During an appearance in Nairobi, Secretary of State John Kerry said he thanked the Kenyan president for giving America "a president of the United States" – a comment alluding to the contested issue of where President Obama was born.

On Monday, Kerry told Kenya's foreign minister he had a conversation with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta concerning the Olympic Games in Rio and President Obama's birthplace:

I had the pleasure of beginning that meeting [with Kenyatta], as I want to begin this press conference this afternoon, by congratulating Kenya on something no nation's athletes have ever before accomplished, and that is to win both the men's and the women's marathon races at the Olympic Games. Absolutely extraordinary. When I mentioned that to President Kenyatta, he promptly said to me, "Well, we also had a hand in helping you win a silver because the person who won came from Kenya." (Laughter.) "And I said, "Actually, Mr. President, you did better than a silver and a gold. You gave us a president of the United States." (Laughter.) So you can see we had a very friendly and positive beginning to the conversation.

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Watch the video of Kerry's remarks:

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Kerry's comment refers to a widespread push during Obama's first term for the president to release his long-form birth certificate amid questions of his natural-born citizenship and constitutional eligibility to serve.

While the president claims he was born in Honolulu, there have been numerous questions, especially since a law-enforcement investigation by Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, found "probable cause" that the birth certificate released by Obama was forged. Also, Obama mysteriously has a Connecticut-based Social Security Number, when neither he nor his parents ever lived there.

As WND recently reported, Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton re-opened the issue of where Obama was born during a July 5 campaign appearance with Obama in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was during that event that Clinton fired a Twitter shot against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

As part of her remarks about Obama, Mrs. Clinton tweeted out: "Someone who has never forgotten where he came from. And Donald, if you're out there tweeting: It's Hawaii." –Hillary on @POTUS

"Someone who has never forgotten where he came from. And Donald, if you’re out there tweeting: It’s Hawaii." — Hillary on @POTUS — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 5, 2016

Ironically, it was Hillary Clinton herself who started the birther movement in 2008, according to numerous news agencies.

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Just Monday, the Washington Times' Kelly Riddell wrote, "The birther movement does indeed have Democratic roots, long before Mr. Trump ever brought it up and made it an issue."

The Times cited a Bloomberg report, which stated, "The idea of going after Obama's otherness dates back to the last presidential election — and to Democrats. Long before Trump started in, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, recognized this potential vulnerability in Obama and sought to exploit it.

"In a March 2007 memo to Clinton ... Penn wrote: 'All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light,' he wrote. 'Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.'"

Riddell added, "Although Mr. Penn never suggested bringing up Mr. Obama's birth certificate as a strategy to exploit this weakness, he did suggest Mrs. Clinton include a line in every speech saying that she was 'born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.'"