AP FACT CHECK: Trump's bogus birth claim about Clinton

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — When finally coming around to the fact President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Donald Trump tacked on a dig at his White House rival.

The public record over the past decade undermines his attempt to blame the Democratic nominee for the origins of a conspiracy Trump peddled for years.

Trump, meanwhile, was for the past five years the primary propagator of the falsehood that Obama was not born in Hawaii in 1961, even though there was no serious question about Obama's birthplace even before the president produced his birth certificate in 2011.

Here's a closer look at evidence that is dubious at best, fails to tie the falsehood conclusively to Clinton herself and cannot compete with Trump's yearslong effort to undermine the legitimacy of the nation's first African-American president.

In an interview Sunday with CBS' "Face The Nation," Conway offered as a first piece of evidence an email that surfaced about a month before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses.

Obama and Clinton, then U.S. senators, were at that time locked in a fierce campaign as stars atop the Democratic presidential field.

"The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level," the email from an anonymous author stated.

Questions about Obama's place of birth did surface in an anonymous email in April 2008 that was circulated among some die-hard Clinton supporters, as Obama appeared headed toward the presidential nomination.

"The 'birther' thing was never an issue that mattered in any conversation, rising to the level where we had to address it," said Paul Tewes, a senior Obama campaign adviser in 2008.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures