Donald Trump Says Birther Claims About Kamala Harris Are ‘Not Something We Will Be Pursuing’
During a press conference on Saturday, President Donald Trump said that he does not plan on pursuing debunked claims about California Sen. Kamala Harris, Mediaite reported.
Trump was asked by a reporter to say whether he believes Harris is eligible to serve as vice president.
He did not directly answer the question, but he made sure to praise conservative law professor John Eastman, who made the controversial claim.
“I read something about it and I will say he is a brilliant lawyer, that I guess he wrote an article about it, so I know nothing about it, but it’s not something that bothers me,” the commander-in-chief said.
The reporter suggested that Trump should explicitly reject the conspiracy theory, as to not add legitimacy to Eastman’s claims.
“I just don’t know about it, but it’s not something we will be pursuing,” Trump replied.
“The lawyer happens to be a brilliant lawyer as you probably know. He wrote an article saying it could be a problem. It’s not something that I’m going to be pursuing.”
Trump — who was a proponent of the birther conspiracy theory about his predecessor Barack Obama — first gave credence to the allegations on Thursday, when he described Eastman as “highly qualified.”
In his op-ed, which was published in Newsweek, the law professor pointed to the 12th Amendment and Article II of the U.S. Constitution, and the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, arguing that Harris is not eligible to serve as presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s vice president.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, but her parents were immigrants. At the time of her birth, the senator’s father was a Jamaican national and her mother was an Indian national. Neither of them was a naturalized citizen.
Eastman’s claims were swiftly rejected by legal experts.
As The Daily Beast reported, Newsweek has apologized for publishing the controversial column. Josh Hammer, the magazine’s opinion editor, and Nancy Cooper, its global editor-in-chief, conceded that the essay is being used as a “tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia.”
The magazine’s staffers reportedly pressured Hammer and Cooper to issue the apology and retract the piece, which is still online.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina also pushed back against the birther allegations, saying that he disagrees with Harris politically but that she is “unequivocally an American citizen.”
On Friday, White House adviser Jared Kushner accused the media of taking his father-in-law’s remarks out of context, pointing out that Trump said he had “no idea” whether the allegations were true or not.
