U.S. President Donald Trump may currently be facing the weight of the Russia scandal, but he doesn’t get to avoid scrutiny where appropriate for other scandals too. He’s currently facing legal challenges from adult film star Stormy Daniels in connection to a nondisclosure agreement she signed covering an affair between the two of them. On Tuesday, her lawyer Michael Avenatti decided to go after Trump on Twitter for his past promotion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Avenatti explained that he altered his birth certificate to make himself seem older so he could get a job at a local McDonald’s that he wanted as a teenager, quipping that he wanted to “come clean” before Trump brought up the change.
He explained:
‘When I was 15, I really wanted to work at the local [McDonald’s]. But you had to be 16. So I doctored my birth certificate by changing the year of birth. I know it is only a matter of time before Trump discovers my “birther issue,” so I thought I should come clean now. I’m sorry. And just to be clear, the McDonalds was in St. Louis, not Kenya.’
Back in spring 2011 — years after then-President Obama had first faced questions about his birthplace — Donald Trump threw his support behind the questioning, telling a Today host:
‘I have some real doubts… I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.’
Obama wasn’t too keen on letting the false claims about his birthplace pile up, and in 2011, he released his official long form birth certificate. It was that same year that Obama infamously roasted Trump over the claims at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Trump didn’t let up, though. Despite his ironic present day criticisms of members of the media using anonymous sources, in 2012 — when Obama was running for re-election — Trump tweeted:
‘An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama‘s birth certificate is a fraud.’
Eventually, in 2016, Trump acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States — but The New York Times reported late last year that the president was still privately floating the idea that maybe Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States after all.
It’s hardly the only falsehood that Trump has held to either before or during his time in office. He’s raised claims of everything from massively widespread voter fraud to the Access Hollywood tape of him bragging about committing sexual assault being faked.
Avenatti’s aims include getting to the truth of the president’s activities in at least one context — that of the hush money he paid to cover his cheating.
After Avenatti suggested that such had to be the case for some time, the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani revealed that Trump had repaid his old lawyer Michael Cohen for Daniels’ hush money after all. That makes the president vulnerable in an ongoing criminal investigation into Cohen covering possible bank, tax, and campaign finance fraud, among other issues.
Check out Twitter’s response to Avenatti below.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
