President Trump was lying when he claimed in 2011 that he had paid private investigators to go to Hawaii to dig up information on former President Barack Obama's birth certificate, Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer, told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday.
In his new book, Disloyal: A Memoir, Cohen writes about Trump pushing the false claim that Obama was not actually born in Hawaii. Cohen told Maddow that when Trump began talking endlessly about the conspiracy theory, he "saw that his poll numbers and his popularity and the number of times that he's gracing the cover of the newspaper is increasing." Trump didn't actually believe any of it, Cohen said, but "he doesn't care what he says, he doesn't care who gets hurt, so long as he wins."
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