Introducing Loretta Fuddy

An Obama Birth Certificate Player You Never Heard Of

In some circles, it is considered racist to question the birth certificate and birthplace of Barack Obama. Yet for most of us ordinary citizens, you need a birth certificate to obtain a passport. The letter is considered a reasonable request, whereas the former is often held to be a symptom of blatant hate-filled racism.

The issue of where Obama is born is important because it’s a job requirement for a President to be a “natural-born citizen” of the United States and no President in our history has ever had as exotic a childhood as Barack Hussein Obama. He was born to an American citizen (born in flyover-state Kansas) and a British subject from Kenya. As a boy, young Barack spent some of his early childhood in Hawaii but then went to several years of elementary school in Indonesia. He returned to Hawaii and later the mainland United States, but it is rumored he spent some extended time in Pakistan during or around his college years. His mother, an anthropologist and employee of the Ford Foundation, was in Pakistan often as well—tricky country to enter in those days for American citizens. At the very least, Barack Obama was an international man of mystery.

The mystery deepened when adult Barack Obama had most of his records sealed, such as college transcripts, his Selective Service registration, his mom’s divorce papers from her second marriage, his Illinois bar records, his Illinois drivers’ license, a list of clients from his days when he practiced law, his medical records, his passport, and possible adoption records (it is credibly asserted that his mom’s second husband, Lolo Soetoro, adopted young Barack). That list is not even remotely complete. All of these things disappeared in 2008 when a guy named John Brennan got to work for Barack Obama, who rewarded him by making him the head of the CIA. In 2008, Obama moved into the White House. Everything about him got questioned: was Barack Hussein Obama his actual father? Were Sasha and Mahlia his actual children? Was Michelle his wife an actual woman? And why was Valerie Jarrett living with them?

All this brings us to Loretta Fuddy. Loretta Fuddy was born in 1948 and began her career in Hawaii as a social worker, later moving into public health. She became head of the Hawaii Health Department in 2011, although she did not have a medical background. It was a huge promotion for an otherwise only modestly distinguished woman. Loretta Fuddy was also a member of a small religious group known as Subud. People who join Subud often adopt a Subud name, which Fuddy did. Her social media accounts were under the Subud moniker of Deliana Antone. Fuddy became the international head of Subud from 2006 to 2008.

Obama has some murky ties to Subud and he bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the cult’s founder (Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo), which are another story for another day. In the book A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, it is alleged that Stanley Ann Dunham, also known as Ann Soetoro (the former President’s mother) was a member of Subud herself and likely knew Fuddy and others in Subud, at least by acquaintance.

Now look at the timeline. Fuddy, a social worker and national leader of a small cult and acquaintance (at a minimum) of Ann Dunham, suddenly in 2011 gets the prestigious gig of being state head of the Health Department of Hawaii, although she lacks the credentials and experience.

She stepped into her big new job in January 2011 and a couple of months later, it was her job to release the official birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama. Obama took the White House in 2008, but still in 2011 and beyond, his place of birth and thus qualification for President was still being challenged. Even the cries of racism could not stop people who said Obama was not American born. Their questions were not entirely unfounded. Barack Obama did spend a portion of his childhood abroad and his mother traveled extensively. Add to that the fact that Barack’s older half-brother, Malik Obama, said that Barack was born in Mombasa, Kenya.

For his part, President Barack Obama insisted he was born in Hawaii, which is plausible since his mother and her parents lived there. The main problem with this assertion was that President Barack Obama couldn’t manage to dig up a birth certificate. Hawaii had all kinds of stories, including that these vital records were destroyed. (Here’s a hint for researchers: vital records are never thrown away, discarded, or destroyed willfully.)

More suspicious evidence emerged. Before he became President, Obama wrote some books, and a promotional pamphlet produced by publishers Acton & Dystel described that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. We know the second part is true—could the first part be true, too? Why lie about it?

The publisher and Obama have since said this was an error. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I never once made a mistake in print where I said I was born in a different country.

It’s clear to see why the controversy ensued. Obama could not produce a Hawaiian birth certificate (um, the dog ate it) and there is evidence floating around he was born in Kenya. Even his own family members are saying he was born in Kenya.

In 2011, as Fuddy was assuming office as the chief of the Health Department of Hawaii, she was earning about $100,000 a year. In 2012, she paid off her mortgage (about $100,000) and paid down debts of about $50,000, a sum that surpassed her earnings. So it appeared that some time in 2011 or early 2012, Loretta Fuddy came into some dough. I do not know the source of this money; it is possible she inherited money or something.

Loretta Fuddy in 2012 granted special permission and access to the long-form birth certificate of Barack Obama. For some reason, the long-form version of Obama’s birth certificate was available but they needed special permission to get it. It would have been easier to break into the Vatican Library that get a Hawaiian long-form birth certificate. This has always seem crazy to me; in most states, long-form birth certificates are relatively easy to obtain.

