Governor Mike Pence appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, where their Presidential Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz relentlessly grilled him about Donald Trump’s involvement in the “Birther movement.” Under pressure, Pence defended himself by reminding Raddatz that members of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign leaned on questions of citizenship to take jabs at then Senator Barack Obama. But Raddatz wasn’t having any of it, “I want to talk about the facts. What's the proof of that?”
At first, Pence tried to stick to the issues by noting that the American people don’t care about the birther issue and are not talking about it. “Look, I understand why Hillary Clinton and many of her defenders in the national media want to distract attention from her dishonesty and her disastrous record on the foreign stage,” Pence stated, “I promise you, the American people see through all of this.”
But Raddatz kept pushing Pence to talk about it, often cutting him off as he spoke. “Governor Pence, you said yourself Hillary Clinton is at fault,” Raddatz said, putting words in his mouth, “And you just said it yourself, what is the proof, because we can't find any. And fact-checkers have checked into that.” Pence tried to call attention to past media reports that pointed to those facts, but Raddatz countered claiming, “The reports of people in my industry say there is no proof they can find that Hillary Clinton had anything to do with it.”
Raddatz seemed as though she was trying to defend Clinton by trying to make it all about what she had said, while, in fact, it was what people associated with her 2008 campaign were saying. The proof of this comes from the liberal Politico who, in April of 2011, found that the start of the birther conspiracy:
Lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama.
Politico’s report is backed up by an article from The Daily Beast, which chronicled how Linda Starr went on a personal crusade to damage Obama with the birther issue, after he secured the Democratic nomination for president. Starr was a Clinton supporter and a Texas delegate for her at the time.
What makes Raddatz’s twisting of words and facts even more disturbing, is that she will be co-moderating the October 9 Presidential Debate with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.