Factchecking Obama’s birth certificate press conference

Published April 27, 2011 4:00am ET



President Obama claimed that the reason he released his birth certificate today is because the issue had become a distraction. Specifically, he blamed the conspiracy for drowning out his speech earlier this month attacking Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity. Obama claimed:

two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.

That is just plain false. Poynter.org reports:

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