US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Friday blasted Republican rival Donald Trump’s statement acknowledging that President Barack Obama was born in the United States after years of questioning the president’s citizenship.
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Members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Friday called Donald Trump a “disgusting fraud” and demanded that he apologize to President Barack Obama for repeatedly challenging the first African-American president’s USA citizenship before retreating from the claim on Friday.
Earlier Thursday, Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in the U.S., despite recent efforts by his top surrogates to downplay the “birther” controversy.
That’s because on Thursday, Trump declined to tell the Washington Post if he still questioned whether Obama is an American citizen.
However, the Republican presidential candidate, who had led the so-called birther movement, which cast doubt on Mr Obama’s citizenship, pointedly did not apologise.
In 2011, Trump claimed that he had sent investigators to Hawaii in a bid to show that Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent, calling it “one of the greatest cons of all time”.
Mrs Clinton said Mr Trump had founded his campaign on “this outrageous lie”.
Mrs Clinton asked: “This man wants to be our next president?”
Clinton slammed Trump’s comments to the Post while speaking at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute event in Washington later Thursday, saying he needs to stop his “ugliness” and “bigotry”.
So Trump offered his stark admission that the birther claim was wrong, albeit doing it in back-handed fashion, prefaced with yet a new falsehood, a claim that Hillary Clinton personally “started” the birther issue during her 2008 campaign. This is the best he can do.
Donald Trump finally addressed the issue of President Obama’s birthplace at a campaign event in Washington D.C. on Friday. The White House released the president’s long-form birth certificate in 2011.
A Public Policy Polling survey conducted a year ago found 61 percent of Trump supporters believed Obama was not born in the United States. Trump was asked if his courtship of African-Americans could be stymied by the birther issue and “hang over his candidacy”.
FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, wrote of Clinton and the “birther” movement previous year, “While it’s true that some of her ardent supporters pushed the theory, there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with it”. You tell me. You know some people say that was not his birth certificate. It’s fairly typical. I was pretty confident about where I was born.
Mr Miller’s claim that Mrs Clinton launched the birther movement during her unsuccessful primary run against Mr Obama in 2008 is unsubstantiated and long denied.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon responded to Friday’s acknowledgement by saying Trump “took no responsibility for his bigoted attacks on our president”. “I have people that have been studying it and they can not believe what they’re finding”, Trump continued at the time, though he never offered any evidence of their supposed findings.
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Shortly after, Obama appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and publicly ridiculed Trump, who was in the audience.
