Hillary Clinton on Wednesday criticized former President Trump and Fox News for “spinning up a fake scandal” over special counsel John Durham’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Clinton tweeted. “The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.”
Clinton also shared a Vanity Fair article that she said included “a good debunking of their latest nonsense.”
In a court filing last week, Durham, who was appointed by former Attorney General William Barr as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, claimed that tech entrepreneur Rodney Joffe had used nonpublic government domain name system data to look into supposed links between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
The filing was part of a case against Michael Sussmann, a former attorney for Joffe who worked on behalf of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Durham has accused Sussmann of lying when he told the FBI in 2016 that he was not representing a client when presenting data that potentially established a link between former President Trump’s business and Alfa Bank based in Moscow.
Durham’s filing alleged that Sussmann got the relevant information from Joffe.
Trump quickly reacted to the filing and claimed the lack of media attention on the filing was indicative of “how totally corrupt and shameless the media is.”
“Can you imagine if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President? All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement,” said Trump.
However, as the Vanity Fair article shared by Clinton noted, Sussmann’s conversation with federal authorities had already been reported on last year, and Durham had not claimed that the White House had been infiltrated or that the Clinton campaign had paid Joffe.
The court filing also did not state that the White House data that had come under scrutiny had come from the Trump administration.