Ayers never thought that anyone would examine The Obama Mythology outside of Cook County. Inside of Cook County, nobody would expect the truth anyway.
We don’t know what Ayers or Zero thought; to me it looks like a perfect legal CYA - “we never said it was really really true!”.
They are now clearly in an official fallback position - “so what if it turns out he was foreign born? It doesn’t matter, he didn’t know” etc.
What they do NOT want anyone to look at is parentage.