Billionaire real estate developer and rising GOP 2012 prospect Donald Trump is firing back at mainstream media reports that the birth document he provided exclusively to Newsmax on Monday was invalid.
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| Donald Trump |
Trump has provided Newsmax a signed, dated Certificate of Birth from the City of New York’s Department of Health.
The new birth certificate states that Trump was born in the borough of Queens on June 14, 1946. It is signed by the mayor, the acting registrar of records, and the commissioner of health.
Trump said that once he realized the document he provided Newsmax on Monday was not an official birth certificate, it only took him a couple of hours to clear up the matter and locate the official document.
“Some in the media were challenging my birth certificate,” Trump told Newsmax Tuesday morning in an email. “So I solved the problem in a couple hours: here is my official Department of Health Birth Certificate.
Trump said he is asking for Obama to make his birth certificate public, though he was not suggesting he believes the President was born outside of the country.
“Anyone can get an official birth certificate — in New York it costs you about $38. I felt obligated to take it to the next step, and get even more than the original hospital birth certificate I provided.
“It is my honor to present my official birth certificate to the public. Look, I am proud to be an American. It was very easy to do."
Trump added: “For the sake of the country the president ought to do the same, and end this unfortunate controversy once and for all,” Trump told Newsmax.
On Monday Trump said that he initially had assumed President Obama had a valid U.S. birth certificate. But on Fox & Friends he said that “facts are emerging” raising a “real question” as to whether Obama is constitutionally eligible to serve as president.
After Trump provided a “certification of birth” document to Newsmax on Monday to establish how easy it is to obtain such a document, the Politico’s Ben Smith reported that an actual birth certificate must bear the signature of the city registrar.
In an obvious gibe at Trump, and perhaps aimed at conspiracy theorists generally, Smith wrote: “Trump’s mother, it should be noted, was born in Scotland, which is not part of the United States. His plane is registered in the Bahamas, also a foreign country. This fact pattern — along with the wave of new questions surrounding what he claims is a birth certificate — raises serious doubts about his eligibility to serve as president of the United States.”
Legal sources tell Newsmax that a birth certificate is quite different from the “certification of live birth” document that the White House has provided to the media.
The former officially confirms and records a newborn child’s identity, as well of details of the birth. But the latter merely confirms that someone has reported the birth of the child.
Because the standards needed to obtain a certificate of live birth are much lower, the sources say, they are easier to obtain.
To obtain a copy of a birth certificate, the identity of the person making the request must be established beyond any doubt.
A copy of Donald Trump’s official birth certificate is below:
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