HI AG Mark Bennett "reviewed and approved" Fukino 7/27 statement ("natural born citizen")

On July 27, Chiyome Fukino of the Hawaii Department of Health released a statement in which she said that Obama was born in Hawaii. One of the curious things about the statement (at the link) is that she claimed to have verified that "Obama... is a natural-born American citizen". She's not a legal scholar and thus wouldn't seem to be qualified to make that determination. But, now it turns out that her statement was approved by Hawaii's Attorney General, a Republican named Mark Bennett.

As discussed here, someone sent an email to Janice Okubo, spokeswoman for Hawaii's DOH asking about this. She replied as follows, referring to Fukino's statement:

The statement was reviewed and approved by our Attorney General Mark Bennett. I am unable to provide further comment.

In the past, I've considered filing FOIA-style requests for information about this issue using Hawaii's Uniform Information Practices Act (UIPA, state.hi.us/oip/uipa.html). If the analysis at the link is correct, then Hawaii must release whatever they used to arrive at the determination that Obama is a "natural-born American citizen", and that may include correspondence between various parties. Of course, that doesn't mean they'll release anything or that the analysis is correct or that they won't try to claim exceptions under the 92F-13 section at the last page. The link above claims that he's making requests and others are doing the same; it would be very interesting to see what results.

Thu, 10/01/2009 - 13:55 · · Importance: 4