NewsBusters: Sunday Shows Ignored Durham Allegations of Spying on Trump

FILE - This 2018 portrait released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows Connecticut's U
U.S. Department of Justice via AP

NewsBusters reported Sunday that the establishment media’s Sunday morning news shows ignored the explosive allegations Friday by Special Counsel John Durham that Hillary Clinton operatives spied on Donald Trump — even in the White House.

As Breitbart News reported on Saturday:

Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in federal court in Washington, DC, on Friday alleging that Hillary Clinton’s political allies paid a contractor to spy on Donald Trump — both as a candidate, and as president — using cell phone data.

The motion was filed in the case of former Clinton Campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who is charged with lying to the FBI about whether he was working for the campaign when he told the FBI about a false link between Trump and Russia.

Sussmann was a partner at Perkins Coie, which often represents Democrats and which hired Fusion GPS to produce the false Russia “dossier” on then-candidate Trump, at the behest of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

The filing then reveals that Sussmann was involved in an effort to mine data from a project run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at a U.S. university (identified in previous reports as Georgia Tech) to spy on Trump and his associates — at Trump Tower, at Trump’s private residence, and at the Executive Office of the Presidency once Trump took office in the White House. Their goal was to dig up damaging information that could then be used to build the “Russia collusion” narrative against Trump.

As NewsBusters noted, only the Fox News Channel reported the story on its Sunday shows. The other networks ignored it:

Despite this bombshell report, none of the Sunday morning talk shows (Face The Nation (CBS), State of the Union (CNN), & This Week (ABC) covered the story, or even mentioned it. NBC’s Meet the Press was preempted by Olympics coverage.

Instead of covering this story, the Sunday shows decided to focus on a different Russia story: what Russian President Vladimir Putin might or might not do in regards to Ukraine, as well as obsessing over the January 6 Capitol Riots that happened over a year ago. Both CBS & CNN had the opportunity to ask Biden Administration National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan about the Durham news but they both failed to consider it.

Sullivan’s role is important because, as Breitbart News has noted, he played a key role in 2016 and 2017 in promoting the Russia “collusion” hoax.

In a statement Sunday, former president Trump thanked Fox News for covering the story: “Covered very powerfully this morning by Fox and Friends and, of course, Maria Bartiromo.”

On Monday, he noted: “Can you imagine that, what should be the biggest story of our time, bigger than Watergate, is getting absolutely no mention, ZERO, in the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, ratings-dead CNN, and MSDNC. … The good news is, everybody is talking about not only this atrocity against our Nation, but that the press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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