Gov. Brewer on birther debate, “…it’s become such a huge distraction…”
CNN’s John King talks to Gov. Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.) about a bill she vetoed concerning birth certificates. A highlight from the full interview is after the jump and a full transcript is posted at CNN.com.
MANDATORY CREDIT: JOHN KING, USA
HIGHLIGHT FROM FULL INTERVIEW
THIS IS A RUSH FDCH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JOHN KING, HOST: Governor Brewer joins now us live from Phoenix. Governor, it’s good to see you. I want to get to your vetoes. But I want to start with, when you hear people like Mr. Trump repeatedly saying — despite all the documentary evidence that the president was born in Hawaii in 1961 — should they just drop this and debate him on whether it’s taxes or immigration or some other issue?
GOV. JAN BREWER (R), ARIZONA: Well, you know, it seems to me that we have talked about this issue now going on probably two years, and that I believe that most people have reached out and they did their investigations and it’s become such a huge distraction, I for one — I believe that from what I have seen and after speaking with governor — or the prior governor of Hawaii that indeed he was born in Hawaii. It’s just something that I think is leading our country down a path of destruction and it just is not serving any good purpose.
KING: Is it — is it a vehicle for some people, some people, to hide maybe racism, to say that they don’t want to come out and say they don’t want to have a black president, an African-American president, so they are trying to find some other reason to disqualify him or to delegitimize him?
BREWER: Well, you know, John. You know, I can’t speculate on that. You know, I think there was a point in time when people didn’t really understand how birth certificates were kept in the state of Hawaii, and now, I think that it’s been pretty much disclosed that they used to have a long form and now they don’t have a long form. Arizona used to have a long form, we now have a short form.
But, you know, in regards to the bill that was passed and the one that I vetoed, it was such a huge distraction. It was a bridge way too far to give one person in the state of Arizona, a partisan person at that, the ability to keep a person off the ballot. And it wasn’t just the president of the United States. It was all the way down the path of all elected officials.
So, it was something that I felt very uncomfortable with signing, having been a prior secretary of state. And I think we just really need to move on. Everybody has had two years to prove if they wanted to that he was not born in Hawaii. They haven’t come up with any of that kind of proof.
So, it just seems to me that it’s more political rhetoric and that it takes the ball off the kinds of subjects that we all ought to be discussing and that would be jobs and the economy.
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