Barack Obama Lived with the Uncle He Was Believed to Have Never Met

You just know he’s this kind of roommate. 

The White House has revealed that contrary to earlier reports that the two had never met, Barack Obama and his uncle, Onyango “Omar” Obama, actually lived together in Cambridge around the time the former attended Harvard Law. Duh, Obama would have told everybody this if . . . someone had asked him about it, seems to be the administration’s mea culpa—quasi culpa?—here.

“Their relationship came into question Tuesday at the deportation hearing of the president’s uncle, Onyango Obama, in Boston immigration court,” The Boston Globe reports. Onyango Obama told the ladies and gentlemen of the immigration court that the current U.S. president couch-surfed at his pad or whatever for a few weeks back in the 80s. Was Obama the elder cool about sharing his beer and making himself scarce if Obama the younger brought a girl home? This was not indicated in court.

A simple case of using secondary sources accounts for the original misinformation: “On Thursday, a White House official said the press office had not fully researched the relationship between the president and his uncle before telling the Globe in 2011 that it had no record of the two meeting,” according to the paper. “This time, press office staff members asked the president directly, which they said they had not done in 2011.”

To be fair: it is entirely possible to share an apartment with someone for a period of weeks without having met them. Many of the happiest Craigslist-facilitated living situations have exactly this set-up.