Rep. Steve King (R-IA) recently speculated that President Barack Obama’s family could have conspired to fake his citizenship by announcing his birth with a “telegram from Kenya.”

During a tele-townhall event recorded last week, King was asked why he wasn’t “investigating Obama’s ineligibility.”

“Before he was sworn in for the presidency, we went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers — only two newspapers in Hawaii — each of them had published the birth of Barack Obama,” the congressman explained. “It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published.”

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King added: “That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on.”

But the Iowa Republican concluded that there was no point “drilling into that now” because “even if it turned out that Barack Obama was conclusively not born in America, I don’t think we could get that case sold between now and November.”

During his 2008 run for president, Barack Obama released his certificate of live birth. After so-called birthers continued to question his citizenship, the White House made the president’s long form birth certificate available in 2011.

“I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going,” the president said last year. “We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.”

“We’ve posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see. People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate. And yet this thing just keeps on going.”

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Watch this video from Rep. Steve King, uploaded Aug. 1, 2012.

(h/t: Think Progress)