At the end of August 2024, a photo of a document appeared on the Internet, which allegedly deprives the Vice President of the United States of the right to stand for election as head of state. We have verified the authenticity of the evidence captured in the viral image.
August 21 in the Telegram channel “Sanya in Florida”(497,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) published the following post: “The birth certificate of Kamala Harris appeared on the American social network X. The document was found in the archives of a Jamaican hospital, which is located in the same region where her father lived. The certificate calls into question the legitimacy of her presidential candidacy: according to US law, only a “natural born” citizen can become president. To be considered such, an American must either be born in the United States or have parents with American citizenship. Kamala's father is from Jamaica, and her mother is from India. Both were students in the year of Kamala’s birth, which raises doubts about their American citizenship at that time.” A photo of the alleged evidence was also attached to the publication. Based on this photo, the TV channelConstantinople"(104,000 views) concluded: "Harris has no right to be a candidate in the US presidential election." Moreover, the same post says: “At the time of her birth, her parents were foreign students studying in the United States and could not have citizenship of the country.”
According to the TGStat service, at the time of writing this analysis, about 200 similar posts appeared on Telegram, with a total of approximately 2 million views. Among the channels that published the photo are “Russia now"(245,000 views), Haqqin.az (111,000), "Mislivets Egor"(106,000), "Mardan"(74,000), "President Gordon" (56,000) and "Voice of Mordor"(51,000). Notes on this topic also appeared on the websites News.ru, "Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Moscow 24", Topnews And "Rambler / news", and posts - on VKontakte (examples here, here And here) And "Zene"
About the requirements for a person who wants to run for President of the United States, it says in Article 2 of the American Constitution:
"No person, except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be qualified to hold the office of President; and no person shall be eligible to hold this office unless he has attained the age of 35 years and been a resident of the United States for 14 years."
According to 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States, all persons born in the territory of the United States or the territories subject to its jurisdiction (except except children foreign diplomats working in the country) are US citizens.
According to the official biographies Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential candidate, was born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964. Her parents were immigrant students: mother Shyamala Gopalan arrived to the USA from India in 1958, and his father, a native of Jamaica, Donald Jasper Harris arrived to the States in 1961. At birth they called daughter Kamala Iyer, but two weeks later they changed her middle name to Davey. This is confirmed by copies of the birth certificate of the current vice president, which were published on the Internet several years ago.
Regarding the new supposedly found birth certificate of Harris, some of the posts above indicate the source of information as social network user X with the username @samwhoissam. This account published The image went viral on the RuNet on August 20; at the time of writing this analysis, the tweet had received almost 137,000 views. Despite the sensational nature of the document, it was commented on only 14 times, with several people in replays doubting the authenticity of the evidence. Moreover, not a single major foreign media outlet spoke about it, including American publications that criticize Harris and the current administration of Joe Biden. But the photo was shared by an English-speaking pro-Kremlin blogger Aussie Cossack (50,000 views) and French-language account Brainless Partisans (373,000). In his Telegram channel, radio host Sergei Mardan found explanation such a meager dissemination of resonant evidence: “No one wants to break the remaining foundations and finally bury the entire political system of the North American States.”
The viral photo shows a paper reportedly found in the archives of St. Ann's Parish Hospital in Jamaica, where was born Father Harris. Who found her and under what circumstances is not specified. The certificate indicates that it was there that the current Vice President of the United States was allegedly born on October 20, 1964. However, there is an oddity in the alleged document - for example, it does not mention either the original or the changed middle name Harris.
At the bottom of the purported document, it is stated that the paper is a genuine copy of the Jamaica Registrar's Office record. Fact checkers from the Lead Stories project contacted contacted the department's press service for comment and on August 28 received the following response: “The Department of State Registration would like to clarify that we do not have a birth record for Vice President Kamala Harris in our archives because she was not born in Jamaica. We hope this information will clear up any questions regarding her place of birth."
“Verified” examined the account @samwhoissam, where the virus certificate was first posted. The profile description does not contain information about where its owner lives and what he does. According to X, the page was created in August 2023, and by the time of writing this analysis, only 44 tweets had appeared there, based on the content of which it can be concluded that the author of the account supports Donald Trump. Moreover, 40 of these tweets are retweets of other people’s posts. From the original posts two (2 And 19 September 2023) were dedicated to Trump's successes, the third (for October 3) - corruption in Ukraine, and the fourth - Harris's alleged birth certificate.
The earliest Russian-language publication with a viral photo that “Verified” was able to detect appeared in the Telegram channel mentioned at the beginning of the analysis “Voice of Mordor" There the picture was posted on August 21 at 15:25 Moscow time. This channel mentioned in dozens of our publications and has repeatedly become the primary source of the spread of fakes, a significant part of which was related to creation fake foreign media sites and/or social media pages. For example, according to a similar scheme on the Internet distributed a fake video in which actor Will Smith allegedly said he would vote for Trump. Then the video created with the help of artificial intelligence initially appeared on the social network X in a profile that mimicked a news account about stars and where only one original tweet was posted. The recording was then distributed by the Voice of Mordor and Aussie Cossack.
Harris's birth certificate, which was previously published by reputable media and whose authenticity is beyond doubt, states that the vice president was born in the United States. Moreover, her parents were scientists, not diplomats of other countries. That is, Harris is a US citizen by birth and has the right to run for president of the country. However, reports that Harris may not be elected to top leadership positions are widely diverged several years ago - for example, in 2019, when she led her first presidential campaign, and in 2020, when she was a candidate for US vice president. Then American constitutional lawyers statedthat such allegations have no basis. In 2024, similar charges repeatedly were refuted fact checkers from the Snopes project, wrote “Verified” is about this.
It is noteworthy that similar scandals affected some previous US leaders. For example, in 2011, Donald Trump called on President Barack Obama to release his birth documents because the billionaire doubted that the current head of state was born in the United States. In March of that year, Trump passed on the press his testimony, and in April on the White House website published Obama's birth documents, according to which he was born in the state of Hawaii. And in 2019, Twitter (now X) published fast, where it was jokingly stated that Trump himself could not hold the post of President of the United States because he was born in another country. The tweet cited a birth certificate, according to which the politician was also allegedly born in Jamaica, like his namesake Donald Harris. In fact, the document lists the ex-president’s birthplace as a hospital. Jamaica Hospital, located in the New York area Jamaica (in English its name is written the same way as the name of the country Jamaica).
Thus, according to official and publicly available documents, Harris was born in the United States and has every right to run for president of the country. The birth certificate, which went viral on social networks in August 2024, in turn, is of unknown origin and contains details that raise reasonable doubts about its authenticity. Representatives of Jamaica also denied the authenticity of this document. In addition, his photo was distributed in the same way as another fake related to the US presidential election, which Verified analyzed earlier.
Cover photo: social networks
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