Mr Trump announced on his official Twitter feed he was heading to the brand new Trump International Hotel in the USA capital to make the speech.
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According to the statement, “Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama” during her 2008 campaign for president.
Trump ally Rudy Giuliani said last week that Trump came around to the idea of Obama as US -born “two years ago, three years ago” but Trump as recently as two years ago invited “all hackers” to uncover Obama’s “place of birth”.
Although Trump had been expected to address the issue from the start of Friday’s event, half an hour or so was taken up with testimonials on his behalf from retired military officers.
During a Fox Business interview earlier Friday, Trump had also brought up his claim about Clinton.
So Trump stoked the media’s interest by claiming he had “something very, very big concerning the President of the United States” – something that would change the course of the 2012 election.
Clinton said Friday Trump’s campaign was “founded on this outrageous lie” and “there is no erasing it”. It’s something Republican former Secretary of State Colin Powell called, in hacked emails, “racist”.
In 2011, Obama released his birth certificate, showing that he was born in Hawaii. But once the primary concluded and Obama first released his birth certificate that summer, this chatter quieted down in those circles, and moved instead to more right-wing precincts. Obama lampooned Trump at that year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as a stone-faced Trump looked on. It was an attempt to distance himself from his years of high-profile advocacy for birtherism, the right-wing conspiracy theory that has denied that Obama’s birth certificates are real.
His running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said earlier this month that he accepts the fact that Obama was born in Hawaii. An additional 31 percent of Republicans neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement and only a quarter of Republicans surveyed believed Obama was born in the U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said Trump is a liar. He has repeatedly demurred and said he doesn’t want to talk about it or that it’s not the focus of his campaign. Trump told The Washington Post on Thursday he would give his opinion eventually but was holding back for a reason only he was privy to. He told the Washington Post Wednesday night, “I’ll answer that question at the right time”.
Obama declined to comment on Trump’s revival of the birther issue, telling reporters he had better things to do.
“It’s OK. (Conway) is allowed to speak what she thinks”. I want to focus on jobs. I think the second thing, though, is this.
After months of dodging, and after years of raising questions about President Barack Obama’s birthplace, Donald Trump’s campaign is asserting that the GOP presidential nominee no longer doubts that Obama was born in the United States.
Despite his spokesman saying in the statement that Trump brought the issue to a conclusion when Obama released the document, Trump has promoted the “birther” theory as recently as August 2013. He told Irish TV that year that Obama “should come clean”, Buzzfeed reported. “All I want to do is see this guy’s birth certificate”, he said to cheers during a 2011 tea party event in Boca Raton. We know, thanks to David Farenthold, that Donald Trump has lied about nearly all of his donations to various charities.
She said Trump is feeding into the “worst impulses, the bigotry and bias” of some people. Obama made the comment before a meeting to discuss free trade.
The President dismissed Trump’s criticism Friday, joking with reporters at the White House and saying, “I was pretty confident about where I was born”.
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Then he paused and smirked. I’m not that shocked, actually.
