ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The WikiLeaks disclosures, coming now on a daily basis, are such interesting reading that agents of the Clinton campaign are working overtime to divert attention from them, particularly the revelations in the emails of the campaign manager, John Podesta. Hillary insists that the hacking of his email account was sponsored, directed or financed by Vladimir Putin, who in this telling even rewrote them to reflect badly on both Mr. Podesta and Hillary. There’s no evidence of Russian connivance, just speculation.

Hillary characterizes Donald Trump as a swamp-dwelling wacko who, when he isn’t harassing or talking dirty about women, spins conspiracy theories from his imagination. She traces the “Obama wasn’t born here” story to Donald Trump, who did in fact embrace “birtherism” at the time that Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s ubiquitous hit man, was peddling “birtherism” to any journalist who would listen. Many did.

Mr. Blumenthal and his confederates worked fertile ground; the “Kenyan birth” story was the hottest tidbit in town as the Democrats gathered for their convention in Denver in 2008. Mr. Obama did not try very hard to squelch the rumor, then or for months afterward. Nor did the humbled remnants of the Clinton campaign, including Hillary herself, discourage reporters in pursuit of the rumor. Rumormongers abounded in Denver throughout that week.

The tranche of WikiLeaks memos provides credible evidence that her campaign seriously considered a full-court spread of the birther story, only later proved false, that Mr. Obama was in fact born in Kenya, his father’s native country, and not Colorado. WikiLeaks reveals that in 2008 Mr. Podesta received and forwarded a number of emails about a poll taken by a leading Democratic polling firm testing whether pushing the story that Mr. Obama was foreign-born would work for Hillary’s campaign.

Paul Begala, a Clinton loyalist who has always been ready to defend anything either Hillary or Bubba did or said, dismissed the story of the poll, taken at the beginning of the long Clinton-Obama struggle. The Clinton campaign was focused early in 2008 not on the general election, but on taking down the upstart senator from Illinois so he could not spoil a coronation.

Once the birther story grew legs, Hillary appeared on the CBS program, “Sixty Minutes,” where she was asked whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States as he claimed. She replied sweetly that he was, and added, “as far as I know.” An answer like this was intended to be taken by the unwary as “probably not.” The answer was markedly similar to some of the answers she gave to the FBI and others when she was peddling the story that she had never lied or done anything illegal in her extensive email correspondence.

Many Americans haven’t heard about the WikiLeaks disclosures because a part of the mainstream media, so called, has decided there’s nothing to see, just move along. Donald Trump has called out this media as part of a conspiracy, but it’s worse than that. It’s a vast left-wing media consensus.

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