Clinton: Trump owes apology to Obama, Americans over birther claims

No matter what Donald Trump says now, the Republican nominee will not be able to undo what he has already wrought by questioning President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, Hillary Clinton said Friday. And he owes both Obama and the American people an apology, she added.

"For five years, he has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president. His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie. There is no erasing it in history," Clinton told an audience at the Black Women's Agenda Symposium workshop in Washington. "Just yesterday, Trump, again, refused to say with his own words that the president was born in the United States."


Clinton's comments came minutes before Trump was scheduled to speak in the same city about Obama's citizenship, which his campaign said in a statement Thursday night that he accepted. Trump himself declined to say earlier Friday whether he believes Obama was born in the U.S., teasing a forthcoming "major statement" on the matter.

"Now, Donald's advisers have the temerity to say he's doing the country a service by pushing these lies. No. He isn't. He's feeding into the worst impulses, the bigotry and bias that lurks in our country. Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple. And Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology," Clinton said.

In a statement released Thursday night, the Trump campaign credited him with being a “closer” in 2011, after engaging in months of speculation and questioning whether Obama was born in Hawaii. “Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States,” senior adviser Jason Miller said.

But Trump continued to raise questions about Obama’s citizenship in the years that followed and declined to respond directly to a Washington Post question about his history on the issue in an article Thursday night that preceded the campaign statement. "I’ll answer that question at the right time … I just don’t want to answer it yet,” Trump said.

And earlier Friday morning on Fox Business, Trump declined again to say himself whether he would be disavowing his past birther claims in his speech at the newly opened Trump International Hotel in Washington. “You watch my statement. I have to, we have to keep the suspense going, OK?” he told Maria Bartiromo.

Trump did address the issue at his campaign event later Friday, but only after bragging about the event's location, his newly-opened luxury hotel, and allowing multiple military medal recipients a chance to speak as well. He incorrectly accused Clinton of being responsible for launching the birther movement in 2008 before finally admitting that “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period."

In response to Trump's admission, Clinton launched a barrage of messages from her Twitter account, slamming her opponent for refusing to express remorse over his "deplorable" decision to lead the birther movement. She wrote that "Trump has spent years peddling a racist conspiracy aimed at undermining the first African American president. He can't just take it back" and that "The birther lie is what turned Trump from an ordinary reality TV star into a political figure. That origin story can't be unwritten." She pinned another tweet, that "what Trump just did is a disgrace," to the top of her profile's page.

Clinton remarked, ”So my friends, there is no new Donald Trump. There never will be. Donald Trump looks at President Obama after eight years as our president. He still doesn't seem him as an American. Think of how dangerous that is. Imagine a person in the Oval Office who traffics in conspiracy theories and refuses to let them go no matter what the facts are."

Met with cheers and applause, Clinton continued, "Imagine someone who distorts the truth to fit a very narrow view of the world. Imagine a president who sees someone who doesn't look like him and doesn't agree with him and thinks that person must not be a real American. Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States. We cannot become insensitive to what he says and what he stirs up. We can't just accept this. We've got to stand up to it. If we don't, it won't stop."