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In 1991, Obama’s literary agency, Acton & Dystel, printed a promotional booklet which misidentified Obama’s birthplace, and stated that Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii”.
This error was later included in a biography that remained posted to their website until April 2007. The booklet’s editor said that this incorrect information, which was not widely discovered until 2012......21 years later..... had been her mistake and not based on anything provided to her agency by Obama.
Conspiracy theories about Obama’s religion appeared at least as early as his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign in a press release by Illinois political candidate Andy Martin, and, according to a Los Angeles Times editorial, as Internet rumors.
From the start of March 2008, rumors that Obama was born in Kenya before being flown to Hawaii were spread on conservative websites, with the suggestion that this would disqualify Obama from the presidency.
In April of that year, some supporters of Hillary Clinton circulated anonymous chain emails repeating the same rumor;[40] among them was an Iowa campaign volunteer, who was fired when the story emerged.These and numerous other chain e-mails during the subsequent presidential election circulated false rumors about Obama’s origin, religion, and birth certificate.
On June 9, 2008, Jim Geraghty of the conservative website National Review Online suggested that Obama release his birth certificate.
Geraghty wrote that releasing his birth certificate could debunk several false rumors circulating on the Internet, namely: that his middle name was originally Muhammad rather than Hussein; that his mother had originally named him “Barry” rather than “Barack”; and that Barack Obama Sr. was not his biological father, as well as the rumor that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen.
In August 2008, Philip J. Berg, a former member of the Democratic State Committee of Pennsylvania, brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against Obama, which alleged “that Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya.”
In October 2008, an NPR article referred to “Kenyan-born” Senator Barack Obama. Also that month, anonymous e-mails circulated claiming that the Associated Press (AP) had reported Obama was “Kenyan-born”.
The claims were based on an AP story that had appeared five years earlier in a Kenyan publication, The Standard.
The rumor-checking website Snopes.com found that the headline and lead-in sentence describing Obama as born in Kenya and misspelling his first name had been added by the Kenyan newspaper, and did not appear in the story issued by the AP or in any other contemporary newspaper that picked up the AP story.
In 2012, the far-right website Breitbart published a copy of the promotional booklet printed by Acton & Dystel in 1991.
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