Buena Park Pastor Wiley Drake Believes He Still Has a Prayer of Unseating Barack Obama

The Preacher vs. the President-Elect
Pastor Wiley Drake thinks he still has a prayer of unseating Barack Obama—sorry, Barack Hussein Obama

First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park’s irrepressible Pastor Wiley Drake is not discouraged in light of the Dec. 8 announcement the U.S. Supreme Court will not hear a New Jersey man’s case that argued Barack Obama cannot be sworn in as president because his father was a British citizen. Alan Keyes, the American Independent Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, and his running mate, Drake, are plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit knocking around California courts that makes a similar claim about Obama’s birth status. Several other cases are also winding through the nation’s courts in what Drake characterized as a coordinated effort he started to prevent the Jan. 20 inauguration of “the first illegal-alien president in U.S. history.”

OC Weekly: Hello, Pastor Drake. This is Matt Coker at OC Weekly.

Wiley Drake: Well, hello Matt Coker of OC Weekly. How are you?

I’m fine. How about you?

I have my 65th birthday coming up, and I feel fine.

That’s great. I apologize for not calling back last week when you called. I was on assignment.

Well, that’s okay.

So I was calling today about your lawsuit, and then I heard about the Supreme Court decision this morning. Are you discouraged?

Well, no one likes to lose. But discouraged? No, there are several cases going on at one time, and we’re all working on these together. I’m really sort of the guy who started off looking at Mr. Obama. Philip Berg, who is Jewish, also brought a case against Mr. Obama in Pennsylvania [where it was shot down in federal court and immediately appealed]. . . . Leo [Donofrio of New Jersey] felt because he made some procedural errors, that’s why the Supreme Court did not hear it and there might be a chance of resurrecting it. There’s also another case, I understand, a Cort case [filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by Cort Wrotnowski of Connecticut] that was cleaner than Leo’s, procedurally. . . . It’s supposed to go before the court this week, so hopefully there will be a better answer.

How is your case different from these?

We went to California Superior Court. The respondents are the 55 Electoral College electors in the state and the Secretary of State. When Mr. Berg’s case was turned down by the federal court, they said the reason was he didn’t have standing; he was just a common citizen. That’s how our case was born. Since Alan Keyes was on the ballot in California as a presidential candidate and I as vice president, we had standing. The courts didn’t see Mr. Berg has the potential for injury, but we did have the potential for injury since we were running for election and did not get a fair shot. That’s why our attorneys, Orly Taitz and Gary Kreep, took it to California’s courts, where it is still in. We’re looking for a hearing date in the very near future. But first we have to serve all respondents—that’s 57 people we have to serve. Since we’re a shoestring organization, grassroots with no money, we’re using volunteers. Even though they are doing a crackerjack job, we hired a professional process server.

So you don’t sound discouraged at all.

Well, any time you go to court, you want to win. For the Supreme Court of the United States to deny a hearing on a case as important as the Constitution, we’re in trouble in this country. At the same time, we’re not gone yet. There is the Keyes and Drake case. In D.C., there is another case, the [unsuccessful ’08 Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Gail] Lightfoot case, that is much cleaner. Instead of going to Superior Court and filing a lawsuit and waiting for it to be denied, she went directly to the Superior Court but filed an urgency injunction, which California courts said needs to go straight to the Supreme Court.

How can we have all these cases basically arguing the same thing?

They don’t. Donofrio says I don’t care where he was born, he is not qualified. Even if he were born in Hawaii, he was born to an American-citizen mother and a British-citizen father. That’s a proven fact. According to these fellows, the constitutional definition is no matter where you are born, both parents have to be Americans. Even if he were born on U.S. soil, that’s a moot point because he’s not qualified. Phil Berg’s case says we have evidence, proof, that he was not born on American soil. His own paternal grandmother says he was born in Kenya. That’s what got me turned on. I’m a pastor. I have a tendency to believe people. When I heard an elderly paternal grandmother—speaking in Swahili, if it was interpreted right, and I think it was—say that she saw her grandson, Barack Hussein Obama, come out of his mother here in Kenya, I can’t imagine why she made that up. There is no motive for lying. In all honesty, she’s just bragging on her grandson.

