Fact-Check: No, Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager Did Not Push the Birther Controversy

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2008 admitted that the campaign had launched the Birther movement. 

Fact-Check: HALF FALSE

It is true that the Birther movement started among Hillary Clinton’s supporters. And, as Breitbart News reported, Clinton’s former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, admitted that at least one member of the campaign had helped propagate the rumor (though she said that person was fired.) It is also likely true that Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal shopped the story to reporters. And it is unknown how much involvement Hillary Clinton herself had with the movement.

However, it is a stretch to say, as Trump did, that Hillary Clinton herself personally started the Breitbart movement, and it is incorrect to claim that her campaign manager corroborated that particular accusation.

(The real truth about the Birther rumor, which the mainstream media choose to ignore, may be that Barack Obama started it himself by allowing his literary agent to claim, for nearly two decades, that he was born in Kenya.)