Her birth certificate says she's a native-born Californian _ but that doesn't matter to President Donald Trump.
Trump refused Saturday to disavow a racist conspiracy theory that suggests Sen. Kamala Harris may not be eligible to run for vice president even though she was born in the Bay Area.
Instead of rejecting the new "birther" claims against the first woman of color to run on a major party presidential ticket, Trump suggested that they might be true.
"If she has a problem you would have thought she would have been vetted by Sleepy Joe (Biden)," Trump said.
A conservative law professor made the absurd claim in Newsweek that Harris, who was born in California, might not be eligible to serve as president or vice president because her parents were immigrants from Jamaica and India.
Trump sought to avoid responsibility for backing the spurious claim. But he repeatedly referred to the professor as "brilliant," signaling that he may agree with the allegation.
"It's not something that concerns me," he asserted. "It's something I read in a little article."
Trump then suggested that Democrats should have known that Harris might face questions about her citizenship.
Trump has repeatedly derided Harris since she made history Wednesday as Biden's choice to be his running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.
He has called her "nasty," "mad" and "angry" in a reprise of some of the misogynistic barbs he leveled against Hillary Clinton in his successful 2016 presidential campaign.
The way Trump has handled the issue draws strong parallels to his efforts over a period of years to push the racist original birther conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama.
Trump repeatedly questioned if Obama, who was born in Hawaii, is really a U.S. citizen.
Also Saturday, Trump said he is considering a pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose spectacular leaks shook the U.S. intelligence community in 2013.
