Why did Fox News suddenly stop lying about Hillary hacking Trump servers?
Hillary Clinton went on offense against a fusillade of attacks from Donald Trump and his defenders among rightward talk hosts and media outlets, as she took aim specifically at Fox News.
“Fox leads the charge in their accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again,” Clinton said in a speech before New York state Democrats. “And as an aside, they are getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks.”
Last week, John Durham, the special counsel who has been investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, raised some new allegations in a court filing. Conservative talk hosts seized on it as a bombshell that showed that Clinton’s campaign spied on Trump. The New York Post had a cover on Tuesday with the headline “Hillary the Spy,” and a Fox News chyron read “Hillary Is The Real Insurrection” during Jesse Watters’ show.
In fact, according to multiple fact checking stories from outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, Durham’s allegations, which involve an internet security expert working for the U.S. government and a law firm that did work for Clinton’s campaign, were old news, not as significant as they seem, or potentially misleading. Yet media on the right ran with it, characterizing it as a Watergate-level scandal, or even greater.
A FoxNews.com story claimed that Durham alleged that lawyers from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 had paid to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House, in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to federal government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia. The word “infiltrate,” however, comes not from Durham’s filing but from commentary from an ally to Trump, Kash Patel.
Watters, meanwhile, claimed that “Durham’s documents show that Hillary Clinton hired people who hacked into Trump’s home and office computers before and during his presidency, and planted evidence that he colluded with Russia. Yeah. You heard that right.” But Durham does not make that allegation in his filing. Politifact rated Watters’ claim “false.”
Clinton’s reference to “actual malice” has legal meaning. That is the threshold that public figures like her would have to meet in order to prove libel claims. This past week, Sarah Palin lost her lawsuit against The New York Times, with a jury ruling the publication was “not liable” and a judge concluding that her legal team had not shown evidence of “actual malice.”
Fox News carried some of Clinton’s speech but cut away before her comments about the network. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But on Hannity on Thursday evening, host Sean Hannity said, “It’s called discovery and it’s called depositions. Malice, really?It’s called news. Hillary, we invite you to bring it on.”
In her speech, Clinton said, “It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get. But now his accountants have fired him as investigations draw closer to him, and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up, doesn’t it?”
Durham has himself suggested that the information in his filing has been blown out of proportion.
In a filing on Thursday, Durham wrote, “If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information.”
Durham’s filing last week was in the case of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who he has accused of lying to the FBI about who he was representing when he brought information to the FBI in 2016 about possible links between Donald Trump and Russia. Sussmann denies the claims, and is seeking to have the charges tossed out.
Durham said that his filing was intended to show that Sussmann, whose firm had hired the internet security expert Rodney Joffe, held a conflict of interest because Joffe’s work was for the White House. The suggestion among media outlets on the right was that Joffe was feeding information about Trump administration to Sussmann, but attorneys representing a data scientist involved in the work said that it was information gathered during Barack Obama’s presidency, according to The New York Times.
