‘The New York Times’ Fact Checks Bogus Claims From Durham Report

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In recent days, the country has learned a number of things about the twice-impeached ex-president who lost the popular vote twice, Donald Trump. Upon leaving the White House, Trump took with him boxes of documents, at least some of which allegedly contained classified information, to Mar-a-lago with him, committing the same crime Trump and his supporters wanted to “lock up” his 2016 political rival, Hillary Clinton, over. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, cut all ties with the Trump Organization, saying that no financial institution (including banks who consider giving loans to Trump) should consider his financial filings trustworthy. In addition to all of this, the January 6th Select Committee continues its investigation into Trump’s incitement of an attempted insurrection against the government he was sworn to protect.

What is Trump and the right-wing media to do? What else but come up with a fake scandal involving Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday, The New York Times called out right-wing media for their latest “scandal,” which involves a court filing from Bill Barr-appointed special counsel John Durham. That filing, they said, proved that the Clinton campaign had spied on Trump using Russian-made cell phones called Yoto phones.

According to The New York Times:

‘The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.’

Donald Trump immediately took to the internet to issue a statement, accusing the “lamestream” media of refusing to cover the biggest scandal in the world (they didn’t and it isn’t). He insisted that they are refusing to cover it because they work for the Democratic Party and, of course, Hillary Clinton.

His accusations are false. The majority of the report is old news, news that had already been reported by more mainstream media outlets. The rest of the news was being twisted by right-wing media and did not indicate that anything they were trying to push as “scandalous” had occurred. Nevertheless, Trump went on rants about it.

‘The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place. This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.’

 

Perhaps the most interesting of the information left out by right-wing media was the time period in which the reported information was covering. Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, attorneys who represent the man who helped to analyze data connected to the Russian cell phones that were used in an attempt to connect to networks in the White House and to Trump Tower, said that what right-wing media has conveniently left out: none of this happened during Trump’s presidency.

‘What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong. The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.’

Featured image screenshot via YouTube