Washington, Dec 6 (IANS): Two years after saying President Barack Obama had not met an uncle who faced deportation, the White House acknowledged he did live with his father's half-brother for a "brief period of time" in the 1980s.

The president's uncle, Onyango Okech Obama, was granted permission Tuesday by a federal immigration judge to stay in the US, where he has lived illegally for the last five decades.

In his testimony before the judge, Obama's uncle mentioned that then-student Obama had stayed with him in Cambridge for three weeks after he was accepted into Harvard law school back in 1988.

The White House staff based its 2011 claim that the two had never met on a review of the documentary record - including Obama's memoir - and had not asked the president himself, Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters Thursday.

"Back when this arose, folks looked at the record, including the president's book, and there was no evidence that they had met. And that was what was conveyed. Nobody spoke to the president," he said.

"When Omar Obama said the other day and there were reports that he had said the other day that President Obama, back when he was a law school student, had stayed with him in Cambridge, I thought it was the right thing to do to go ask him."

"Nobody had asked him in the past, and the President said that he in fact had met Omar Obama when he moved to Cambridge for law school and that he stayed with him for a brief period of time until his, the President's, apartment was ready," Carney said.

After that period, Obama and his uncle "saw each other once every few months while the President was in Cambridge" but eventually "fell out of touch," he said.

"The President has not seen Omar Obama in 20 years, and has not spoken with him in roughly 10 years," he said.

Carney also repeated that the White House had "absolutely zero" involvement in the uncle's deportation case.