Old News vs. Wrong News—Why Not Both?

There's a Marx Brothers movie—maybe Horse Feathers?—with a mook who has this face of invincible rectitude. What a shyster.

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist indicts

5 Media Lies About The Latest Special Counsel Revelations

Lie no. 1 is the claim that "it's just those crazed right-wingers" who think the Durham investigation uncovered evidence that somebody was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign before the campaign existed to "spy" on Trump Tower and the pinging with the Alfa Bank server thing.

Indeed, several writers are cited as calling this a rightwing "furor", from Charlie Savage at the New York Times through Brian Stelter at CNN to Hillary Clinton herself:

Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it's a day that ends in Y.

The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.

For those interested in reality, here's a good debunking of their latest nonsense.https://t.co/iYY8Uxuogx

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, 2022

And what makes it a lie? Cleveland doesn't cite any of the alleged liars:

Of course, while casting coverage of Special Counsel Durham’s investigation as the cries of cray-cray conservatives might resonate with their readers, as a substantive counter to the most recent revelations in the Sussmann case it falls flat.

It's a lie because it's actually true, as far as Cleveland can tell, but it "falls flat". Uh-huh.

Lie no. 2 is Savage's allegation that

The facts “also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time—raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims,” Savage wrote

In fact, that's a serious misquotation. Savage wrote that

the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims.

It's not that the "facts" involve dense and obscure issues. It's that the narrative is "mostly wrong", "misleading", or "outright misinformation", in other words consists not of fact but of lies, as Savage amply demonstrates in the rest of the article, and it's really hard for the reader to catch the lies, partly because of the density and obscurity of the subject matter.

Which doesn't mean the thing shouldn't be covered—Savage is covering it!—but Cleveland in making up her own lie about what Savage said is not revealing any lies on his part.

Lie no. 3 is Durham critics' allegation that Fox News was lying in its coverage when it claimed, as a kind of summary of the Durham filing, that

Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to ‘infiltrate’ servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing from Special Counsel John Durham found.

The critics note that the Durham doesn't find that the technology company infiltrated anybody, so Fox shouldn't have said that it did. Cleveland says this is a lie, although it is true,

At least on this point, the press members suffering from “media vapors” have a point: Durham did not say “infiltrate.” Rather, Kash Patel, a former chief investigator for Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, used that word in an interview with Fox News.... [and] [i]t is likewise true that the special counsel’s Friday filing did not claim that the “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia,” as Fox News headlined its coverage of the developments in the Sussmann case. Rather, it appears that Joffe voluntarily exploited his access to the data and received no compensation.

because it

does nothing to counter the serious allegations revealed in Durham’s latest filing revealed [sic].

because the allegation that Joffe infiltrated the Trump Tower and White House servers and got paid for his efforts isn't one of the serious ones, I guess, but I don't how to get from there to the conclusion that it's therefore a lie when you Fox's claim is false.

Let's just stipulate for the record that to "infiltrate" is to

enter or gain access to (an organization, place, etc.) surreptitiously and gradually, especially in order to acquire secret information.

Whereas Rodney Joffe, as Savage explains, 

did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats

suggested by the unexplained evidence of clusters of Russian-made cell phones in and around Trump Tower and the White House, on which he subsequently wrote a report for the CIA.

Lie no. 4 is the suggestion that, aside from the Trump Tower surveillance, Sussmann's and Joffe's activity with regard to the White House couldn't have been spying on Trump, because Trump wasn't at the White House. This was going on during the campaign, when as you'll recall Barack Obama lived in the White House.

The next narrative launched to minimize the significance of the revelations contained in Durham’s motion focused on the data Sussmann presented to the CIA purporting to show “that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.”

The data relating to the White House “came from Barack Obama’s presidency,” the Times reported, quoting two lawyers representing one of the researchers who aided Joffe.... 

But, Cleveland complains, it must have had something to do with Trump, because Durham's new filing says so:

As the motion explained, in providing the DNS data to the CIA, Sussmann told the government agents “these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”

In this case, the original liar may well be special counsel John Durham, who never mentioned the White House connection until this week. It's a reference to an analysis carried out in 2015-16 with which Trump had nothing to do, unrelated to the Alfa Bank pinging issue:

The Georgia Tech folks were using public DNS data to help a military research organization analyze a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network, and nobody suggests they were acting illegally. Durham does suggest that Joffe obtained the White House DNS logs surreptitiously, which would be illegal, but Joffe claims it was an open part of the malware investigation. And all of this took place during the Obama presidency anyway, so nothing from any DNS searches of the White House could have anything to do with Trump. And Joffe has never been charged with anything.

If, to the contrary, Durham wants us to believe that Trump associates were, being "infiltrated" in that investigation, he's got some explaining to do. Unless Trump henchmen were hanging out around the Obama White House, why would they have been using their YotaPhones there? What is Durham suggesting? If they were, I want to know about it!

But it's true that it was the Obama White House Sussmann and Joffe were concerned with. It's not a lie. The lie is the one slyly hinted in Durham's filing and now being told all over the place by John Ratcliffe, Mark Meadows, and others including Donald himself, that they were looking at the Trump White House:

Then former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows weighed in, also tweeting over Techno Fog’s 10:25 a.m. tweet: “They didn’t just spy on Donald Trump’s campaign. They spied on Donald Trump as sitting President of the United States. It was all even worse than we thought.” 

Finally, Patel issued a lengthy statement via Twitter that claimed “the Hillary Clinton campaign and her lawyers masterminded the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President of the United States.” (Durham’s filing actually did not claim the Clinton campaign directed this.) Patel separately told Fox News “the lawyers worked to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower and White House servers.”

and then

Trump issued a hyperbolic statement on the filing, saying it “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign.” He said the “scandal” was far bigger than Watergate and “in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

And that's the lie Cleveland is encouraging by fogging the issue.

Lie no. 5 is Savage's allegation that this is all "old news", though he said that it was "mostly wrong or old":

“But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news,” Savage wrote early in his Times coverage.... The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.”

On the contrary, says Cleveland, what about this?

Nor did the Times report, as Durham alleged, that Joffe and his associates, “exploited this arrangement by mining the [Executive Office of the President]’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

No, I'm afraid not. For one thing, Savage did report in the Times story that Durham alleges it, though he doesn't comment on whether it's true or not:

Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

So that's one more of Margot's lies.

Durham promises that he's going to establish that in court, but he doesn't give us any clue about the evidence (except by saying that it goes back to 2014, when Trump was even less president than he was in 2016). This may not be old news, but it sure looks like wrong news, which is "mostly" what Savage is talking about. You're lying about that too.