By Eugene Scott CNN
Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager rejected Donald Trump’s claim Friday that the campaign was responsible for the “birther” movement.
“The campaign, nor Hillary, did not start the birther movement. Period. End of the story,” Patti Solis Doyle told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
She did say, however, that a volunteer coordinator in Iowa in late 2007 “did forward an email that promoted the (birther) conspiracy.”
“Hillary made the decision immediately to let that person go. We let that person go. And it was beyond the pale, Wolf, and so not worthy of the kind of campaign that certainly Hillary wanted to run or that we as a staff wanted to run that I called David Plouffe, who was obviously managing Barack Obama’s campaign in ’07, to apologize and basically say that this was not coming from us. It was a rogue volunteer coordinator,” Doyle added.
“And David very graciously accepted my apology,” she added.
Doyle said she couldn’t recall whether the fired volunteer coordinator in question was a paid position.
She also said she is not aware of a memorandum written by Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster and Clinton 2008 strategist, that seemed to question the President’s Americanism.
“I don’t know exactly what he wrote, but certainly we never — the ’08 campaign — never promoted the birther conspiracy. Whether we took whatever advice was in that memorandum, it is clear by the campaign that we ran that we did not use it at that time,” she said.
Doyle also sought to dispel the rumors on Twitter Friday.
Clinton’s Republican rival, Donald Trump, has falsely accused her campaign of starting the “birther” movement, and while the former secretary of state has never publicly questioned Obama’s citizenship, some of her staff members did question Obama’s background during the 2008 Democratic primary fight.
Penn’s memo in March 2007, while not raising the issue of Obama’s citizenship, did identify Obama’s “lack of American roots” as something that “could hold him back.”
Reggie Love, the longtime traveling aide to Obama, wrote in his book that Clinton and Obama had a heated conversation about the notion that Clinton supporters were sending emails saying that he was a Muslim.
In a March 2008 interview with “60 Minutes,” Clinton said she took then-Sen. Obama’s word that he was not a Muslim, but when pressed if she believed he was, she replied, “No. No, there is nothing to base that on — as far as I know.”
In a statement Thursday night announcing that Trump believes Obama was born in the US, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said, “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.”
On Friday, the Republican nominee for the first time publicly said Obama was born in the US.
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