Former sheriff Joe Arpaio, now a candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, said Wednesday night that he still believes President Obama’s birth certificate is fake — and can prove it.

In an interview with CNN, Arpaio told anchor Chris Cuomo that he had no regrets about his multi-year effort to prove that Obama’s birth certificate was fake. Arpaio told Cuomo that he continues to believe Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery because he “has the evidence.” He complained that “no one will talk about it and no one will look at it.”

In a separate interview on WABC Radio, Arpaio criticized the FBI for focusing on Russia and not his evidence on Obama’s birth certificate. “You gotta do what you feel is right, and not have these cover-ups and people not willing to look at everything we got. Why won’t they look at it? We sent it to the FBI two years ago. With a lot of other information. Where is it? They’re too busy talking about Russia,” Arpaio said.


Arpaio was recently pardoned by Trump after he was convicted of contempt of court. He had refused to abide by a court order instructing him to end systematic racial profiling and faced jail time.

Arpaio was also a key ally in Trump’s own effort to push the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States. During his run for president, Trump and his campaign attempted to claim that he came to believe Obama was a citizen in 2011.

just in: "Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States." pic.twitter.com/8QxSgyL1XU — Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) September 16, 2016

But Trump continued to push the conspiracy theory for much longer. Trump told CNN in July 2015 that he still didn’t know where Obama was born. In January 2016, he told Wolf Blitzer that he planned to write a book that revealed Obama’s actual birthplace.


In September 2016, as questions mounted about Trump’s views on Obama, Trump held a press event at his DC hotel and said, “President Barack Obama was born in the United States.” He took no questions.

The New York Times, however, reported in November 2017 that Trump “used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.” According to a CNN report, Trump believes “he would have done better in the polls had he continued to stand his ground on the birth certificate issue.”

He now has a Senate candidate ready to test his theory.