Fox News is mangling Special Counsel John Durham's latest Trump-Russia filing

On Friday night, Special Counsel John Durham filed a pretrial motion on possible conflicts of interest by the lawyer representing Michael Sussmans, a cybersecurity lawyer Durham has charged with allegedly lying to the FBI. But he also "slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump," Charlie Savage writes in Monday's New York Times.

Trump and allied media organizations say Durham's filing, as Fox News' Brooke Singman put it in a widely cited early report, shows that lawyers for Hillary Clinton's 2016 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." Those claims were repeated Monday on Fox News' daytime news and prime time opinions shows.

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.