[GregNH]

The "document" was never "handled." The fingerprint on a separate layer. It's part of the "document's" manufacturing process.

[rx]

If I understand you, the Obama defenders would say that the automated scanning process on the whizbang Xerox WorkCentre® 7655 copier, in its own "wisdom," assigned each copied element onto its "choice" of layer. So, if there's an oily, smudgy fingerprint visible, presumably whoever copied it had his or her finger on the image at that point.

It might prove multiple-pass copying (hence, that the data were divided in a manually-mediated process, proving alteration from the original, obviously to deceive) if the smudge is collocated with some other real image data that's found on a different lawyer, but there the smudge is not to be seen.

If that's the case, yes, it sounds like the forgers have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar yet again!"