Flashback: 2019 Media Chant ‘There Was No Spying’ on Trump

According to a Most recent filingIt turns out that Trump is the Special Counsel John Durham. This was being spied on after all — both as a candidate in 2016 and as President of the United States — by operatives paid by Clinton campaign associates. This is an extremely shocking revelation, and it’s also embarrassing for media who repeatedly repeated that no one spied upon the Trump campaign.

The media’s dismissive approach to Trump’s spying allegations endured throughout his presidency. The issue received little attention from liberal television networks.

Durham’s latest filing alleges that a tech firm paid by a Clinton campaign lawyer infiltrated the servers of Trump’s private properties, and later the Executive Office of the President. Durham says they monitored all internet traffic, in order to establish a link between Trump’s Russia and the United States.

Lesley Stahl’s 2020 interview with Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes is a perfect example of the media’s refusal even to entertain the spying accusations:

DONALD Trump: They tracked my campaign.
LESLEY STAHL : We don’t have any evidence to support that.
TRUMP: Of course there is, it’s all over the place.
STAHL: No.
TRUMP: Lesley and my campaign were spied upon by them, and they were caught.
STAHL – Can you say anything? You know, this is 60 Minutes and we can’t put on things we can’t verify.

Stahl’s attitude at the time was perfectly in line with the rest of her colleagues’. For years, they smugly repeated that “there was no spying” of any sort on Trump or his campaign, while at the same time refusing to dig into the topic even slightly.

The media’s knee-jerk dismissal of Trump’s allegations has left them looking pretty foolish in this case. It’s not the first time their incurious attitude has come back to bite them, and it’s likely to happen again as Durham’s investigation continues.