[

We did an investigation and found all kinds of things. In 2005, even before we found out he’d become a presidential candidate, his people did legal research on how and what were the procedures for changing the Constitution of the United States, especially the natural-born-citizen clause. It seems they were anticipating problems. And there are idiosyncrasies with his birth certificate. It’s obviously a forgery. A forensic investigation found his sister Maya’s name on it. They pretty obviously took his sister’s birth certificate and doctored it.

Was she born in Hawaii?

I don’t know.

Hmmm . . .

We still have two cases and possibly a third one to get their hearing. Our own California case, if we can win, that’s 55 electoral votes that would be withheld. That would take him down to within six or seven of not having enough to be elected anyway. It’d have to go to the Senate to be decided—birth or no birth.

I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but these lawsuits have spurred a lot of comments on the Internet.

I have been.

Some are speculating the Supreme Court justices rejected the Donofrio case because to do otherwise would lead to rioting in inner cities.

Well, we’ve speculated about that as well. I’ve been pretty keenly aware of what’s going on in the Supreme Court. You’ll notice the date when they decided the case would go to conference was on a Friday. Typically, if you go to conference, you take a vote, thumbs up and down, whether to schedule for a hearing. They knew that a lot of people would be discouraged if they made an announcement Friday that they would not take the case. Washington, D.C., is a powder keg. They knew they’d already be at happy hour Friday afternoon and be drunk. Even if a ballgame goes one way or another, they start burning stuff because they are drunk. I think the Supreme Court put the case off until Monday because they knew people would have hangovers and not be drunk.

You’ll notice, typically in a case with any notoriety, a judge will say we turned it down but I think we should have taken it, or another judge will write something and give reasons why they didn’t. Usually, at least two on each side will make this comment. But in this case, they did not even make one comment. They did not even make it public. The clerk of the court posted it on a bulletin board. That’s verification of what I think shows they were fearful. They knew if they announced Friday they took the case, the idiots on that side would start burning stuff, and if they didn’t take it, the idiots on other side would do stupid things. It has created a constitutional crisis.

I’d like to tick off the comments of people on both sides. How do you explain the director of Health and Vital Statistics in Hawaii having verified the birth certificate on record as authentic?

Well, I think she lied. Heh-heh-heh. It’s pretty simple. I’ve tried to make all sorts of excuses, but I think she just made a political lie. She thought she’d get press out of it. She did: She got bad press.

Another little wrinkle that most people are not talking too much about is the documents that go to Hawaii have a requesting box called 7C. It indicates proof for this is foreign, not from Hawaii. They did admit Mr. Obama’s certificate had box 7C checked on it. This just unravels the more you go into it. We also found out when he registered with the Selective Service for the draft, on one of the forms is a round rubber stamp with the postmark on it. This was in 1980, I believe, but the Postal Service says that type of round rubber stamp hadn’t been used since the ’70s. And on that same stamp, he signed it the 30th of the month, and then the stamp on other side of document says it was stamped on the 29th. He could have made a mistake, but it makes you think, hmmm, what is all this about?

We looked at documents in Illinois under the Freedom of Information Act. We got the form from when he registered with the state as an attorney. For one question, he gave his full name, then a few questions down he is asked if he used any other name other than what it says on line one, Barack Hussein Obama. He checked no. Everybody knows he went by Barry Soetoro in Indonesia and even Occidental College in the LA area.

[

His lawyers have made sure that every place, every school or hospital, has placed a hold on his records. We suspect that if we could get his Occidental records, we would find out, since he admits he was dirt poor at that time, that he probably went in on an international visa where you get a free education. That would show he would have had to prove he was a citizen of Kenya or some other country to get that money, but he has indeed locked those records.

There are also claims that the Obama campaign released different versions of the Hawaiian birth certificate—the first without an official seal, the second with the seal stamped in the wrong place and so on. What do you know about that?

