Predictably, the New York Times pooh-poohed the release of the classified annex to the Durham report. Charlie Savage wrote:
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and other Trump allies have declared that a newly declassified report on the Russia investigation provides “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.” The reality is almost precisely the opposite… The report shows that a purported email that Trump supporters have long tried to portray as a smoking gun is instead most likely a fake. Russian spies appear to have tried to make it seem authentic by assembling passages lifted from actual emails by different hacking victims…
Mr. Trump and his aides have coupled those releases with wild and inaccurate claims about what they show, spinning the reports as proof of his long-running narrative that the investigation was a hoax instigated by enemies for political reasons.
This whole “assembled by Russian spies” line is based on one assessment about a pair of emails likely pulled by Russians from other real American victims of hacking. Beyond this instance of a “composite,” the paper ignores the gigantic load of material from the same source, which has been described in multiple other reports as real and affecting numerous American “victims” from the Executive and Legislative branches, as well as think-tanks and NGOs.
More irritating is Savage’s diatribe against Patel and the hoax “narrative,” offered without mentioning the roughly ten million instances in which the Times botched its coverage of Patel and Republican investigations into Russiagate. When Patel and then-House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes released the much-denounced “Nunes memo” about FISA abuse in early 2018, Savage personally “annotated” the document, which would be vidicated more or less entirely by an Inspector General investigation nearly two years later. About the accusations of FISA abuse, which included use of the Steele dossier to obtain surveillance authority, Charlie wrote:
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