In addition to the extensive and well-researched document distributed by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress, that I wrote about here in my article Congressional Research Service bursts birther balloon, there was another, shorter memo from the CRS, written by Jerry Mansfield to Congressman Bilbray.
Mansfield’s June 2009 memo, titled “Qualifications of Barack Obama to Be President of the United States,” was a very short reply to a question from the Congressman with some web pages attached, including ones from FactCheck.org and the first statement from the Dr. Fukino from the Hawaii Department of Health web site. The anti-Obama propaganda web site, WorldNetDaily has a new article by Dr. Jerome Corsi misrepresenting the memo and omitting important details to mislead the reader. What happened: Congressman writes its research service and gets a reply; spun version: Congressmen were “prepped” on what to say.
Corsi goes on to list a number of what he suggests are similar replies from Congress to prove that they are mindless robots repeating the party line. Of course, since the congressmen were simply stating the truth, one would expect them to be similar. Whether they got information from the Congressional Research Service, from Google, the New York Times or from Obama Conspiracy Theories–facts are facts.
The important point I want to make for my readers is that there are two CRS documents. One is a detailed research work, and the other is a cover letter for a few good web pages. When you see a quote from Corsi saying: “Mansfield said he ‘did not conduct any investigation,'” it refers the memo by Mansfield and not the one by Jack Maskell.
