Today we get a series of outright lies from the Republican candidate for president of the United States, in a self-aggrandizing statement about his history of promoting the grotesque right wing racist Birther conspiracy theory:

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.

In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. 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. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

Mr. Trump is now totally focused on bringing jobs back to America, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, taking care of our veterans, introducing school choice opportunities and rebuilding and making our inner cities safe again.” – Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor

Trump didn’t “bring this ugly incident to its conclusion.” Not at all. In fact, he continued to push the Birther conspiracy theory long after Obama’s long-form birth certificate was released in 2011. The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick compiled some of Trump’s tweets to prove this:

Yup definitely resolved in 2011 pic.twitter.com/kXy8g5rLBs

— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) September 16, 2016

There’s more at Media Matters. The simple fact is that Trump has been promoting this absurd irrational right wing fantasy for many years. He built his entire political career on it. And he used lies to do so, saying he had sent “investigators” to Hawaii (he didn’t), and saying he had an “extremely credible source” who told him the birth certificate was fake (he didn’t).

And he’s also lying about Hillary Clinton being the “first [to] raise this issue,” because Hillary Clinton never said or suggested Obama was born outside the United States. It never happened.

At LGF we’ve been fighting against Birtherism for many years, and last year we did some deep research into the origin of Birtherism, discovering what seems to be the first public mention of the theory at far right discussion forum Free Republic on March 1, 2008. Bottom line: the Birther conspiracy theory came from the right wing.

Trump’s self-serving statement is a lie from start to finish. The GOP nominee for president is a dishonest egomaniac.