The Durham Report: When Fox News Doesn't Like a Story it Just Invents a New One
A condensed overview of 20 hours of Fox News for the week ending 5/21/23
Last week Fox News anchors took a story about the Durham report, an exhaustive investigation that yielded next to nothing, and turned it into a vast conspiracy by Hillary Clinton to destroy former President Donald J. Trump and sow mistrust in the American people about his presidency.
Most of what was revealed in the 306-page report was special counsel John Durham’s personal criticism how the FBI and the DOJ handled the investigation led by Robert Mueller into possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
Durham’s critique of the agency was largely a rehashing of a Department of Justice inspector general injury from 2019. Although the inspector general’s report was quite critical of the FBI it ultimately found the agency did not act with political bias and was justified in opening an investigation into Trump.
The entire special counsel inquiry led by Durham only resulted in one criminal conviction of a low-level FBI agent who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email and two humiliating acquittals.
Former President Donald J. Trump once claimed special counsel John Durham would uncover the “crime of the century.” When the dust finally settled, the American tax payers were out $6.5 million for a largely useless partisan investigation meant to retaliate against Trump’s perceived enemies.
Fox News just created its own reality and decided the Durham report completely exonerated Trump and everyone involved in his campaign despite several criminal convictions and guilty pleas related to the investigation. Durham also didn’t negate the Mueller report or make any claims about anyone’s innocence or guilt.
To watch this unfold was frustrating to say the least. Although Fox News did discuss other topics the Durham report dominated everything. Because this story is so vast I’m going to break down some highlight from the week.
Shows I covered last week
Fox & Friends - 1st hour
The Five
Fox News Tonight
The Ingraham Angle
The Five - Monday Night Meltdown
One of the themes I picked up on almost immediately was the use of the same type of language Trump has pushed since the day he lost the 2020 election.
Greg Gutfeld started off the discussion.
“And so we had a half a decade hoax that infected and undermined every institution because we made to believe this person is evil. And then people make fun of people who are skeptical about an election. Why shouldn't they be skeptical about an election? When the DOJ and the FBI and the mainstream media and the tech companies and the Chamber of Commerce are all in on the same thing, why shouldn't the election be called into question?” said Gutfeld.
It seemed like Gutfeld was supporting the latest version of The Big Lie that Trump was somehow robbed of a fair election in 2020. It wasn’t rigged voting machines supplied by Smartmatic or Dominion but a false story pushed by a nefarious intelligence agencies.
Jesse Watters brought up treason.
“We already knew that they framed Donald Trump for treason. We knew the facts that Hillary created the Russia collusion hoax. We knew Barack Obama was briefed on crooked scam to link them to Russia, and we knew that they fabricated evidence to spy on the Trump campaign. Obama administration officials spied on the Trump campaign illegally based on a hoax that crooked cooked up and then they cleaned it all up with the Mueller investigation, which was a fake investigation designed to tee up an impeachment,” said Watters.
Watters made a number of false statements in his short rant. The investigation into Trump was not started because of anything Hillary Clinton did.
In May 2016, during a night of heavy drinking in a London bar, George Papadopoulos, a young advisor for the Trump campaign boasted to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Two months later after emails involving the Clinton campaign started leaking online the Australian officials passed on this information to U.S. intelligence.
John Durham did not dispute this in his report. George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and served 14 days in prison.
The Obama administration did not spy on the Trump campaign. This was also not included in the Durham report. It’s a conspiracy theory started by Trump himself that has largely circulated in right-wing media.
Judge Jeanine Pirro weaved in the Hunter Biden scandal.
“We have an out-of-control intelligence agency, 51 intelligence agents lying about Russian disinformation. We've got DOJ, FBI. They're not afraid of anything anymore, because none of them are having their feet held to the fire. And is The New York Times or The Washington Post going to return the Pulitzers?” said Pirro.
Then Martha MacCallum read a statement by Trump.
“I bet they want to make sure that we mention here former President Trump, this is his first statement about this. He says ‘I, and much more importantly than American public, have been victims of this long running and treasonous charade started by the Democrats, started by Comey. There must be a heavy price to pay for putting our country through this’”, said MacCallum .
The Primetime Meltdown
Will Cain tried his best to be a poor facsimile of Tucker Carlson in the 8 p.m. slot but failed miserably. Cain also brought up Fox’s favorite all purpose villain - Hillary Clinton.
“But what we learned today with the long anticipated release of the Durham Report is that the FBI worked as a disinformation shop for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Special counsel John Durham's report shows us that the same people that lecture you today about threats to democracy nearly destroyed it by using our intelligence agencies to target the then Republican nominee for president and then later sitting president, Donald Trump. The entire story begins not by rigging the election against Donald Trump, though. It starts with rigging an election in support of Hillary Clinton,” said Cain.
