The New York Times poured a bucket of ice cold water on the fire which has torn through conservative media over the past 72 hours — the filing from special counsel John Durham which many on the right are using to claim that Hillary Clinton’s campaign spied on former President Donald Trump.

In an analysis authored by Charlie Savage, the Times swatted away the key claims being made by Trump and his media allies.

“[T]he entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies,” Savage wrote.

Durham’s filing purported to have new revelations surrounding an indicted cybersecurity attorney named Michael Sussman with longtime ties to Democrats. Sussmann has been indicted with lying to the FBI by not presenting a conflict of interest to the FBI when he gave them information tying Trump to Russia. The indictment alleges that Sussmann claimed he was acting as a good samaritan when he gave the FBI his tip, and did not disclose a connection to the Clinton campaign.

Sussman had obtained his information from a technology executive named Rodney Joffe, who was a client. The filing said, “the government will establish that among the Internet data [Joffe] and his associates exploited was domain name system (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to “(i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).”

The purportedly new information from Durham’s latest filing led some outlets to claim the Clinton campaign was spying on Donald Trump. The Times called out those reports.

“Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to ‘infiltrate’ a White House server,” Savage wrote. “The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.”

Savage added:

For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, 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.

The full analysis can be found here. Mediaite’s Michael Luciano also examined some of the hype around the story and separated the fact from fiction.

The post NY Times Assesses Durham-Mania in Right Wing Media: ‘Mostly Wrong or Old News’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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