Arpaio Bypasses Fake Media

• Lawman tells AFP his investigation into Obama birth records spurred high-level retribution

• Says he might consider running for public office again if President Trump made the request

By Mark Anderson

On Friday, Aug. 25 President Donald Trump announced his plan to pardon “America’s sheriff,” Joe Arpaio. Recently, in an effort to bypass the fake news, American Free Press reached out to Arpaio to hear directly from the embattled lawman. The hostile mainstream press has repeatedly piled on the false narrative that Arpaio had engaged in “racial profiling” when his deputies apprehended illegal alien suspects—of mainly Mexican extraction in a state that borders Mexico—thereby running afoul of the Fourth Amendment in the process. But Arpaio doesn’t see it that way, arguing that he was elected by the people of his county to enforce the law even when it was not the politically correct thing to do. Arpaio, finally feeling free to speak out in the wake of the pardon, told this AFP writer that he has always considered himself a “constitutional sheriff” answerable to the people who elected him, not a bureaucratized police chief under the sway of a mayor or city council. He recalls being actually sworn in to carry out the enforcement of federal immigration laws under Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) 287(g) program.

“I had the authority to enforce immigration laws . . . sworn in by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” he explained to AFP, specifying that his department exercised powers specifically granted to it to round up illegal aliens, detain them, and hand them over to federal authorities for processing. Arpaio added that two state laws, one to combat human smuggling and another to sanction employers hiring those in the country illegally, provided an additional backstop. “The 287(g) program, one of ICE’s top partnership initiatives, allows a state and local law enforcement entity to enter into a partnership with ICE, under a joint Memorandum of Agreement, in order to receive delegated authority for immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions,” states a passage on the DHS website.

“Just before I left the department, we had 10,000 detainees turned over [to the feds] but around 33% came back,” Arpaio continued, expressing his frustration over repeat offenders. “When the president pardoned me, he didn’t necessarily have all the facts,” the former Drug Enforcement Administration officer continued, “but I’m sure it was because [there was] no jury trial for me.” Prior to the pardon, Arpaio was slated to be sentenced Oct. 5, likely for up to six months in jail. After a short trial, originally scheduled to start in early December 2016 but delayed, he was pronounced guilty on July 6 by Judge Susan Bolton of the U.S. District Court in Phoenix. Judge Bolton issued the verdict from the bench because Arpaio’s request for a jury trial was denied. But because no court hearing was convened to read Arpaio the verdict in open court, which his attorneys say also runs counter to legal constitutional interpretations, he learned of his verdict from the media.

THE OBAMA FACTOR

Tea party group members, frustrated because they could not find anyone with the temerity to probe Obama’s background, had approached Arpaio about their birth-certificate concerns. He accepted the challenge somewhat reluctantly, knowing the “heat” would soon come from the top, he said. Interestingly, Donald Trump raised the birthcertificate issue early on when he was considering running for president, prior to the 2012 election. Arpaio went on to say that after his “Cold-Case Posse” was formed in 2011, at no cost to taxpayers, to explore the legitimacy of Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate—which the posse maintained was fraudulent based on forensic research—things soon “went south” for Arpaio.

In hindsight, Arpaio told AFP, “I don’t think it was so much the illegal roundups. . . I think it was the birth certificate issue they [the Obama administration] were mainly after me about.” According to both Arpaio and his birth-certificate researcher Mike Zullo, notorious billionaire and cultural-political revolutionary George Soros financially fueled the “un-elect Joe” movement, reportedly to the tune of around $3 million, that resulted in Arpaio’s re-election defeat last November after 24 years as a highly popular sheriff. Arpaio lamented that the mainstream media, while fixated on select constitutional questions since his pardon, to this day still “won’t even look into Obama’s birth certificate issue.”

Arpaio revealed for the first time something he discovered during his last re-election campaign. In accordance with applicable law, those behind the anti-Arpaio TV ads, used in a blitz that ran during early voting and right up to election day, were required to send him advance copies of those attack ads, which, he noted, were mailed to him from a New York office of the national Perkins Coie law firm. What’s especially interesting about the sender’s return address is that this law firm is the same firm that represented Obama in the birth-certificate probe. Even more interesting is that, according to Zullo, President Obama’s personal attorney, Judith Corley of Perkins Coie, is the one who flew to Hawaii to get the certificate and deliver it to the White House as the probe over the authenticity of the certificate continued. Soros has also been linked to Perkins Coie.

Zullo noted that Arpaio’s last official action—a press conference he held on Dec. 15, 2016, just before Democrat Paul Penzone officially assumed office—concluded the six-year birth-certificate probe by announcing to the incredulous press on hand that the so-called “birth certificate” was “an electronic file, not a birth certificate,” meaning it was a file “with no probative value”—in other words, fraudulent. That determination, said Zullo, is according to the independent, double-blind findings of two separate forensics entities that use different approaches to examining public documents for authenticity.

WILL ARPAIO RUN AGAIN?

Arpaio, now 85, told AFP that he’s received calls urging him to run for office, perhaps for Congress. While some press accounts have reported that the Arizona Senate seat currently occupied by Republican Jeff Flake has sparked Arpaio’s interest, he told AFP: “Originally, after I lost the sheriff’s race, I said, ‘I’m out of this.’ I actually don’t know what office I’d run for.” Arpaio added that he feels the mainstream press, such as the Washington Examiner, may have presumed too much regarding his possible political plans. However, he told AFP, “I didn’t say no or never in a million years, either.”

According to the Examiner, “Flake is in a tenuous position. A recent poll found that the first-term senator has only a 22% approval rating among Trump supporters, as well as a 63% disapproval rating. (Among Arizonans overall, Flake has an 18% approval rating.)” Arpaio also told AFP that he would not totally rule out running for sheriff again. Meanwhile, Trump, who’s friends with Arpaio and supports his views, has to some extent encouraged candidates to run against Flake. The president recently dubbed the senator “Flake Jeff Flake” and suggested he’s “weak” on border security and crime. Arpaio rapped Flake and fellow Arizona Sen. John McCain for publicly opposing him, by saying Arpaio ignored the “rule of law” as sheriff, rather than getting together with the lawman to get the facts. Arpaio concluded, “Now, if President Trump asked me to run [for whatever office], that’d be a ‘wild card’ to consider.”