Who was the first 'birther'?

Bio used by Barack Obama’s literary agency beginning in 1991 and ending in 2007 – the year he declared his candidacy for president.

Donald Trump was wise not to take the advice of some of his staff and political allies by apologizing to Barack Obama for questioning his eligibility for the presidency and, yes, even whether he was born in the U.S.

Trump was hardly the first "birther." Neither was I. Nor was my colleague Jerome Corsi. And neither was Hillary Clinton.

That honor belongs to one person and one person alone – Barack Obama.

Obama went to extreme lengths to conceal his past. And, indeed, if he was born in the U.S. and was eligible to serve as president, he certainly did his best to create the mystery that led to the question being asked.

Years earlier, he billed himself as having been born in Kenya.

Maybe he thought it was a sexy way to sell books, get a foreign student scholarship, attract women – who knows?

But it's a fact that he boasted about it. (See the image of his bio used by his literary agent to get a contract for his first book.)

Would that not be reason enough to investigate his background?

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Then Obama refused to release his birth certificate during his entire first term in office, despite the controversy he had ignited years earlier.

It was eventually released for two reasons:

WND Books published "Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi and it went to No. 1 on Amazon, while Donald Trump pounded Obama, demanding release.

In other words, Trump was one of the primary forces behind Obama's capitulation. (Parenthetically, I will add that the document has never been authenticated as genuine.)

I won't go into the voluminous amount of evidence of a cover-up, or all the valid reasons for questioning not only where Obama was born, but whether he had even retained citizenship when he and his mother left the country to move to Indonesia and enroll him in a Muslim school there over the objections of U.S. immigration officials concerned, at the time, about the status of his citizenship status.

I won't go into his missing college records, which might shed light on whether Obama had claimed to be a foreign student, as many at Columbia assumed.

I won't go into the fact that his supposed "birth hospital" in Hawaii steadfastly refused to acknowledge publicly that simple fact.

Personally, I thought it was important to establish that Obama met the minimal constitutional litmus test for eligibility. For that I was vilified, called a racist, lampooned, besmirched, called a conspiracy theorist and worse.

During all that time, I never drew any conclusions about his birthplace – just that there were questions that needed to be answered.

It's worth recalling that in the 2008 election, the only "birther" issue to be raised by any media was the question of John McCain's eligibility. That one was driven home by the New York Times and had to be settled by a U.S. Senate investigation and unanimous vote that he was.

So, when I watch the TV talking heads exchanging ignorances on this subject, pardon me if I simply turn off the tube in disgust.

Excuse me for not answering at least a dozen requests for interviews from the global media last week when Trump admitted Obama was born in the U.S. – something he actually has no evidence to conclude with any certainty.

Instead, I prefer to thank Trump for standing up courageously in 2010 to force the issue. He had nothing to gain at the time. But, it probably led directly to his eventual nomination by the Republican Party for the presidency in 2016.

And that's the real story of who the first "birther" really was. It was Barack Hussein Obama.

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