Miriam Goderich, who was identified as the person who edited the text of the 1991 brochure listing Barack Obama as having been born in Kenya, has issued a statement that seeks to accept personal blame for the "mistake" but which only raises more questions. The statement was sent to Political Wire:

"You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me -- an agency assistant at the time.  There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.  I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."

Okay, fine. But a fact-checker does not make up text. A fact checker receives a text written by someone else, and then determines whether the factual assertions are based on the verifiable truth.

So the question remains: who submitted the text that was insufficiently fact-checked by Ms. Goderich? Who, in other words, first offered the assertion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya?

One must ask who on earth other than the client himself, Barack Obama, would have had the data upon which to assert that Barack Obama was born in Kenya? If that person was not Obama, then why would such person believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Recall that at the time, Obama occupied no political office, and had been in the public eye primarily because he was the first black person elected president of the Harvard Law Review. It seems very likely that  Barack Obama himself supplied the information. Who else would be in a position to make such an assertion? Who could have supplied such "mistaken" information to the literary agent?