CLAIM: Former President Barack Obama admitted on camera that he was born in Kenya, not the United States.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The video was originally posted by a parody account on YouTube more than a decade ago. It had been altered to include the comments cited by social media users. The Democrat never said he was born in Kenya or that he wasn’t American.
THE FACTS: Social media users are re-circulating a long debunked video clip purporting to show President Obama saying he was actually born in Kenya.
The clip opens with a snippet from a 2011 CNN interview in which then-presidential hopeful Donald Trump questions Obama’s citizenship.
The Republican businessman used the “birther” conspiracy to propel himself into national politics, baselessly claiming the nation’s first Black president wasn’t qualified to hold the office in the first place.
“Why has he spent over two million dollars in legal fees to keep this quiet?” Trump asks in the clip. The line is also repeated in the text above the video.
The video then transitions to grainy footage of Obama.
“It’s true, I’m not an American,” he appears to tell the crowd. “I was not born in Hawaii. I wasn’t born in the United States of America. I come from Kenya.”
But the clip of Obama is satire and has been altered to make it sound like he uttered those words.
The doctored clip goes back at least 13 years to the YouTube account ObamaSnippetsDotCom. The account, which hasn’t posted anything new in years, described itself as an “Obama Humor” site.
“It’s not political. It’s just for fun,” the the account’s “About” section reads.
The more than one minute clip even opens with a definition for “spoof” as a “hoax” or “light parody.”
The Obama Foundation, which the president established in 2014, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.
But the original footage comes from Obama’s 2009 appearance at the Tophane Cultural Center in Istanbul, Turkey in which he tackled a range of questions posed by students.
A nearly 45-minute video of the event was posted on his administration’s YouTube channel, which has been preserved and maintained by the National Archives.
The doctored video doesn’t show the former president’s face at key moments when he makes the purported citizenship comments, but a comparison with the original footage — along with the official White House transcript — confirms he didn’t say any of the phrases.
When he supposedly says, “I was not born in Hawaii. I wasn’t born in the United States of America,” for example, the original video and transcript shows he was answering a question from an audience member about what his election meant for some in the U.S.
“I was not born into wealth. I wasn’t born into fame. I come from a racial minority. My name is very unusual for the United States,” Obama said. “And so I think people saw my election as proof, as testimony, that although we are imperfect, our society has continued to improve.”
What’s more, he never utters the word “Hawaii,” which is where he was born according to his long form birth certificate, which the White House took the extraordinary step of releasing in 2011.
And the only time Obama mentions Kenya during the event is when he acknowledges his father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born there.
Trump, meanwhile, has since relented on the “birther” conspiracy.
At a 2016 campaign stop, he declared what many had long accepted: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
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