NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 20: Former U.S. President Barack Obama answers questions at the Gates Foundation Inaugural Goalkeepers event on September 20, 2017 in New York City.
Lawyers for former President Barack Obama sent a letter to a Republican super PAC Wednesday demanding that the group remove a misleading advertisement that utilizes a voice-over from Obama’s audiobook to attack former Vice President Joe Biden.
The Obama lawyers said in a cease-and-desist order that the pro-President Donald Trump super pac must take down the 30-second advertisement from all mediums ahead of the crucial South Carolina primary Saturday. It is also urging South Carolina television stations not to air it.
The South Carolina primary is the second primary of the election season, and it is the first in the South. Biden currently holds a wide 20 point lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who just scored a landslide victory in the Nevada caucuses.
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The Super PAC, Committee to Defend the President, which supports Trump’s reelection, created the $250,000 advertisement, titled, “Enough Empty Promises,” which initially aired during the tenth Democratic debate Tuesday.
The 30-second ad utilizes a recording of Obama reading a passage from his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, to challenge Biden.
Biden has strong support from many African American voters.
The 30-second ad suggests that Biden joined segregationists, wrote a bill that disproportionately jailed African Americans, blamed African American parents for inequality and “won’t represent us [African Americans], defend us, or help us.”
Obama had been recounting a conversation he had with a barber who was commenting on Chicago politics before the election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African American mayor.
“This unauthorized use of President Obama’s name, image, likeness, voice and book passage is clearly intended to mislead the target audience of the ad into believing that the passage from the audiobook is a statement that was made by President Obama during his presidency, when it was in fact a statement made by a barber in a completely different context more than 20 years ago,” Patchen Haggerty, Obama’s lawyer, wrote in a letter to the super PAC group Wednesday.
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