President Trump’s recent pick for Treasury Department spokeswoman repeatedly spread conspiracy theories on a personal blog suggesting former President Obama was secretly a Muslim, CNN’s KFile reported Thursday.
Monica Crowley, who was appointed by Trump last week as assistant Treasury secretary for public affairs, made the baseless claim on posts and at least one tweet between 2009 and 2015, according to CNN.
{mosads}She also reportedly suggested that Obama was trying to convert the U.S. to Sharia law and that conspiracies about his birth certificate were “legitimate concerns.”
“If the birth certificate were never a big deal, why did No Drama Obama wait nearly 3 years before releasing it? Why endure and stoke all of the drama? To make those raising legitimate concerns about his origins and policies look like kooks? Maybe,” Crowley wrote in an April 2011 post.
“For over 2 1/2 years, questions have been raised about Obama’s origins and background,” she said.
Trump was one the most prominent proponents of the birther movement, which falsely held that Obama, who was born in Hawaii, is not actually an American citizen.
In a 2013 blog post, Crowley suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood was dictating American foreign policy.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is a sworn enemy of the United States. In Obama, they have found an ally. What does that say about Obama? I’m sure you can figure that one out,” she wrote.
“What it says about America’s national security is that it looks increasingly like it’s being dictated BY that sworn enemy,” she continued.
Media Matters for America, a left-leaning advocacy organization, reported on Crowley’s blog posts earlier this month.
It also noted that she has called the press, which her job will include working with, “dishonest, hostile, biased, rude fake news.”
Crowley previously bowed out of a bid to join the National Security Council as a press secretary in 2017 after CNN’s KFile reported that her book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened,” and her Ph.D. thesis contained instances of plagiarism.
The former syndicated radio host, columnist and Fox News contributor denied those reports and instead went to work later that year for political analyst and consultant Douglas Schoen, who at the time was working for Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch.
Neither Crowley nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment on the uncovered posts.