As far as the birth certificate, yeah, there are a lot of questions. There is no seal, then they sent another one in and didn’t have the seal in the right place. What’s that all about? A lot of this stuff is discussed on Berg’s site, ObamaCrimes.com.

Speaking of websites, here’s what FactCheck.org has said on the matter: “FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all the requirements from the State Department for providing U.S. citizenship.” Did you know that?

Yeah. But, again, they only saw what Obama put on his website. Interestingly enough, FactCheck.org was owned by a company for which Barack served on its board of directors.

That’s convenient.

Makes you wanna go hmmm. The more we dig, the more we find, so we finally decided let’s take it to court and let the courts decide. I made a statement that, uh, if Barack Hussein Obama can prove he is a bona-fide, constitutional, natural-born candidate, as one of the co-founders of the Presidential Prayer Team and the former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, I will lead people to pray for him.

Well, that’s nice of you.

Yeah, everybody wants to make it about race, to make it about politics. Another thing is Philip Berg, who brought the first case, was chairman of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania for many years. He is not a fly-by-night guy. He’s an old man; he’s been around forever on the Democrat’s Central Committee. Also, he was a deputy district attorney for years. This wasn’t like he was a Republican going after a Democrat.

That’s very interesting. Did you know that back when Hillary Clinton was campaigning against Obama, a blogger supporting her had to admit to having looked through Honolulu Advertiser back issues and discovering a birth announcement in the Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961, edition for a son born Aug. 4, 1961, to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianole Hwy.? So her argument is why would someone plant a fake announcement in a newspaper in 1961? It’s not like someone back then knew this baby would some day run for president.

Well, I had not heard that. Again, why would someone go to that degree? But there have also been a lot of other things that are very unusual.

Do you know who Joseph Farah is, the founder of WorldNetDaily.com?

Oh, yes, Joe’s a good friend of mine.

Joe said that even without a favorable Supreme Court ruling to the allegations, the native-born issue will haunt Obama’s entire presidency much like the Monica Lewinsky controversy dogged the rest of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Well, I’d agree with that except it will be even more so than the Lewinsky thing. I think it will dog him because one of our attorneys, Gary Kreep [of the United Justice Foundation] said we will do everything we can to fight this battle. If we win this case, we will keep him out of the White House. If we lose, Gary and his committee of lawyers, and many of us are supportive of this, if Mr. Obama is indeed inaugurated, we will file a lawsuit against the inauguration for being illegal and against the chief justice of the Supreme Court for swearing in a usurper. And then, typically on the first day of office, the president signs a bunch of bills. Every bill or document he signs, we will file a separate lawsuit. For every decision he makes, it’s gonna to be tied up in court.

Man, won’t that get expensive?

Well, I didn’t commit to do it; the attorney did.

Dang attorneys.

Yeah. When he told me that, I said, “Wow, this is going to be expensive.” And he said, “Wiley, you’re a preacher. I’m a lawyer. Don’t tell me how to do my job.” I said, “Okay, I can’t pay, but I can pray.”

[

It’s not like your church is a giant church like Saddleback.

No, I don’t have any money. People accused me of doing this to raise money, but I tell them, “I’m not making money, and by the way, if you want to help our church, can you give us some money?” The time and effort I’m putting into this is really costing our church money.

Is this is all sour grapes because Keyes-Drake lost to Obama-Biden?

Well, certainly nobody likes to lose, but in all honesty, we didn’t have any delusions of grandeur. We were making a statement against the Republican Party. It’s not like we really thought we’d win. I think that is just a foolish accusation. Alan has been around a long time. He’s lost before. The other thing they tried to tell me . . . My wife just got out a pair of scissors for the phone line. . . . They accused me, as a Southerner, of being racist. What about Mr. Keyes? He’s blacker than Mr. Obama. This is certainly not race-motived.

Okay, I’m going to let you go because the last thing I need is to get on the bad side of your wife and her scissors.

I appreciate that.

mc****@oc******.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *