Trump, Clinton trade barbs over Obama 'birther' movement

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton traded barbs Thursday over the Republican nominee’s past suggestions that President Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and thus ineligible to be president, despite the fact that he was born in Hawaii – also known as the “birther” movement.
Trump’s campaign spokesman said the Republican candidate now believes Obama was born the U.S., but has been called upon to say so himself. Campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Trump "did a great service to the country" by bringing closure to an "ugly incident" that Trump, in fact, fueled.
"In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate," Miller said.
"Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure" to the issue, he added. "Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama's birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States."
Trump’s “birther” comments were long seen by some as an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president and have turned off many of the African-American voters he is now attempting to court in his bid for the White House.
According to the Associated Press, the statement came after The Washington Post asked trump whether he believed Obama was born in the U.S. "I'll answer that question at the right time," Trump told the paper. "I just don't want to answer it yet."

Asked by the paper whether his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was accurate when she said in a recent television interview that her boss now believes the president was born in the U.S., Trump responded: "It's okay. She's allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things."
Clinton went on the attack Thursday night at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute over Trump’s refusal to say whether Obama was born in the U.S.
"He was asked one more time where was President Obama born and he still wouldn't say Hawaii. He still wouldn't say America," Clinton said. "This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?”
Trump fueled the “birther” movement in the days when Obama took officer. In August 2012 — more than a year after the president released the document in April 2011 — Trump was pushing the issue on Twitter, according to the AP.
"An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud," he wrote.
Trump has said repeatedly during the campaign that he no longer talks about the "birther" issue, but hasn’t retracted his previous statements.
"I don't talk about it because if I talk about that, your whole thing will be about that," he told reporters in his plane last week. "So I don't talk about it."
The Trump campaign’s statement late Thursday claims that Clinton launched the “birther” movement during her unsuccessful primary run against Obama in 2008.
"Hillary Clinton's campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President," the statement claims. "This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer."
Clinton has long denied the claim.
Hillary For America press secretary Brian Fallon challenged Trump on Twitter to say he believed Obama was born in the U.S.
Obama had released a standard short form of his birth certificate before the 2008 presidential election. Anyone who wants a copy of the more detailed, long-form document must submit a waiver request, and have that request approved by Hawaii's health department.
In 2011, amid persistent questions from Trump about his birthplace, Obama submitted a waiver request. He dispatched his personal lawyer to Hawaii to pick up copies and carry the documents back to Washington on a plane.
The form said Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. It is signed by the delivery doctor, Obama's mother and the local registrar.
On the day he released the document, Obama jabbed at Trump. "We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers," he said.