Cain also repeats language that is used to criticize Trump for his role in the January 6th riot on the U.S. Capitol when he used the phrase “threats to democracy.”
Will Cain really got creative with this one. He basically was claiming the intelligence agencies manipulated the 2016 election in such a way that Hillary Clinton lost even though she was supposed to win.
Later that evening Laura Ingraham took things even further on “The Ingraham Angle.”
“And it is arguably worse than Watergate when you look at the facts . . . powerful forces in Washington, powerful forces abroad were hell bent on destroying Donald Trump's political career before it really began. These are the same forces who claimed to this day to be the great defenders of democracy.
But the truth all along was that they were the real threats to democracy. They wanted to keep power by any means necessary. And they also wanted to send a message to anyone like Donald Trump, anyone like him who comes along, Beware. Ron DeSantis might think about this tonight because they will come for him to in some way, shape or form,” said Ingraham
I’m not sure who Ingraham is referring to when she used the phrase “powerful forces abroad,” but she was implying a global conspiracy to keep Trump out of power.
She continued.
“I promise you that. Now, why they're going to do it? Because there are no repercussions. This is also why Democrats will never let go of January 6th, because that's another pretext for weaponizing the federal government against the people. If not, we should expect more of the same a government that acts more like an occupying force that cavalierly abuses the public trust whenever it senses strong opposition,” said Ingraham.
Her guest Stephen Miller, former advisor to President Trump, echoed her sentiments.
“That here we are seven years later, after they store for they stole four years of a presidency and they tried to undermine and overthrow democracy, there has been zero reform, zero accountability, zero consequence for the people who attempted this coup,” said Miller.
This was projection at its finest. Ingraham was actually arguing that Democrats were weaponizing the riot on January 6th in order to overthrow democracy.
Nothing that Cain or Ingraham said in either monologue was included in the Durham report.
Will Cain - This is what Caused the Ukraine War!
Since I’ve started covering Fox News I’ve seen the network blame Hunter Biden, President Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris for the war in Ukraine. Will Cain provided a new layer to the regional conflict while working in Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“The Democratic Party succeeded in demonizing Russia, making them our primary enemy on the world stage. Not the Chinese Communist Party and bringing us to the verge of nuclear war in Eastern Europe as we conduct a proxy war in Ukraine. Not only that, in entire three years of presidency was derailed. The country was pitted against itself. And everyone now has bought into lies and disinformation while pretending they are the warriors against disinformation.
And in the end, after all of that, not only has no one been held accountable. But this, I think, would be the third smoking gun in the dead body. That is the trust in the United States institutions. Not only were they not held accountable, they were so emboldened by this entire story that they did the same thing again in 2020 with Hunter Biden's laptop.”
Fox & Friends and the Sweet Morning Television Spin
The next day on “Fox & Friends,” Ainsley Earhardt also repeated a lot of the same themes echoed by her co-workers.
“Big political smear all to influence an election and so many people. It was revealed yesterday what we already knew and what many people were already saying and had been for years that the FBI knew about it and was lying about it. The Clinton campaign was lying. Adam Schiff was the intel community, and this all dates back. Remember Christopher Steele and his dirty dossier?
They were funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to say that there was collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. And that was called that investigation was called ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’ And that's what Durham was looking into to see if they had any evidence that there was collusion. And he says there wasn't.”
Earhardt was reading some of this directly off of written notes in her hand which makes me think some of these thoughts may not have been her own.
Fox News has repeatedly misled its viewers about the source of the Steele dossier since it was leaked to the press.
The dossier was a 35-page series of research memos produced by a firm called Fusion GPS and written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent. The memos purportedly showed evidence of a relationship between the Trump the and Russian government.
Fox News neglects to tell its viewers that GPS was originally hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, to dig up dirt on Donald J. Trump during the primaries. The Free Beacon at the time backed Republican Senator Marco Rubio for president.
The Washington Free Beacon stopped funding the project in May 2016 when it looked like Trump was going to win the primary.
After Trump secured the nomination, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the D.N.C. and its law firm Perkins Coie hired GPS to compile opposition research into Trump, his business dealings and any possible relationship with Russia.
It was then that GPS hired Christopher Steele due to his extensive experience working with Russian sources. Most of what was found in the dossier has been discredited but Fox leaves out the true origin of the research materials.
Jesse Watters - We Need MORE Corruption in the FBI
On Tuesday Jesse Watters openly advocated for corruption.
