John Crudele of the New York Post presents evidence that the surprising decline in the unemployment rate reported by the Department of Labor just prior to the 2012 election, taking it below 8%, may have been the result of faked data:

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee - that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

"He's not the only one," said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

The alleged fraud came about because telephone interviewers were having difficulties meeting the standards required:

 Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews - meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.

Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I'm told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.

Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.

"It was a phone conversation - I forget the exact words - but it was, 'Go ahead and fabricate it' to make it what it was," Buckmon told me.

The real question is whether the faked interviews were skewed toward reporting jobs held. One can imagine that if there was pressure to fake the interviews, then there was also pressure to make them report more employment. But this is impossible to know without putting people under oath.

Clearly a Congressional investigation is merited.

On President Obama's watch, we have seen fraud employed to influence the 2012 election regarding Obamacare, so it is not much of a stretch to believe that unemployment data also was faked to influecn e the election. This raises questions about the legitimacy of his victory.