https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/conspiracy-theorists-ufo-hunters-among-first-to-flock-to-obama-s-once-secret-presidential-records/ar-AAV7rx3?ocid=msedgntp
Exactly five years after President Obama left office the public got its first chance to request the secret files archived by the administration in January – and hundreds took the opportunity.
While many requests focus on touchstones in the Obama presidency and White House politics, more than a third attempt to dig up dirt on debunked conspiracy theories that took root well before Obama’s 2009 inauguration as well as long-simmering suspicions about the U.S. government.
They asked for everything from communications with close confidantes like Valerie Jarrett and Dan Pfeiffer to interactions with Oprah and Beyoncé. And they checked in on the president's connections – both real and imaginary – to Hunter Biden, George Soros, Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein.
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In celebration of Sunshine Week, a national initiative to “educate the public about the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive and unnecessary secrecy,” USA TODAY took a look at 842 requests made to the National Archives for Obama-era information.
The log includes the name and request made by each of the 205 individuals who filed those Freedom of Information Act letters via email in the hours and days after the process began on Jan. 20. Twelve were frequent filers, with 20 FOIAs each, and some of them appear to have used fictitious names and verbatim language.
The log contains 81 mentions of Obama’s birth records and one for “a copy of Barack Obama’s DNA.” Some refer to the president as “Barry Sotero” or “Satoro,” misspellings of Soetoro, the last name of his stepfather, which Obama used while growing up in Indonesia before moving back to Hawaii at age 10. That surname was one basis for an Internet-fueled theory that he was ineligible to even run for president because he was a foreigner. More than a dozen requests ask for records of a rumored $65,000 White House hot dog and pizza party that never happened.
Others attempt to answer questions with documents: “Why was (Osama bin Laden’s) body being thrown into the sea that fast?” one requester wrote, referencing the burial at sea off the USS Carl Vinson in 2011. The sea burial and lack of publicly released material from the raid and killing of bin Laden by U.S. special forces has fueled conspiracies about how the al-Qaeda leader was killed or if he is still alive.
Requesters sought records tying Obama to misinformation magnets like George Soros, Jeffrey Epstein, Anthony Fauci, Bowe Bergdahl and Anthony Weiner. Some dip into conspiracies that have long been debunked. For instance, three requests ask about Comet Ping Pong, the pizzeria in Washington D.C. that fake websites identified as the home base of a child sex ring led by Hillary Clinton. In 2016, it was targeted by a gunman who believed the stories.