“I was walking into Fox today and I see this car run at the bottom of the screen and says, Durham says the FBI treated Trump and Hillary differently. Really mean Hillary bleached her server and smashed Blackberries with hammers,” said Watters.
Watters has made the reference to bleaching servers several times. Hillary Clinton’s lawyer used free software called BleachBit to delete data from her personal server. Actual bleach on a metal server wouldn’t do much of anything except evaporate.
Watters continued.
“Then they tried to put Trump in prison for obstruction. Think about that. Yeah. So at the end of the day, you have Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton coming back from Europe, China and the Middle East with boatloads full of cash. And Trump is the bad guy. Now, the Republicans are out there saying that, oh, we get in there, we need to get rid of the FBI.
That's never going to happen. What they need to do is this. They need to appoint a loyalist as FBI director. Kind of the way that JFK appointed his brother to run the Justice Department. You need a loyalist or you need some guy that you have so much dirt on that he wouldn't even try anything. If I could say one other thing I meant to say,” said Watters.
Fox the King of Defamation Lawsuits Complains about Pulitzers
The co-hosts on “Fox & Friends” complained at length that other media companies got awards for covering Trump’s possible collusion with Russia while Fox News knew the real truth all along.
I can’t fit the entire segment due to the length of this piece but this is the abridged version.
Brain Kilmeade: How about this? Ten Pulitzers awarded to the Washington Post's ten over The New York Times, The George Polk Awards, actually to LIU hands that out to The Washington Post. The whole staff is like ten people's names, their Edward R. Murrow, two more granted to The Washington Post. So it was won and also a Peabody, too, inside Putin's Russia . . . n Will the judges go back and say upon further review, I like my blue ribbon back.
Ainsley Earhart: They're not going to give them back because they're going to say they're going to put this on the resume. I want a Peabody, I want a Pulitzer. I want a George Polk Award or Edward R. Murrow Award. And if I remember correctly in local news, when we were all applying for these types of things, if we had a, you know, a great story, if we wanted to apply for one of these awards, you could it was a lot of work.
Steve Doocy: You earn it for great story. Ultimately, though, the story was fake.
Ainsley Earhart: It was a lie.
Fox News anchors railed against other media companies that were awarded Peabody and Pulitzer awards for their work covering The Mueller Report, a special counsel investigation into possible collusion between the Russia and the Trump presidential campaign.
This is the same network that has made the largest defamation settlement payout by an American media company in history. According to legal briefs released as part of the lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News executives and anchors knowingly promoted false stories about the 2020 presidential election.
In a matter of months Fox News will face a similar lawsuit filed by Smartmatic which could result in an even larger loss.
Fox News also seemingly completely blocked out the bipartisan Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee report that resulted in a 1,000 page document published in August 2020. According to reporting by The New York Times,
“The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.
The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was stocked with businessmen with no government experience, advisers working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment and other friends and associates Mr. Trump had accumulated over the years. Campaign figures, the report said, “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
Jessica Tarlov was the ONLY person who accepted reality
After her co-hosts ranted and gnashed their teeth the lone liberal on “The Five” finally brought the story back to reality. She was interrupted frequently throughout this exchange but I’ve included only her words as it’s hard to follow with the crosstalk.
“We can't survive the redo of that. And frankly, Donald Trump got some of his best moments out of the quote. Russia collected the American people. He fed off of it. . . .Trump, who is a showman, benefited by being a victim of this.
And that's why he continues to proliferate the image that he is the victim. He did it last week. Okay. Here's the thing with the John Durham investigator. If all of what Jesse just said is true, why are there no new charges? Why did someone put out a 306 page report? I think that's what it was.
And everyone then just goes home. . .Maybe they're just losers, right? Maybe there isn't truth to what you've been arguing all along here by just be kind because you charge the report. So two things about the report. The report says that there's truth and that the point of this was to find whether any person or entity violated the law.
John Durham could say all this, but he doesn't find any legal lawbreaking. Otherwise he would bring new charges. He tried three times. He has one low level conviction and two acquittals. Basically came up with bupkis. After four years of work . . .I think that they should have told the Trump campaign if there were people that were trying to influence it.
Yeah, but the only person who actually lost out by the FBI was Hillary Clinton. When Jim Comey got up there 11 days before the election and said that they had a second investigation, opened into her emails and didn't know what we just know they didn't care if this was some new statement that just came out,” said Tarlov.
Stories Fox News Ignored
I compared the 20 hours of Fox News that I analyzed last week with five hours of the PBS NewsHour. These are the stories that PBS covered that Fox News did not.
