Tag Archive for: trump
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…
Trump says Durham’s probe will expose ‘the crime of the century’
Donald Trump claims Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the former president’s ties to Russia revealed the alleged spying by Hillary Clinton‘s campaign was ‘treason at the highest level.’
‘It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place – and I called this a long time ago – you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century,’ Trump said in an exclusive interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
‘This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.’
The former president claimed he ‘didn’t have any’ insight into the allegations outlined in Durham’s February 11 court filing until it was made public, but noted that the Department of Justice official found ‘things far bigger than anybody thought possible.’
Durham alleged that Clinton’s presidential campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ and exploit servers at Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment, a ‘particular health care provider’ and the White House to ‘establish an inference and narrative’ that would tie Trump to Russia.
The filing also accused Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of bringing Trump-Russia allegations that ‘relied, in part’ on traffic assembled by the servers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Durham was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate possible misconduct within the U.S. government as it investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and any ties to the Trump campaign.
Donald Trump (pictured in January 2022) claims Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the former president’s ties to Russia revealed the alleged spying by Hillary Clinton ‘s campaign was ‘treason at the highest level’
In a section of the filing titled Factual Background, Durham argued those involved with the infiltration of the servers were ‘mining traffic and and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.’
The former president – who alleged ‘people were suspicious that something was going on’ during the 2016…
How a battle over Trump computer accusations is playing out in court
A long-running fight over accusations of computer links between Donald Trump and a Russian bank has intensified recently, shedding new light on how the government uses obscure Internet data to hunt for hackers and underscoring how the legal battles rage on regarding the 2016 presidential race.
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The computer data dispute centers on an allegation that surfaced at the very end of the campaign — that a server tied to the Trump Organization was in repeated contact months earlier with a server for Russia-based Alfa Bank. The claim was based on records from the Domain Name System, or DNS, a kind of digital phone book that matches domain names, usually a jumble of words, to Internet protocol addresses, which are numbers. Such records show when one computer seeks out another, but the logs don’t explain the substance of any communication.
When the claim first surfaced, some computer researchers argued that the DNS data, while not definitive, indicated human communications between the Trump Organization and Russia. Other experts dismissed that idea, saying the nature of the data made it easy to create a fake trail.
The fight over what the Alfa Bank computer data did or didn’t show largely faded from public view. But it roared back to life this fall.
In September, special counsel John Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Democrats, on charges that he lied to the FBI in 2016 about who his client was when he brought the bureau information about the Alfa Bank computer allegations. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.
Separately, Alfa Bank is suing a number of unknown hackers — “John Does” — who the bank claims fabricated data to “create the false appearance of a covert communication channel between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.” As part of that lawsuit, the bank has sought to subpoena the researchers who initially raised concerns about Alfa’s DNS records.
[Researcher who was primary source of Steele dossier arrested, charged with lying to FBI]
Lawyers for some of those researchers argue Alfa Bank’s suit is an improper effort to use information from Durham’s investigation to help Russian interests better understand…