The “paper of record” printed a whopper on Friday. Responding to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) public release of the newly declassified appendix (Durham annex) to John Durham’s 2023 Special Counsel report, the New York Times deliberately lied to their readers. The full annex can be viewed here.
The lightly redacted annex contained intercepted emails — that Durham believed to be authentic — between Leonard Benardo, a top official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and Julianne Smith, a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It also included other documents from the “Clinton Plan” intelligence, which further bolstered the case that the former secretary of state intended to portray then-candidate Donald Trump as an agent of Russia to distract voters from the FBI’s investigation into her use of a private server for government business.
Durham is quoted in the annex saying that “there is evidence to believe the Clinton Plan intelligence was authentic and that the Clinton campaign did carry out such a dirty trick.”
The annex also states that investigators were unable to “determine definitively whether the purported Clinton campaign plan [intelligence]…was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety.”
Here’s how the Times chose to report the story: ‘Clinton Plan’ Emails Were Likely Made by Russian Spies, Declassified Report Shows.
Their sub-headline read: “An annex to a report by the special counsel John H. Durham was the latest in a series of disclosures about the Russia inquiry, as the Trump team seeks to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files.”
Aside from the Left’s compulsion to deem any unfavorable news an attempt to distract from Trump’s “Epstein scandal,” there is nothing in the Durham annex that suggests the emails were “likely made by Russian spies.”
This story feels eerily reminiscent of the October 2020 public letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials, claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story bore all the classic hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. That letter was organized and published for one reason only: to provide then-candidate Joe Biden with cover to deflect questions about his family’s foreign influence-peddling operation during the upcoming debate with Trump. And it did exactly that.
The Times reports that the purported email from July 27, 2016, included in the annex “was most likely stitched together by Russian spies.”
The article says, “It also shows how the special counsel, John H. Durham, went to great lengths to try to prove that several of the emails were real, only to ultimately conclude otherwise.”
Durham did not conclude otherwise. As mentioned above, he believed the documents were genuine, but was unable to authenticate them.
[The article is behind a paywall, but it can be viewed here.]
The Times’ article is not journalism, but propaganda, which many conservatives were happy to point out.
In the social media post below, conservative writer Mark Hemingway called out the Times, sharing a post from fellow conservative Hans Mahncke that highlights another section of the annex that directly contradicts the story in the Times.
In a separate post, Mahncke points out the double standard that every communication from Trump or one of his associates was scrutinized, while “Durham wasn’t even allowed to access the Soros Foundation emails tied to the Hillary email cover-up and the scheme to smear Trump because the disgraceful partisan hack Beryl Howell, masquerading as a judge, blocked him.”
In the X post below, the Federalist’s Sean Davis says the Times is “straight up” lying and provides some pretty compelling arguments for why that is so.
1) The Durham annex never states at all that the specific intelligence was “fabricated.” It says the opposite, that his office was never able to “determine definitively whether the purported Clinton campaign plan [intelligence]…was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety.”2) At the time the intel which Ben Smith says was “fake” was received, John Brennan took it so seriously that he briefed Obama about it, took notes about it, and stashed the notes away in his safe.3) James Comey specifically went under oath and cited the Clinton plan intelligence as one of the major reasons he chose to unilaterally usurp the authority of Loretta Lynch and to declare that the U.S. government would not charge Hillary Clinton for her use of an illegal private email server.4) Comey told Congress that he believed the Clinton plan intelligence was “genuine.” “So far as I knew at the time, and still think,” Comey testified on December 7, 2018, “the material itself was genuine[.]”5) FBI general counsel James Baker said he was “greatly concerned” about the intel and specifically Lynch’s reaction when confronted with it. Durham’s report said Baker “did not dismiss the credibility” of the intel reports. Andrew McCabe likewise said he was struck by Lynch’s “odd” reaction to the allegations.6) Everyone on earth knows the Clinton campaign launched a scheme to falsely claim that Trump colluded with Russia. This new claim that somehow it was a fabrication that the Clinton campaign ran an op to falsely tie Trump to Russia is beyond insane. It’s sociopathic.
And finally, journalist Matt Taibbi, a former editor at The Rolling Stone, who is not a conservative but an honest reporter, has concluded the obvious in a Friday post on his Substack website: “No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up.”
According to Taibbi:
This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail.I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge. Now, there’s no doubt. Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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