The statement was constructed to sound as if ALL presidents had released their taxes, when of course the optional practice began with Nixon, who was trying to fend off Watergate.
Anyone with a working brain has got to know the slime Scump is hiding things that would prove to be a disaster for him ;;hiding his school grades too? Must have been last in class
In the absence of evidence, public speculation is risky.
Also, recall that Obama sealed all his academic records. We wonder why, eh?
Sorry BK NOT SEALED
This is an example of mostly old baloney in a new casing. It mainly recycles years-old falsehoods and insinuations, most of which
we covered long ago, in connection with an earlier viral email.
But with President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign heating up, this new graphic has appeared on
countless anti-Obama websites and in viral emails like the one we’ve reprinted here. Very little that it contains is new, and the old falsehoods have not improved with age.
Nothing ‘Sealed’
The idea that
any Obama record is “sealed” is a falsehood, to start. The
word “sealed” when applied to documents ordinarily refers to records that would normally be public, but that a judge has ruled cannot be released without the court’s permission. Common examples of truly “sealed” documents include records of
crimes committed as a juvenile or
records of adoptions. None of the claims in this message refers to records actually “sealed” in that usual sense.
In some cases, the records this screed claims are “sealed” are actually public, and open for anyone to see. Other supposedly “sealed” records are normally private documents that Obama hasn’t released — and that other presidential candidates haven’t released either.
So as with earlier versions, this is little more than an attempt to raise suspicions by asking for records that aren’t ordinarily made public, without any evidence that those records contain anything derogatory. We’ll take the claims and questions in the order they appear.
- Claims #1, 2 and 4, college records. Obama’s college records are not “sealed” by a court order, as this graphic would have you believe. It would be illegal under federal law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974) for Occidental, Columbia or Harvard Law School to give anyformer student’s records to reporters or members of the public without that person’s specific, written permission. Obama hasn’t released them, but neither have other presidential candidates released their college records. George W. Bush’s grades at Yale eventually became public, but only because somebody leaked them to the New Yorker magazine. Bush himself refused to release them, according to a 1999 profile in the Washington Post.
- Claim #3, thesis paper. Obama did write a paper on nuclear disarmament for an honors course in American foreign policy during his senior year, but it wasn’t the sort of “thesis” that some colleges require for graduation and keep on file in their libraries, like those that Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama released. During the 2008 campaign, reporters were told that Columbia had not retained a copy of Obama’s 1983 paper, and that Obama didn’t have a copy, either. NBC News contacted his former professor, Michael Baron, who said he looked for his copy but couldn’t find it, and thought he probably tossed it out eight years earlier in a move.