CLAIM

Hillary Clinton and/or members of her 2008 presidential campaign started the "birther" movement questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the U.S.

RATING

det-red.gif   FALSE

ORIGIN

On 16 September 2016, after years of being the most visible and outspoken exponent of “birtherism” — the notion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and thus his presidency is illegitimate and his allegiances suspect — GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump stepped up to the podium at a televised campaign event and completely  reversed  his stance on the matter — but not before trying to lay blame for the long, drawn-out smear campaign on someone else.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”

A press  release  issued by Trump’s campaign staff elaborated on the accusation:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign  first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show  Morning Joe  admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.

In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

The statement is correct when it suggests that the claim that Hillary Clinton invented birtherism isn’t new. It had been  made  in 2015, for example, on the MSNBC  Morning Joe  program:

Though it’s true that the specific allegation that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. first reared its head during the 2008 presidential race, rumblings about Obama’s “otherness” had been percolating since long before that. In 2004, a political gadfly named Andy Martin  issued  a press release calling Barack Obama a “complete fraud” who had “misrepresented his heritage” in his memoir,  Dreams From My Father , and “is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.” The theme was pushed further in December 2006 by conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel, who published an  article  entitled “Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim,” which stated that “Obama has a ‘born-again’ affinity for the nation of his Muslim father, Kenya.” In March 2007, Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn  proposed  attacking Obama on the basis of his “lack of American roots.” And, in December 2007, a Clinton volunteer county coordinator in Iowa was  fired  for forwarding an  e-mail  making the by-then familiar claim that Obama is a Muslim.

The idea that Obama was  born  elsewhere, specifically Kenya, was first floated in April 2008, according to a 22 April 2011  Politico   article  by Ben Smith and Byron Tau on the origins of birtherism:

That theory first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous e-mail questioning Obama’s citizenship.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,” asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.

That Hillary Clinton supporters circulated such an e-mail isn’t in question, but the claim that that’s the moment the birther theory “first emerged” simply isn’t true. The likeliest point of origin we’ve been able to find was a  post  on conservative message board FreeRepublic.com dated 1 March 2008 (which, according to a  report  in  The Telegraph , was at least a month before Clinton supporters got on the e-mail bandwagon):

DO YOUR HOMEWORK, MY FRIEND!