Two weeks ago, Breitbart News broke a story about a biography written by a literary agency in 1991 that incorrectly claimed that their then-client, Barack Obama, was born in the African country of Kenya. In followup stories, we reported that the Kenya claim remained on the lit agency’s website until two months after then-Senator Obama announced his run for the presidency in 2007. In another followup written by a client of that same agency, we learned it was the standard practice of Dystel and Goderich for their writers to submit their own bios.
As our original story made clear, Breitbart News was in no way questioning where the president was born. What we did and still do question, though, is how the Kenya claim originated, how it remained a part of Obama’s biography for almost seventeen years, and what it might tell us about a sitting president who has not been vetted by the media and who therefore has been allowed to pretty much write his own life story.
But, predictably, other than dismissive wrist-flicking and assuming their natural position in defense of the president, the media all but ignored what quite obviously would’ve been considered a legitimate and important story were Obama a sitting president with an -R- after his name.
Until now.
Over the weekend, the whole of the MSM decided to put an end to the very bad news cycles the Obama campaign brought upon itself last week by conspiring to turn Romney’s relationship with Donald Trump into a full-blown narrative meant to put the presumptive GOP nominee on defense.
For whatever reason, Trump still isn’t convinced Obama was born in America, and one of the primary pieces of evidence he now cites to back his claim is the fact that Obama’s own literary agency apparently believed for over a decade that their client was born in Kenya:
“He’s a young man doing a book and he said what he believed to be the truth,” Trump told CNBC this morning. “It all wouldn’t matter, except if you’re born in a foreign country, you’re not allowed to be president, so you know this is a minor detail.”
And, lo and behold, the media has suddenly become very interested in our exclusive.
He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth,” Trump said about Obama’s birthplace, basing his assertion on a literary biography written for Obama that was recently unearthed by Breitbart.com. “The literary agent wrote down what he said… He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia… Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”
Evidently Trump didn’t get the Breitbart.com memo about the new framing of the whole “born in Kenya” thing. When even Arizona Republicans back away from the birth certificate questions, it’s time to move on.
Trump was referring a report last week from conservative website breitbart.com that showed the president’s literary agent erroneously claiming he was born in Kenya as part of a pitch for a book on race he never completed. The literary agent said last week that she was mistaken in making the claim.
ABC News even falsely claimed our story had been discredited:
Trump revived the false claims about Obama’s birthplace on Thursday, citing a discredited story about a literary agency that mistakenly listed that Obama was born in Kenya in a recently discovered catalog of clients that included the president.
But do you see what the media is doing here? Every single one of these articles is an attack on Mitt Romney for not doing the media’s bidding. The media wants to intimidate and bully Romney into repudiating Trump, so they crafted this intentional distraction.
So even though we uncovered a legitimate document from Obama’s not-so-distant adult past, that same document is now being used by the media to beat Romney up. Furthermore, the many questions that still surround the document — Did Obama ever see the bio? Did he ever proof it? How did the bio writer ever get the idea to begin with that someone born in America was born in Kenya? — remain unanswered because the media refuses to ask them.
Whether a sitting President of the United States who, as a grown man, (Obama turned 30 in 1991) might have spruced up his bio to look more exotic or allowed others to do it for him, is a legitimate line of inquiry — especially after what we’ve learned about Elizabeth Warren and most especially after the Washington Post declared relevant Mitt Romney’s high school days from almost a half-century ago. But our corrupt media has only found this story worthwhile as a weapon to use against Obama’s opponent.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC