(CN) - Donald Trump's campaign Thursday night said the Republican presidential candidate now believes President Barack Obama was born in the United States, but the candidate himself was reluctant to address the issue himself, only doing so Friday after it threatened to overwhelm his campaign.
Trump had promised Friday morning to make a "major statement" on the president and where he was born, but when the time came, at the end of an event attended by veterans and medal of honor winners, he addressed it with a single sentence.
"President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," Trump said.
President Obama himself commented on the controversy that's overtaken the presidential race Friday morning, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he was "shocked" something like "birtherism" would come up now, "when we have other things to do."
Obama then added, "Actually, I'm not shocked at all."
"I was pretty confident about where I was born," the president continued. "I think most people were, as well. My hope would be the presidential election reflects more serious issues than that.""
The renewed attention to the "birther" movement, which falsely claims President Obama wasn't born in the United States and the GOP presidential candidate's hand in it is part of the fallout from the release a trove of hacked emails from the Gmail account of former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
In an August 21 email disclosed on the DCLeaks.com website, Powell attacked Trump for being one of the leaders of the movement.
The catalyst for Powell's comments to Emily Miller, a journalist who once worked under him as a deputy press secretary at the State Department, was a speech Trump had given earlier in Virginia in which the candidate claimed the GOP "will be the party of Lincoln once again" - a blatant play for the black vote.
Powell and Miller begin their email conversation talking about the secretary's schedule, and then, as the extended email chain continues, turn to the subject of the Trump.
"There is nothing he can say that will sway black voters, so he might as well say it to white folks," Powell says. "He is at 1% black voters and will drop. He takes us for idiots. He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the Presidency. Or, demanding his school transcripts to see how he got into Harvard (eg, affirmative action ). You don't fall for his false sincerity, I hope."
Later, Powell adds: " ... the whole birther movement was racist. That's what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn't keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.
"As I have said before, 'What if he was?' Muslims are born as Americans every day," the former secretary of state said. "The transcript thing was also racist. The President graduated Harvard and was editor of the Law Review. And now decades later Trump wants to see his transcripts to see if he should have been admitted. And for him to say yesterday that within four years he would have 95% of blacks voting for him is schizo fantasy."