Hillary Hints at Defamation Lawsuits Against Trump and Fox News, Says Attacks ‘Awfully Close to Actual Malice’
In a speech delivered to the New York State Democratic Convention on Thursday, Hillary Clinton suggested she may be the victim of defamation at the hands of Donald Trump and Fox News. She even said that “they’re getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks.”
“Actual malice” is a legal standard that a public figure must show was present when bringing a libel case. The Supreme Court has ruled that “actual malice” means a defendant made a defamatory statement “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Trump and Fox News have long been critical of Clinton. Lately, they have seized upon a filing by Special Counsel John Durham to claim that Clinton spied on Trump while he was a candidate and president. One Fox News host even falsely stated that Clinton hired people to plant evidence in Trump’s servers in order to flag to federal authorities. These claims are wildly inaccurate.
Addressing the convention, Clinton told attendees not to get “distracted” by “some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook.”
She added,
By the way, they’ve been coming after me again lately, in case you might have noticed. It’s funny. The more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get. So now his accountants have fired him, and investigations drop closer to him, and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up, doesn’t it?
Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they’re getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks. But as I said, don’t get distracted. Don’t let the extremes of any or either side throw us off course. Focus on the solutions that matter to voters, not the slogans that only matter on Twitter.
An article published on FoxNews.com that helped spur the “Hillary spying” narrative features a misleading headline declaring, “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia, Durham finds.”
The lede paragraph further stated,
Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing from Special Counsel John Durham says.
However, the Durham filing does not contain the word “infiltrate” as the Fox News headline suggests. Rather, those who’d read on would find that word actually came from Trump loyalist Kash Patel.
The lede has since been edited to read, “Durham found” instead of “Durham says.”
Watch above via NY1.
