On the March 2 edition of his Spotify podcast, host Joe Rogan once again spread a right-wing lie to his millions of listeners, baselessly claiming that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign hired people to hack the Trump campaign “while he was president” and plant “evidence that tried to implicate him in the shady dealings with Russia.”
Rogan, along with numerous right-wing media outlets, wildly misconstrued a pretrial motion filed by special counsel John Durham which alleged that a lawyer linked to the Clinton campaign shared internet traffic data from networks near the White House and Trump Tower with the CIA. In reality, Durham’s filing does not allege that the Clinton campaign hired the lawyer nor does it provide evidence that the data were collected during Trump’s presidency.
Rogan has recently faced widespread backlash for spreading bigotry, medical misinformation, and right-wing lies on his Spotify podcast. Despite this, Spotify has determined that its newly published platform rules, which the company claims have been internally in place “for years,” do not prohibit numerous dangerous and unfounded claims spread on The Joe Rogan Experience. For example, Rogan has suggested that social acceptance of trans people is a sign of “civilizations collapsing,” claimed that the omicron variant is “essentially just a cold,” and falsely asserted that mRNA coronavirus vaccines are “really gene therapy”
During the episode, Rogan falsely claimed that the Clinton campaign “hired people to hack into [Trump’s] campaign while he was president.” After making this claim, Rogan asked his podcast producer Jamie Vernon to look into the story, saying, “Google what has been proven.”
Vernon then displayed a Business Insider article on the topic that stated, “The filing does not allege espionage. It does claim that a Clinton-linked lawyer obtained non-public data from the White House and Trump's servers.” Rogan ignored the story and said that “this is definitely a biased website.” Vernon later pulled up an MSNBC article on the topic that noted it was a “fake scandal” but the two, of course, did not note this fact. Vernon also showed an opinion article in The Hill from Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich which did not substantiate Rogan’s claims about the Clinton campaign. Nonetheless, Rogan continued to ignore the facts of the story and lamented that “It’s just fucked. We’re fucked. It’s a lot of mess.”