The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defended its senior adviser to the White House after past comments resurfaced of the official questioning President Obama’s American citizenship.
Frank Wuco, who hosted a conservative radio program before joining the White House in January, floated the conspiracy that Obama was not eligible to be president because he was not a natural born U.S. citizen and claimed that Obama knew “nothing about the black American experience.”
“Mr. Wuco works every day to keep the American people safe by helping to implement the President’s security-focused agenda, including raising the global bar for vetting and screening of potential terrorists. Years-old comments cherry picked from thousands of hours on the air have no bearing on his ability to perform his job for the American people,” then-acting DHS press secretary Tyler Houlton told CNN.
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Wuco once hosted a guest in 2011 who wrote a book forwarding the case why Obama was ineligible to be president and called the president’s birth certificate “questionable” after it was released to the public.
“This person, not only does he, with the exception of the color of his skin, not only does he sort of lay a very false claim on his identification with the black American experience, he has no idea what it is. But people don’t care,” Wuco once quoted a friend as saying on his show.
The debunked “birther” conspiracy that Obama was born in Kenya was promoted by former real estate mogul Donald Trump before his run for president. Trump believed the birth certificate to be fraudulent when it was released.
Kirstjen Nielsen, who previously worked in the White House as the deputy to chief of staff John Kelly, was confirmed as the new DHS secretary earlier this month.