Birth certificates come in two types: the short-form and the long-form document. The long-form is also called the “official birth certificate” and it is what is needed for an American-born citizen to obtain a passport. The short-form is a very abbreviated report. Apparently, after losing the birth certificate, Obama’s long-form birth certificate was found. It was now the job of Loretta Fuddy to authenticate it, that is, vouch that it was a genuine document. A copy of the long-form birth certificate was released and Obama’s personal attorney, a woman named Judith Corely, went to Fuddy’s office in Hawaii in person to pick it up. It was then posted online as some sort of proof that Obama was indeed American born.

Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire.

This long-form birth certificate was instantly and, in my opinion, credibly challenged as a forgery. One challenge to the document was that the father’s race was described as “African,” when the term used in 1961 was “Negro.” But leaving that aside, a number of issues suggested the document was a fraud, including “kerning.” Kerning is a technique used by word processors to adjust the spacing between letters and words to make text visually more appealing. Word processors kern automatically; typewriters, which would have been used in 1961, do not have this function. So how did the 1961 birth certificate get kerned? It turned out the long-form birth certificate made the birther crisis even worse. From 2008 to 2011 there was no long-form birth certificate and now what the White House offered was being shouted down as a fake.

Meanwhile, in 2012, Donald Trump (long before he ever ran a Presidential campaign) offered $5M to the charity of one’s choice if anyone could prove for certain where Obama was born. It didn’t even matter if it was in Hawaii or on the moon, just irrefutable proof. No hinky documents. To date, no one has claimed that money and, to be fair, I’m not sure Trump is still making the offer.

In 2013, a guy named Douglas Vogt rocked the boat in a big way when he issued a 95-page public document and a 75-page sealed affidavit describing his concerns that the birth certificate was phony and Obama should not be President. We will save his many issues for another day, but Vogt took a unique position. He said that his concerns about the birth certificate were a matter of “public interest” and demanded that a Grand Jury be called. This unleashed a Supreme Court discussion on whether citizens could convene a Grand Jury. Apparently, they can’t, although the Constitution does not overtly prohibit it.

Nevertheless, Vogt filed his “20 points of forgery” documents on October 18, 2013. The sealed affidavit was never released in full by the U.S. Federal Court, although some boring portions of it have been made public.

Now let’s come back to the unfortunate Loretta Fuddy, who was now living in a paid-for house in Hawaii. She was right in the middle of this mess since she had previously testified and authenticated the long-form birth certificate that loudmouth Douglas Vogt was challenging. (I say “loudmouth” with affection.) She got interviewed by a news show called the Hagman & Hagman Report on December 4, 2013. Loretta Fuddy was now in the hot seat.

On December 11, 2013, Loretta Fuddy was dead.

On that fateful date, Loretta Fuddy had visited a leper colony, of all places, in Kalawao County as part of her duties in the Health Department. She was taking a small puddle-jumper flight from Kalaupapa back to Honolulu. People in Hawaii, particularly big-shot government folks, take these small planes all of the time to travel around the state. For those interested in planes, it was a 2002 Cessna 208B.

The crash occurred over water. Pilots who work in Hawaii are very specifically trained for emergency water landings. This pilot managed to bring the plane down safely in the water and every single one of the passengers, including Loretta Fuddy, evacuated safely via the right door at the rear of the plane. Every person got a life jacket although the report is that two of the life jackets were made for kids. Loretta—a large, 220-pound woman—got one of the kids’ life jackets and hers was defective, to boot—it did not inflate fully. She appears in the accident report as Passenger 3.

Every person involved in this crash survived except Passenger 3. A couple of passengers sustained injuries such as broken ribs, a broken collar bone, and a head injury. But only Loretta Fuddy died. The weird thing is that she sustained no obvious physical injuries at all. The autopsy stated that after surviving the crash, Loretta Fuddy died of a cardiac arrhythmia before she could be plucked out of the water.

Although Fuddy was 65 at the time and overweight, she was reportedly in good health with no history of heart disease. Arrhythmias can and do occur spontaneously and some arrhythmias can indeed be life threatening and even fatal. But the interesting thing about arrhythmias is that they leave no real evidence behind. Death by arrhythmia is usually determined when no other cause can be ascertained. There is no way to prove Loretta Fuddy died of an arrythmia or that she didn’t. The evidence is invisible.

The untimely death of Loretta Fuddy raises the age-old “who benefits?” legal question. Even the most ardent Obama fan has to admit that the timing of her death was quite convenient, because Fuddy was almost certainly going to be interviewed soon by official sources about the birth certificate. She might have even been facing some sort of indictment or government investigation. If she had certified a birth certificate that she knew was phony, she might have cracked under the pressure of scrutiny.

Or maybe it’s all just a big coincidence.