How Fox News manufactured a Hillary Clinton spying scandal

[Nevilledog]

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Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
The end game here, beyond “scandals” being good for ratings, is to minimize Trump’s corruption and lawlessness by making it seem as though Democrats are even worse

aaronrupar.substack.com
How Fox News manufactured a Hillary Clinton spying scandal
With the walls tightening in on Trump, desperate times call for desperate segments.
6:17 PM · Feb 16, 2022

https://aaronrupar.substack.com/p/fox-news-hillary-clinton-durham-spying?r=ex4o

*snip*

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.

You have to read all the way to the bottom of the Fox News article to learn that the “infiltrate” line actually comes from former Trump administration official Kash Patel, who told Fox News in an interview that the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia” — an explosive allegation that in no way is backed up by the document in question. But Fox News referenced it in the headline to misrepresent the story as worse for Clinton than it really is.

The coverage has only gotten more dishonest from there. On Monday night, both Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity told a fairy tale about the Clinton campaign hacking the Trump campaign and White House, with Hannity describing the Durham revelation as “the biggest election and presidential spying scandal in the history of this great country.”

*snip*

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[Kingofalldems]

2. Kick this for Trump's secret buddies.

[robbob]

3. Good read

Bookmarking for later…