Paul Singer

USA TODAY

Donald Trump said Friday, "Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it."

Neither of those things is true.

The story of where the "birther" movement was born has been explored almost as much as where Barack Obama was born.

It is true that during her 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton's pollster said the candidate could distinguish her Midwestern background with Obama's "lack of American roots," since he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. But the campaign never questioned his birthplace.

It is also true that it was aggravated Clinton supporters who first raised the claim that Obama was not born in the U.S. But again - Clinton had no involvement in this.

"There’s no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with bogus claims that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus was ineligible to be president," wrote FactCheck.org earlier this year.

Fact check: Hillary Clinton wasn’t a ‘birther’

And while Trump says he "finished it" by generating enough publicity that Obama ultimately released his birth certificate, that was by no means the end of the conversation. Trump himself has raised questions about whether Obama's birth certificate is real, and told CNN in a 2015 interview he did not know whether Obama was a U.S. citizen.