Barack Obama’s half-brother has taken to social media to disparage his famous sibling, calling him a “fake a–.”
The brother posted a British traveling document of their late father and suggested that the former president refused to store it as an archival element in his new presidential library.
The passport shared on Twitter by Malik Obama on April 11 bears the name “Mr. Barack Hussein Obama” and was stamp-dated on April 29, 1959, April 29, 1964, and April 29, 1969.
It lists that the person to whom the identification belongs is a British Subject: A Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies and was born in Alego, Nyanza Province, of Kenya.
The tweet said, “I tried to get fake a– to put this in his library but he wouldn’t.”
He later tweeted, “Fake a– a snake,” before encouraging people to purchase his autobiography, “Big Bad Brother from Kenya.”
Many saw the passport and believed it belonged to the 44th president of the United States, fueling a long-running false conspiracy theory that the first president of the country of African descent was foreign-born.
Malik Obama sought to clarify the provenance of the document by email, stating to Reuters, “It’s my father’s passport.”
Even though the rumor was debunked, it continued to run rampant by “birthers” on various social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
One person retweeted Malik Obama, writing, “Malik Obama is dropping docs proving Barack Obama was born in Nairobi, Kenya and was thus a FAKE and ILLEGITIMATE President,” despite a photograph of the bearer of the passport being of the two Obamas’ father.
Malik Obama also fueled the conversation by raising questions about his citizenship.
“Where I come from we take our father’s nationality,” Malik wrote.
“His mother was citizen of America so he’s American citizen; his father was citizen of Kenya so he’s Kenyan citizen. He’s American citizen and Kenya citizen. That about right?,” the former’s president brother wrote in an April 18 tweet.
The photograph of the travel document has been published multiple times, most notably on the cover of the Obama brothers’ father’s biography, “Barack Obama Sr.: The Rise and Life of a True African Scholar.”
Another indicator that the passport does not belong to the Hawaii native, is that the bearer’s birthday is listed as June 18, 1934. President Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961.
Not everyone jumped on the birther bandwagon.
A Twitter user posted the former president’s birth certificate.
Another person tweeted, “Nobody dislikes the man and his politics more than me and I wish this was true, but it isn’t.”
“How much is the Orange cheeto paying you to push this disinformation?” another user wrote.
The concept of “birtherism” was pushed by Obama’s successor in 2011.
Donald Trump held rallies, did press, and made public statements calling for the then-president to release his full birth certificate. It would not be until 2016 that Trump admitted that Obama was indeed born in the United States.
While Malik Obama made a petition to his brother to have his father’s documents in the Barack Obama Presidential Library, the 14th Presidential Library to be administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a federal agency, another institution is currently in possession of it.
Malik Obama has handed it over to the University Archives in Connecticut, a collection and auction organization.
John Reznikoff, the founder of University Archives, has also authenticated the passport, saying the photographs are of “a genuine passport of the president’s father.”
