Editorial Note: The reporting from Fox News in this story contained several substantive mistakes, found in its headline and opening sentence:
“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 found.”
Fox’s article wrongly used and put quotes around the word “infiltrate”, which was said by a Republican researcher and not, as the story reports, from the Durham filing. The word itself also went beyond the filing, which didn’t indicate whether gathered information was illegally taken from servers or, as the Clinton researchers claimed, collected through legitimate data sources.
Further, the Fox story indicates that the Clinton campaign directed the digital snooping, while the researchers say they took the initiative on their own, something the Durham filing didn’t address.
What happened:
The Durham filing stated that researchers working for the Clinton 2016 campaign, through their lawyers, hired cyber researchers who accessed DNS computer data from Trump Tower and the White House. The campaign’s report accused Trump’s team of using a “covert server” linked to Russia, as well as using supposedly rare, Russian-made phones near the White House and other places.
The Durham filing and other research have debunked those claims.
The Clinton campaign lawyer met with the FBI in a failed attempt to get the agency to open an investigation into the matter. Slate wrote an article touting the now-debunked claims days before the election, and Hillary Clinton Tweeted about it several times.
We have retracted the story, although it is still available on the Fox News website.
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