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He did not apologize or speak to his own role in spreading the falsehood, which many people see as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of America's first black president. Instead, Trump offered a curt admission tainted by yet another demonstrably false charge: that Hillary Clinton and her 2008 primary campaign "started" the racially charged smear.

Not exactly. The claim predates Trump's interest in promoting birtherism.

One of the first documented questions about Obama's provenance came in early 2007, when the right-wing Insight Magazine reported that researchers with ties to Clinton's campaign were trying to make hay over his schooling during the years he lived in Indonesia. The Clinton team denied this.

The rumor was that Obama attended a madrassa, or Muslim religious school. The connotation, at least at the time, would be that he had been educated in Islamist or radical anti-American ideology.

But even then, there was no suggestion Obama had been born outside the US.

There is no evidence that Clinton in 2007 or 2008 bolstered, supported or much less "started" the birther crusade.

And in recent years she has repeatedly blasted it, calling the movement "insidious" in a speech to supporters during an NAACP dinner in May. Last September, speaking to CNN's Don Lemon on the "Tom Joyner Morning Show," Clinton called the idea that she created the birther rumor "ludicrous."

"First of all," she added, "(the birther claims are) totally untrue. And secondly, you know, the President and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that."

Proponents of this allegation tend to point to a memo, written by Clinton pollster Mark Penn, and a conspiratorial email forwarded by a pair of campaign staffers in 2007.

He wrote: "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

However unsavory the sentiment, Penn, who is not working for Clinton's current campaign, did not at any point address Obama's birthplace.

Clinton never pursued Penn's notion as a line of attack. Later in the year, the campaign dismissed two staff members in Iowa who passed along an email that cast Obama as a Muslim agent bent on "destroying the US from the inside out."

CNN has attempted unsuccessfully to reach Asher for comment. He told his former employer, McClatchy, Friday that he met with Blumenthal in 2008, and that the newspaper chain dispatched a reporter to Kenya to investigate. Nothing came of it. He said there already had been stories published with the allegation before that meeting.

Some 2008 staffers told CNN that Blumenthal was not officially part of the Clinton campaign, and a CNN check of Federal Election Commission records shows no payment to Blumenthal from the campaign.

In 2007 and 2008, the birther conspiracy mostly took a backseat to another bogus tale -- one that suggested Obama, a Christian, was secretly a Muslim.

Clinton: "Of course not. I mean, that's, you know, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that."

Kroft: "And you said you'd take Senator Obama at his word that he's not a Muslim."

Clinton: "Right, right."

Kroft: "You don't believe that he's a Muslim or implying? Right?"

Clinton: "No. No. Why would I? No, there is nothing to base that on -- as far as I know."

Kroft: "It's just scurrilous --"

Clinton: "Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors that I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time."

But Clinton's use of five words -- "as far as I know" -- prompted outrage from many Obama supporters. Critics argued that they left the door open for unsavory innuendo.

Could Clinton have been more forceful in pushing back on the rumors? Yes.

Is there evidence that she or top campaign officials stoked the fire that Trump and assorted right wingers have openly and gleefully fueled in public for years? No.

Trump's decision to backtrack on the birther issue -- and pin it on Clinton -- is likely a campaign tactical move designed to improve his standing with moderate voters who might be susceptible to charges that Trump is racist.

The same survey found that 61% of Trump's own supporters did not subscribe to birther rumors, so the campaign likely considered that it had more to gain than to lose by dropping this as a wedge issue in his race against Clinton.

The rest is here:
No, Hillary Clinton did not - CNNPolitics.com