Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaking at the Republican National Convention last year (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Thanks to a pardon from President Donald Trump, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now a free man. And in a recent interview given to the San Jose Mercury News, Arpaio has pledged to keep up the fight for one of Trump’s old pet causes: searching for former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.




The former sheriff and longtime racist asshole told the paper that Obama’s birth certificate “has to go down as the biggest cover-up in the history of the United States.”

“Nobody wants to touch it,” Arpaio continued.

Of course, Obama shared his Hawaiian birth certificate back in 2011. Even Trump, to whom Arpaio refers as his “hero,” has stopped lying about Obama’s origins. One of the primary advancers of the “Birther” conspiracy theory, Trump finally admitted in September 2016 that Obama was born in the U.S.—but not before blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the rumors.


But not good old boy Arpaio. As the Mercury News notes, the man who was convicted of continuing to racially profile Latinx people as sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., once sent a deputy to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate.



The 85-year-old has apparently decided that this is the hill he will die on. While Trump has abandoned the search for Obama’s “real” origins, Arpaio pointed out to the Mercury News that Trump “never directly addressed the authenticity of the birth certificate itself.”



And so Arpaio continues to roam the earth, free: a stubborn old racist cockroach, pledging—much to the dismay of the rest of the world—not to go away.

Read more at the San Jose Mercury News.