We'll start with the tweet:
Looking forward to joining @toddstarnes at 2 pm ET to discuss evidence that Hillary Clinton and her campaign paid tech companies to plant evidence and fabricate a false narrative linking Donald Trump with Russia.
— Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (@GReschenthaler) February 14, 2022
Tune in here: https://t.co/ddZdJeiN7X
As far as I can tell, Rep Reschenthaler certainly was on Starnes' show but that's about it on the factual data in Guy's tweet.
Let's take a look at the facts that the former JAG judge chose not to tell any American citizens who happened to be listening to Todd Starnes on the 14th.
When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.
But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.
Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation.
Keep in mind that Guy said that Clinton and her campaign paid the tech
companies to plant evidence and fabricate a false narrative.
None
of that is actually in
the motion.
Take a look:
The Indictment also alleges that, beginning in approximately July 2016, Tech Executive-1 had worked with the defendant, a U.S. investigative firm retained by Law Firm-1 on behalf of the Clinton Campaign, numerous cyber researchers, and employees at multiple Internet companies to assemble the purported data and white papers. In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data. Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract. Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying then-candidate Trump to Russia. In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain “VIPs,” referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton Campaign.
Where is the part about "planting" evidence? If the above is true (and the Times explains that it's way off base) they were gathering data and not planting it.
From the Times:
The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.
Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.
The Times also points out that the filing never said that that tech company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.
But here's the big part:
Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.
“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.
So exactly how much of Guy's tweet is factually correct?
Well, he was on Todd Starnes' show but that's about it.
Whether anything else in that motion is, in fact, true does not change the
fact that US Representative Guy Reschenthaler (former Navy JAG Magisterial
Judge, doncha know) lied to the public in his false description of it.
