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. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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?”
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