A plane crash that killed Hawaii Department Health Director Loretta Fuddy on Wednesday has piqued the interest of conspiracy theorists because of her role in verifying President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
In 2011, Fuddy attempted to end the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories about President Obama’s citizenship by verifying his Hawaiian birth certificate. Yet a small number of people still hold onto the theory that Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen, and so is therefore ineligible to be president.
Nine people were on board the Makani Kai Air flight to Honolulu when it crashed Wednesday. Fuddy was the lone fatality.
Donald Trump, who has spent years repeatedly raising questions about President Obama’s birth certificate and who says he sent investigators to Hawaii to research the issue did not respond to a request for comment on the plane crash from TPM Thursday. However, he did discuss Fuddy on his Twitter page where he described her death as “amazing.”
“How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived,” Trump wrote.
Orly Taitz, a California-based birther who has filed multiple lawsuits disputing Obama’s presidential eligibility wrote a pair of posts on her website Thursday about Fuddy’s death. One of Taitz’s posts was a copy of an Associated Press article about the crash. The other was a single sentence on the timeline of Fuddy’s appointment.
“Now deceased Director of Health Loretta Fuddy was appointed to her position in March of 2011, only a couple of weeks prior to releasing forged birth certificate for Obama,” Taitz wrote.
Conservative news site WND published an “exclusive” report on Thursday morning about Fuddy’s death by writer Bob Unruh. It was not clear how the story was an “exclusive” since the circumstances of Fuddy’s death were reported by Hawaiian media Wednesday evening and WND’s article was largely a summary of these local accounts.
WND’s article was headlined, “Top Official In Obama Birth Mystery Killed.” It emphasized the fact Fuddy was the “only fatality” while noting WND has “reported since before the 2008 election on the dispute over Obama’s birth documentation.” The site also pointed out Fuddy had recently “been working on the state’s Obamacare website.”
Jerome Corsi, a WND “senior staff reporter” and author who penned the 2011 book Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President” shared the WND article about Fuddy’s death twice on his personal Facebook page Thursday. In one of his posts about Fuddy, Corsi described her as a “key Hawaii Department of Health official involved in Obama birth certificate cover-up.”
“She refused to show original 1961 birth records for Obama that she claimed Hawail has in its DOH ‘vault.’ But she would not permit anyone to inspect those records,” Corsi wrote.
