file.
“Why would I do that?” Jacobs asked.
WND suggested it would be in the public interest to have available for study the additional information her less-redacted file might contain.
Jacobs suggested WND needed to make that request in a FOIA to DHS.
“I’m sure they will give you what they gave me,” she said.
WND’s own FOIA request is in process.
Jacob’s refusal to make the file public is reminiscent of Sen. John Kerry’s decision in 2005 to sign Standard Form 180, releasing his Navy Records only to the Boston Globe, known to be a newspaper favorable to Kerry, not to the U.S. public at large.
As WND reported, Kerry’s Navy records became an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign after more than 260 Vietnam veterans who served in his swift boat section launched an effort to counter many of the senator’s claims about his war service.
Put up for adoption?
Close examination of the unredacted page obtained by WND, which Jacobs obviously used to write her biography, shows it contained key information relevant to the Obama nativity story that was whited out in the copy sent to Smathers.
On page 122 of her biography, “The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father,” Jacobs revealed that Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham had considered giving up their son for adoption:
According to the INS memo concerning her April conversation with Dahling, the INS administrator, ‘Subject [Obama] got his USC [United Sates citizen] wife ‘Hapai’ [pidgin for pregnant] and although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away.
Exhibit 1 shows the unredacted INS file from which Jacobs worked to obtain the information.
Exhibit 1: Unredacted memo from INS file provided to reporter Sally Jacobs |
Exhibit 2 shows the same memo in the redacted state that DHS released to Smathers.
Exhibit 2: Redacted memo from INS file provided to reporter Heather Smathers |
Clearly, the redaction was designed to eliminate the information that Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham considered putting baby Barack Obama Jr. up for adoption with the Salvation Army.
Furthermore, the unredacted version of the memo documents that the INS was aware of the adoption possibility as early as April 10, 1961, four months before the baby was born.
A familiar face or MIA?
The information in Jacobs’ version of the document is consistent with other documentation that contradicts President Obama’s narrative of his early life. He has claimed that Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham lived together with him as a family in Hawaii until September 1962, when Barack Obama Sr. left Hawaii to go to Harvard University to begin graduate studies in economics.
As recently as April 20, only a week before Obama released from the White House what he claimed was a scan of his original long-form 1961 birth certificate, Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie was insisting to Fox News that he was in Hawaii when Obama was born.
Abercrombie personal testimony was an attempt to verify that Honolulu was the place of Obama’s birth, even though under questioning he admitted he was not literally at the hospital to witness the birth.
Abercrombie’s revised story was that he “first laid eyes on baby Obama a few days after he was born,” supposedly when Obama’s parents introduced the newborn to friends at the University of Hawaii, where Abercrombie and Obama Sr. were students.
“We not only saw him and were with them, but were introduced to him of course at our gatherings, our student gatherings,” Abercrombie said on April 20. “And of course over the years then as he was raised by his mother and his grandparents we of course saw him frequently because he was with his grandfather all the time.”
By these statements, Abercrombie claimed to know the Obama family quite well.
Abercrombie’s point apparently was to affirm Barack Obama Sr., Ann Dunham and the baby were seen and introduced commonly at the University of Hawaii.
But the document cited in Jacobs’ biography published some three months later, in July, contradict Abercrombie’s claims about the Obama family.
Jacobs wrote on page 118 that Obama Sr. “said nothing of his new girl friend [Stanley Ann Dunham] to most of his friends on campus.”
Still, on the same page, Jacobs quotes Abercrombie, who insists Obama Sr. brought Dunham with him to parties at the university.
But, as if to explain why university students didn’t consider them to be married, Jacobs quotes Abercrombie as saying that Dunham tended to sit quietly beside Obama Sr., as she spoke little and “instead listened closely as the men – and it was mostly men at their gatherings – argued and laughed.”
Jacobs documents no incident in which Dunham brought baby Obama to the university to engage in social events with her husband and the baby’s father.
WND has separately documented that Dunham left Hawaii within a few weeks of the baby’s birth to attend on-campus evening classes at the University of Washington in Seattle. She did not return to Hawaii until after Barack Obama Sr. left the islands in September 1962.
Jacobs first revealed that Obama Sr. and Dunham had considered putting the baby up for adoption with the Salvation Army when she wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled “Father spoke of having Obama adopted,” published July 7.
Jacob recounts in her book how she found the INS file for Obama, Sr.: “In a storage facility in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where the paper records of what was once called the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service are stored, there is a folder bearing the name Barack H. Obama, alien registration number A11938537, which contained memos stretching from the time he arrived in Honolulu in 1959 until he was forced to leave Cambridge, Massachusetts, against his will in 1964.”