Jesse Watters spins facts beyond recognition with claims that Hillary Clinton paid to hack and frame Trump


Fox News host Jesse Watters falsely accused Hillary Clinton of paying hackers to break into former President Donald Trump’s computers and plant fabricated evidence that would frame Trump for collusion with the Russian government.

The elaborate scheme Watters described is a massive distortion of a Feb. 11 court filing that has attracted attention from conservative media in the week after it dropped.

The filing came from special counsel John Durham, selected by former Trump Attorney General William Barr to examine the reasons for the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Special counsel Robert Mueller led the initial investigation that culminated in a report published in 2019.

Watters claimed Durham’s work now implicates Clinton.

“If there was ever any doubt that Clinton was behind the Russia hoax, that’s officially gone,” Watters said on his prime-time show Feb. 14. “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.”

“Hillary broke into a presidential candidate’s computer server and a sitting president’s computer server, spying on them,” he went on. “There, her hackers planted evidence, fabricated evidence connecting Trump to Russia, then fed that doctored material to the feds and the media.”

None of what Watters said on that program about an effort to hack and frame Trump with fake evidence is borne out by Durham’s filing, which he cited. The document never even mentioned hacking.

Still, the narrative echoed elsewhere on Fox News, where talk of hacking and an offense “worse than Watergate” stretched across programs, according to TVEyes, a media monitoring service.

The chyrons on “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Feb. 14 focused on Hillary Clinton and special counsel John Durham’s investigation. (PolitiFact)

One of the first headlines posted to Fox News’s website inaccurately declared that the Clinton campaign paid to “infiltrate” Trump’s servers. The word “infiltrate” was never used in…

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