Turkey is set to have a runoff in its presidential election on May 28th as no candidate got more than 50% of the vote. Turkish citizens living abroad have already begun voting.
The official death toll in Myanmar from Cyclone Mocha climbed to 145 and could continue to rise as rescuers and aid groups gain access to hard hit areas. The military government’s tight grip on the country has made it more difficult for aid organizations to assess the full extent of the damage.
A 78-year-old American citizen was sentenced to life in prison in China on charges of spying. The details of the charges against John Shing-Wan Leung have not been publicly released.
In North Carolina the state legislature voted to override Governor Roy Cooper’s veto on a bill that would ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Thailand’s opposition parties formed a coalition and won landslides in the last elections challenging the current conservative military backed government. It’s difficult to know who will lead the country as the military junta that seized power in 2014 changed the constitution to solidify its own power.
A new report by the Asian American Foundation found that 80% of Asian Americans do not feel they fully belong and are accepted, while more than half don't feel safe in public places.
The Museum of Natural History in New York City unveiled its newest wing - a center for education and research. The latest renovation took 10 years to build at a cost of $465 million. It includes sustainable architecture and interactive tools.
Two months after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for various Russian officials for war crimes, Russia placed ICC’s British prosecutor, Karim Khan on Russia’s Interior Ministry’s wanted list.
Russia agreed to extend its deal to allow Ukraine to export grain to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Both Turkey and China played a role in its extension as both countries benefit from Ukrainian exports.
Fighting has intensified in Sudan between two warring factions battling for control over the country. According to the UN over 1 million people have been displaced - 843,000 have been displaced internally and around 250,000 people have fled the country.
The European Parliament adopted a new EU Regulation aimed at tackling deforestation requiring companies to undertake due diligence into the source of a wide range of commodities, including cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm-oil, rubber, soya and wood, to ensure that they have not been obtained as a result of deforestation.
According to a new report by Amnesty International 2022 saw the highest number of recorded executions since 2017, primarily due to increases in just a handful of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Iran executed three more prisoners who were involved in anti-government protests.
Bashar al-Assad, the brutal dictator of war-torn Syria was welcomed back to the Arab League, a move that prompted international outrage. Many blame al-Assad for the bloody civil war in his country that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands.
At a Senate hearing last week top executives of recently failed banks largely refused to take responsibility for their banks’ failures. They also attempted to defend paying out large bonuses and salaries when they knew their companies were facing insolvency.
PBS produced a segment that explored the Biden administration’s teacher apprenticeship program that was rolled out last fall. The program is meant to help lower income students become teachers and to lure new people to the field of education.
The Supreme Court turned down a request a block to an Illinois law banning certain types of semi-automatic weapons. The move is temporary as the law is pending appeal.
Ousted former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s house was surrounded by police who claimed he was hiding violent terrorists. Khan called the claim crazy.
The battle for medication used for abortion entered the 5th circuit court. If the drug is banned by the court it could have devastating consequences to people seeking abortion and for the availability of other drugs approved by the FDA.
A New JAMA Report showed excess mortality and shorter life spans in the Black community when compared to the general population. After initial progress, excess mortality and years of potential life lost among the U.S. Black population stagnated and then worsened, indicating a need for new approaches.
Urban populations slightly grew last year with the largest increases in Texas and Florida while declines in New York City and Los Angeles were cut in half. The largest growth area was in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX. Fox aggressively promotes the false notion that Americans are fleeing urban areas in large numbers.
Ships from the U.K., French and U.S. navies transited the Strait of Hormuz next to Iran last week as a show of force to keep the seaway safe and open after Iran seized two oil tankers. Iran made no move to interfere with the military ships.
Democrats maintained control of the Pennsylvania legislature after winning a special election in the Philadelphia suburbs.
At least 14 people died and thousands were left homeless after flooding caused by extreme rain in Northern Italy.
Thousands of Israeli nationalists, mostly Orthodox teens and young men, marched through the main Palestinian thoroughfare of Jerusalem’s Old City. Some of them shouted “Death to Arabs” and other racist slogans. The demonstration was to mark the 56th anniversary of “Jerusalem Day,” which marks Israel’s capture of the Old City.
PBS produced a segment about the growing popularity of home schooling.
By The Numbers
Coming up…
This week I’ll be covering “Fox & Friends,” “The Five,” “Fox News Tonight,” and “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
I’m also working on a video that will be a breakdown of the congressional investigation into the FBI whistleblowers. I wanted to include that in this week’s newsletter but I couldn’t fit it in.
Good job! 👍🏼