Kristi Noem Lies Her A$$ Off At CPAC Claiming Clintons Spied On Trump Even Though John Durham Denied All That

I don’t know why the extremist faction of the Republican party — which is 90% of it, these days — lives in such an adamantine echo chamber where they tell each other things that they all know are lies. Maybe it’s to give each other courage to repeat the lie yet again the following day. And the day after that. One can only speculate.

CPAC, which used to be the Conservative Political Action Conference, but not is the Cult Performing Always Conclave is going on this week in Orlando, Florida. Kristi Noem got up and started the magic incantation to the faithful with the solemn words, “Trump was right.”

Ahhhhh. Salvation. Music to their ears, balm to their souls.

Just straight-up, brazen lying by top Republicans. Unless the ‘neutral’ and ‘we don’t know what’s in their hearts’ media across the board calls this stuff out for the rank dishonesty that it is, our country will continue its descent into fact-free authoritarianism. https://t.co/ZNi0hcOiG3

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 26, 2022

I agree with Mehdi Hasan. This is despicable. Now, fact checking it is not difficult. Obviously Kristi Noem doesn’t want to spend the 30 seconds to do it that I did. Here’s what John Durham himself said a week ago yesterday to the New York Times.:

WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.

Citing a barrage of such reports on Fox News and elsewhere based on the prosecutor’s Feb. 11 filing, defense lawyers for a Democratic-linked cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, have accused the special counsel of including unnecessary and misleading information in filings “plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool.”

In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Durham defended himself, saying those accusations about his intentions were “simply not true.” He said he had “valid and straightforward reasons” for including the information in the Feb. 11 filing that set off the firestorm, while disavowing responsibility for how certain news outlets had interpreted and portrayed it.

“If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information,” he wrote.

Durham went out of his way to clarify that he had been talking about something that took place during the Obama era, in 2014.

But over the weekend, the conservative news media treated those sentences in Mr. Durham’s filing as a new revelation while significantly embellishing what it had said. Mr. Durham, some outlets inaccurately reported, had said he had discovered that the Clinton campaign had paid Mr. Joffe’s company to spy on Mr. Trump. But the campaign had not paid his company, and the filing did not say so. Some outlets also quoted Mr. Durham’s filing as using the word “infiltrate,” a word it did not contain.

Most important, the coverage about purported spying on the Trump White House was premised on the idea that the White House network data involved came from when Mr. Trump was president. But Mr. Durham’s filing did not say when it was from.

Durham says elsewhere that the period of time was from 2014-2017.

Joffe has not been charged with a crime. But Durham’s office said he “exploited” his access to DNS traffic that his company had lawful access to from 2014-2017 as part of a government contract to monitor for cyberattacks and malware, and which was later provided to researchers at Georgia Tech. Investigators said Joffe tasked the researchers with going through the data to establish an “inference” and “narrative” tying then candidate Trump to Russia.

While the details in the filing raised questions about the ethics of their conduct, Durham did not accuse Sussmann or Joffe of spying or hacking. And cybersecurity experts also say the details do not support the claim that the Clinton campaign unlawfully surveilled Trump.

This was all over the news last week but conveniently, it never got to Kristi Noem. She and other Republicans at CPAC are rejoicing in playing Orwellian memory hole games and ignoring the truth.

This is not the CPAC of Reagan and McCain:

As the crowd gave the 37-year-old John McCain a rousing standing ovation, Reagan chuckled.

“Well, I might as well sit down,” he said. “I can’t do any better than that for the remainder of the evening.”

The moment deserves some unpacking today, as conservatives gather for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It’s an event that bears little resemblance to the one that celebrated the future president and the future senator, who both went on to careers defined by support for aggressive U.S. intervention overseas.

On the morning after President Vladimir Putin of Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, at least one speaker at the conference used the platform to criticize President Biden, a Democrat, as distracted by a crisis in a place Americans need not care about. Others on the conference’s agenda have made remarks that seem to sympathize with Russia. On Saturday, activists will hear from Donald Trump, who this week hailed Putin as a “genius.”

It’s not the first time that CPAC has revealed how far the Republican Party has traveled in the Trump era. In 2018, as McCain was suffering from terminal brain cancer, a CPAC crowd booed when Trump mentioned the senator’s name in a speech.

But the conference’s evolution from its intellectual roots to ardent populism continues to anger and sadden many on the right.

No, it’s a shitshow. and Donald Trump will be giving the keynote address Saturday night.

Where oh where is Kimberly Guilfoyle dancing on stage with a smoke machine and fireworks? That was what we got last year. A wag on Twitter put a music bed of The Stripper playing under that performance, and it was a scream. I was so hoping Guilfoyle would do an encore. Maybe it just hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s what that looked like if you’ve forgotten it. Sweet Jesus.

Kimberly Guilfoyle at CPAC with sound: pic.twitter.com/rXJKQKJbqO

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) February 27, 2021

That’s the highlight of CPAC nowadays, seeing how circusey, stoned and out of control the participants get. Not the Reagan/McCain crowd a tall a tall. So far everybody is talking about the Big Lie or the Durham nothing burger. Now you know.

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