How Fox News manufactured a Hillary Clinton spying scandal

Most of the Fake News resides on the other side of the aisle....and the public knows it

Seems as if the leftists are blaming the messenger. John Durham isn’t on the FNC payroll.

..."It’s been a bad month for Trump. He’s under mounting legal pressure thanks to progressing criminal investigations in Georgia and New York, his longtime accounting firm just dropped him in a highly suspicious manner, and he’s been in the news for mishandling classified information so egregiously that the DOJ might have to get involved.

But he still has something very important going for him — Fox News.

Instead of covering Trump’s scandals — which they succeed in ignoring almost completely — Fox News/Business is desperately trying to turn reality on its head by manufacturing a scandal about Hillary Clinton spying on the Trump campaign and White House.

If you think that sounds too absurd to take seriously, you are correct. But the right-wing network isn’t about to let facts get in the way of its preferred narrative. And they’re accusing other outlets who aren’t going along with them of being part of a coverup.

Let’s start with a quick look at the relevant facts. A new court filing from John Durham, the special counsel appointed by then-AG Bill Barr to investigate Trump’s investigators, alleges that “a tech executive [Rodney Joffe] ‘exploited’ his access to computer data at the Trump White House to find ‘derogatory information’ about President Donald Trump” and his connections with Russia, as NBC puts it. Joffe then passed that information along to a client, an attorney associated with the Clinton campaign named Michael Sussmann. Sussmann then passed it along to the CIA in February 2017 without disclosing his connection with Joffe.

The “derogatory information” in question did not involve hacking or any other sort of possible criminal activity. It was the product of Joffe’s lawful access to domain name system (DNS) data. So, ultimately, this is not a big deal. You can argue that Sussmann, who’s one of only two people to face charges in connection with the Durham probe, should’ve been more transparent. But nothing going on rises anywhere near the level of “SPYING” or being “far worse than Watergate.”

But in its never-quenched thirst for Clinton scandals, and doubtless wanting to deflect from the all the bad news floating around Trump, that sort of hyperbole is exactly what Fox News is going with. After Trump released a statement on Saturday reacting to the Durham filing by suggesting that unnamed people associated with the Clinton campaign should be put to death (“in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death”), Fox News sprang into action.

They did so by sexing up the story in a remarkably dishonest way. The headline of Fox News’s big online writeup of the Durham revelation claims “Clinton campaign paid to 'infiltrate' Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia, Durham finds.” But in reality the word “infiltrate” appears nowhere in Durham’s court filing, so characterizing it as a “finding” of his is misleading to put it charitably."...