Fox News Stops Covering Hillary Spying on Trump Story After Spending All Week Attacking Media For Ignoring It

Anyone watching Fox News this week was told that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been caught spying on former President Donald Trump. This was reported across many Fox News programs as fact, with some hosts adding exotic frills to the story. More reputable news outlets were quick to pour cold water on the assertion. Some even called out Fox News for being either stupid or willfully misinforming their viewers.

The evidence for Fox News’s breathless and repeated “worse than Watergate” claim was a late Friday filing from Special Counsel John Durham that focused on one-time Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman.

A good example of Fox’s sensationalized coverage were these comments from Jesse Watters, made on Monday:

Durham’s documents show that Hillary Clinton hired people who hacked into Trump’s home and office computers before and during his presidency, and planted evidence that he colluded with Russia.

Yeah. You heard that right. Hillary broke into a presidential candidate’s computer server and a sitting president’s computer server, spying on them. There, her hackers planted evidence, fabricated evidence connecting Trump to Russia, then fed that doctored material to the feds and the media.

Durham’s filing did not show this – at all. What’s more, as New York Times reporter Charlie Savage pointed out, the right-wing media narrative surrounding the filing was “mostly wrong or old news.” Indeed, the Times had reported on it last year.

This didn’t keep Fox News from continuing to insist a scandal was afoot. The network even had the temerity to call out the rest of the media for ignoring this alleged bombshell: Fox News media report Howard Kurtz called out his competitors for not covering the story, though it was never made clear what exactly the story was. Oops.

But late Thursday, the story took another turn, as Durham responded to Sussman’s filing to dismiss the case, and added some clarity to the misreporting.

Savage wrote about the new filing, saying Durham “distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.”

The key statement from Durham’s most recent filing reads:

If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information.

That statement was read in full by Bret Baier on Special Report Thursday night in advance of a remarkably muted panel discussion. Since then, the Fox News insistence that Clinton had been caught spying on Trump has nearly completely abated. That’s a rather stunning turn from the obsessive, nearly wall-to-wall coverage this non-story received over the past week.

In the past six days, John Durham was mentioned 219 times on Fox News, according to TVEyes. But as of 11 a.m. today. his name was mentioned only once by Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends, and it was in the context of Hillary Clinton being asked a question by a reporter.

So what happened? Mediaite reached out to Fox News to ask if the network no longer felt the bombshell that Hillary Clinton spied on Trump was newsworthy, or if they no longer believe that it’s true. Fox News has not replied.

In a column published earlier this week, I asked how real journalists could compete with a network such as Fox News that was so comfortable reporting falsehoods. The fact that the network has apparently ceased covering a story that they got so unbelievably wrong, without any public statement acknowledging it, just proves the point I made in that column.

What an incredibly embarrassing moment for Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.