Donald Trump Steps Up Calls for Obama to Release Birth Certificate

March 28, 2011 -- Has Donald Trump found a winning issue for the 2012 election cycle?

As the multimillionaire real estate mogul mulls a presidential bid, he has turned up the volume on his calls for President Obama to release his own birth certificate.Trump has become so dead set on this issue that on Monday he released a copy of his own birth certificate to Newsmax, conservative website. It shows that Donald John Trump was born at Jamaica Hospital in New York June 14, 1946, at 10:54 a.m.

(It now appears that Trump did not release an official copy of his own birth certificate today but rather a "hospital certificate of birth." Official birth certificates are issued by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The document that Trump released to the media today was provided by Jamaica Hospital.)

Click Here to see a photo of Donald Trump's hospital certificate of birth.

"This guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn't," Trump said in an interview on Fox News Monday. "I didn't think this was such a big deal, but I will tell you, it's turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me from all over saying please don't give up on this issue."

Trump didn't stop there. In the interview he also called for an investigation into Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who is close to the Obama family and led an unsuccessful effort to make public a copy of the president's birth certificate.

"I think this guy should be investigated," Trump said. "He remembers when Obama was born? Give me a break -- he's just trying to do something for his party."

Abercrombie's efforts were stymied by a Hawaii privacy law that forbids the release of such records without Obama's consent.

The Obama campaign released a "certification of live birth," which is a shorter document that carries the same legal weight as the long one, in 2008.

Trump has brought up the issue again and again. In a recent interview with ABC's "The View," he said that Obama has "a terrible pale that's hanging over with him" because of his refusal to release the document.

In 2008, the Obama campaign circulated a "certificate of live birth" showing that the president was born in Hawaii in 1961, but the "birthers" are not convinced. Many continue to believe that Obama, who had an American mother and Kenyan father, was born outside the United States.