In a February 12 statement, former President Donald Trump falsely asserted that new findings from special counsel John Durham “provides indisputable evidence that [his] campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign.” Soon after, right-wing outlets picked up the story, echoing Trump’s lies as an opportunity to revive a years-long obsession with unproven claims that former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton illegally spied on the Trump campaign. However, this hysteria ginned up by conservative media appears to actually be a combination of “mostly wrong or old news.”
Murdoch-owned outlets especially have been pushing this narrative. Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have all repeated the “Trump was spied on” angle in response to the pretrial motion filed by Durham against Michael A. Sussmann, a former Democratic Party lawyer.
According to the motion, Sussmann had previously told intelligence officials from the CIA that another one of his clients, tech executive Rodney Joffe, had informed him that someone using a Russian-made smartphone was connecting to Trump Tower and the White House networks. Right-wing media took this aside and skewed it to mean that Joffe and Sussmann “infiltrate[d]” Trump Tower and the White House, spying on Trump for the Clintons. Durham’s findings never used the word “infiltration,” and there’s no evidence Joffe or his company were ever hired by the Clintons. The Trump Tower computer in question was “not owned or operated by the Trump Organization” and had been “administered by a mass marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients.” Additionally, the investigation’s data covered only President Barack Obama’s tenure years before Trump even occupied the White House. Regardless, that did not stop Murdoch’s right-wing empire from pushing that angle.
Fox and other Murdoch outlets claim the Durham “findings” are “bombshell” news showing Clinton is a “certified political criminal”
- On Sunday, Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy boasted about the coverage Fox gave the story and wondered aloud if other networks will pick it up: “We appropriately gave this the bombshell treatment it deserves. Will it even be covered on the other networks?” Co-hosts Will Cain and Pete Hegseth compared the investigation to the Mueller Report, falsely asserting that Mueller’s investigation “came up with nothing” while Durham’s resulted in “three or four indictments” with “probably more to come.”