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Trump Campaign Stops Casting Suspicions Over Harris Eligible to be VP

Ken Bredemeier

   WASHINGTON - The White House agreed Sunday that Democratic California
   Senator Kamala Harris is eligible to become vice president, ending
   false suggestions echoed by President Donald Trump that she was
   ineligible to serve if she is elected in November because she was born
   in the United States to immigrant parents.

   Harris, now 55 and picked last week by former Vice President Joe Biden
   to be his running mate in November's national election, was born in in
   1964 in the western city of Oakland, California. She is the daughter of
   an Indian woman who had emigrated to the U.S. to attend graduate school
   and a father from Jamaica, making her the first Black woman to be on a
   major party national ticket in the U.S.

   Under the U.S. Constitution, she is an American by birthright, by being
   born in the U.S.

   "In our opinion, it's case closed," Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller
   said in an interview on ABC News's "This Week."

   Trump's White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told CNN that Trump
   accepts that Harris is eligible to serve as vice president if the
   Biden-Harris ticket wins the Nov. 3 election over Trump and Vice
   President Mike Pence as they seek a second four-year term.

   Meadows said he was more concerned about Harris's left-of-center
   political views that Trump and Republicans oppose.

   Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, last week
   promoted the conspiracy theory that Harris was ineligible to run for
   the vice presidency because of her parents' immigration status at the
   time of her birth.

   But Miller said, "She wasn't speaking for the campaign. I am."

   Biden's campaign denounced claims that Harris was ineligible as
   "abhorrent."

   Trump for years promoted the past false "birther" allegation that
   Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii and thus
   ineligible to serve as president before stating during his 2016
   campaign that Obama is an American. Trump last week described questions
   raised about Harris's eligibility to run for vice president as "very
   serious."

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