Sheriff Joe Uses Hawaii's Text Error to Renew Birther Claims

Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, now a candidate for Senate, used the massive text-alert gaffe in Hawaii over a nonexistent missile to dredge up the controversy over President Obama's birth certificate. "There's something wrong with that government," Arpaio said of Hawaii, per ABC News. "I know doing a certain investigation on a fake, fraudulent government document. They can’t even solve that case." At that point, Fox News interviewer Jeanine Pirro pushed back and informed Arpaio that Hawaii had, in fact, produced the birth certificate proving that Obama was a US citizen.

But the 85-year-old Arpaio, a longtime "birther" who is running for Jeff Flake's seat in Arizona, wasn't budging. "Well, the only thing I’m saying is they can’t even solve a phony document." Pirro again countered him, "because they did solve that," and moved on. It's not the first time Arpaio has addressed the subject in his short candidacy. Just one day after announcing last week, he told CNN that he's sure Obama's birth certificate is fake. "No doubt about it," he said, per the Washington Post. "I'm not going to go into all the detail, but yes, it's a phony document." (More Hawaii stories.)