WAR OVER TRUMP SPYING. Anyone who has followed political journalism for more than a minute or two could predict how some big outlets would cover the revelation that operatives connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign spied on the Trump campaign. Once legacy media journalists saw the story reported on Fox News, and especially when they saw former President Donald Trump promoting it, they immediately thought: How can we knock this down?
Normally, when news breaks — and the spying information was contained in a court filing by Justice Department special counsel John Durham — a news organization first reports the news. Then it might publish one or more analysis pieces, reaction pieces, and follow-up stories. But first, they report the news.
That didn’t happen this time. The New York Times, for example, skipped the news story and went straight to the analysis. And it was really more analysis and commentary, with this lengthy and oddly worded headline: “Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track; The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.”
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
That’s a lot to put in a headline. First, the New York Times said the story was so complicated that perhaps it shouldn’t be reported at all. Yes, they really said that. Stories like the Durham filing, the Times wrote, “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.”
Then the article discussed some of the particulars of the Durham filing, which were contained in a motion in Durham’s false statements case against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked on behalf of the 2016 Clinton campaign. First, a note on what those particulars are. As I described in an earlier newsletter, in that filing, Durham reported that beginning in July 2016, a tech executive named Rodney Joffe (he is unnamed in the court papers, but the name has been widely reported) worked with the Clinton campaign’s law firm to “mine internet data,” some of it “non-public and/or proprietary” — that means secret — to search for information that could be used to claim a Trump-Russia connection. Among the secret data that was “exploited,” according to Durham, was internet traffic from Trump Tower, from Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Joffe’s company, Durham says, “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement” — a government contract — to provide tech services. They then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s [internet] traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
The point of the Times story was to suggest that Durham’s filing was somehow wrong. But the first thing the Times did was to argue that the coverage of the filing was wrong. Indeed, some coverage claimed the filing said operatives working with a Clinton-paid law firm had “infiltrated” the White House, when in fact, the filing did not use the word “infiltrate.” So that was a mistake. On the other hand, it was a mistake in the coverage, not in Durham’s filing.
The Times also said that Trump himself had exaggerated the filing’s contents in his various press releases on the story. No surprise there. On the other hand, the exaggerations were Trump’s, not Durham’s.
Then, the Times argued that some of what Durham said was old news, that it had actually been reported last October in … the New York Times. But that was not an attack on the accuracy of Durham’s filing.
Finally, the Times got down to it, claiming that the spying had not targeted the White House, which is, of course, part of the Executive Office of the President mentioned in the filing. Again, the Times framed its critique in terms of the “right-wing” coverage: “Contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era,” the Times wrote. In fact, the Times said, citing lawyers involved, “the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.” According to lawyers cited by the Times, it all happened before Donald Trump became president, contrary to what the “right-wing” said.
But in its effort to prove the “right-wing” wrong, the Times did not grapple with the actual text of the Durham filing. And the filing said, right there in Paragraph 6, that Sussmann — remember, he is the lawyer working for the Clinton campaign who is under indictment for making false statements — used the data gathered by the tech company and told the CIA that the data — those DNS logs — “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.”
Is the reader supposed to believe that Trump and/or his associates were using Russian cellphones in the vicinity of the White House sometime during Barack Obama’s presidency and that a tech company connected to a Clinton campaign-paid lawyer picked it up? Should the reader perhaps believe Sussmann lied to the CIA? At the very least, the Times should have included the relevant portion of the filing, which appears to contradict the assertion that it all happened during Obama’s term.
The Times’s bigger problem was that it set out to knock down the “right-wing” coverage of Durham’s filing without first reporting on Durham’s filing. And since the Times is quite influential in some journalistic circles, its arguments were echoed throughout many cable TV discussions.
Then came a postscript. In a new motion, Sussmann’s lawyers accused Durham of seeking to “politicize” the case, “inflame media coverage,” and, ultimately, “taint the jury pool.” Sussmann asked the court to strike the relevant portions from Durham’s motion. Durham obviously had to respond, and in his response, he wrote, “If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information.”
The Times read that argument and said, aha! Durham is distancing himself from all that “right-wing” coverage! Not long after, the Times published a story headlined, “Durham Distances Himself From Furor in Right-Wing Media Over Filing; The special counsel implicitly acknowledged that White House internet data he discussed, which conservative outlets have portrayed as proof of spying on the Trump White House, came from the Obama era.” It does not seem to have occurred to the New York Times that the New York Times might be one of those media outlets that either overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted the facts in Durham’s filing.
Here’s the key: Directing attention to “right-wing” coverage of the Durham filing allows some media outlets to ignore the substance of Durham’s filing. But it does not change the substance of Durham’s filing. And in the future, the special counsel will undoubtedly reveal more about what really happened.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
