Spotify’s Joe Rogan lies that the Durham filing shows “the Clinton campaign” planted evidence and spied on Trump
Rogan: “They hired people to hack into their campaign while he was president. … They planted evidence that tried to implicate him in the shady dealings with Russia.”
Written by Alex Paterson
Published
On the March 2 edition of his Spotify podcast, host Joe Rogan once again spread a right-wing lie to his millions of listeners, baselessly claiming that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign hired people to hack the Trump campaign “while he was president” and plant “evidence that tried to implicate him in the shady dealings with Russia.”
Rogan, along with numerous right-wing media outlets, wildly misconstrued a pretrial motion filed by special counsel John Durham which alleged that a lawyer linked to the Clinton campaign shared internet traffic data from networks near the White House and Trump Tower with the CIA. In reality, Durham’s filing does not allege that the Clinton campaign hired the lawyer nor does it provide evidence that the data were collected during Trump’s presidency.
Rogan has recently faced widespread backlash for spreading bigotry, medical misinformation, and right-wing lies on his Spotify podcast. Despite this, Spotify has determined that its newly published platform rules, which the company claims have been internally in place “for years,” do not prohibit numerous dangerous and unfounded claims spread on The Joe Rogan Experience. For example, Rogan has suggested that social acceptance of trans people is a sign of “civilizations collapsing,” claimed that the omicron variant is “essentially just a cold,” and falsely asserted that mRNA coronavirus vaccines are “really gene therapy”
During the episode, Rogan falsely claimed that the Clinton campaign “hired people to hack into [Trump’s] campaign while he was president.” After making this claim, Rogan asked his podcast producer Jamie Vernon to look into the story, saying, “Google what has been proven.”
Vernon then displayed a Business Insider article on the topic that stated, “The filing does not allege espionage. It does claim that a Clinton-linked lawyer obtained non-public data from the White House and Trump's servers.” Rogan ignored the story and said that “this is definitely a biased website.” Vernon later pulled up an MSNBC article on the topic that noted it was a “fake scandal” but the two, of course, did not note this fact. Vernon also showed an opinion article in The Hill from Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich which did not substantiate Rogan’s claims about the Clinton campaign. Nonetheless, Rogan continued to ignore the facts of the story and lamented that “It’s just fucked. We’re fucked. It’s a lot of mess.”
Citation From the March 2, 2022, edition of Spotify's The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): Well, the Russia Trump thing was crazy because they got into his servers. They hacked into — they hired people to hack into their campaign while he was president. They got — they hacked into the computers. They planted evidence that tried to implicate him in the shady dealings with Russia. Like, it wasn't just that—
MEYER: Who's them?
ROGAN: The Clinton campaign. It wasn't just that they were spying on him. It was that they were—
MEYER: Planting
ROGAN: Yeah, let's Google that. Google what has been proven about — who was it that it came up with the information?
DAKOTA MEYER (AUTHOR): And it just came out and like two weeks later? You got this going on.
ROGAN: Yeah. Very quickly.
MEYER: And don't you think it's kind of crazy like, I mean because there is—
ROGAN: But the people weren't upset about it. That's what's the most fucked up. Like, the Democrats weren't freaking out. They weren't saying, Wait a minute, this is outside of the law. This is a horrific violation of our laws and our boundaries of our ethics, what we think should be done and not done by someone who's a leader. You want to find people who are actually committing crimes, not pin crimes on people.
…
JAMIE VERNON (PRODUCER): Is this the thing?
ROGAN: What you need to know about the John Durham filing that Trumpworld is fuming over. And what is this, Business — ah, dude.
VERNON: I'm trying to ask if this is even what you were talking about so we can dig into the right story.
ROGAN: Yeah, it's a Durham filing. Yes
VERNON: Even looking into this now, depending on what lick I click, it's—
ROGAN: What lick you click?
VERNON: Link I click. It's, it's filled with bias. So like,
ROGAN: OK, yeah, well, this is definitely a biased website.
MEYER: Yeah, it's just it's crazy
ROGAN: It's they're biased towards things being inflamed, you know, like—
VERNON: So which — where should I go, then? Because I typed in ‘what has been proven’?
ROGAN: That's a good question. Durham. Yeah. Which is — what's a good way to look at this?
MEYER: None of them.
ROGAN: Some of them have to be accurate.
MEYER: Do they?
ROGAN: What we know about the Durham probe, Hillary Clinton's responsibility for the Durham probe.
VERNON: Who's going to have written that unbiased article to find?
ROGAN I don't know, do you got anything that's going both ways?
VERNON: I was starting to read through that so I can — if you give me another minute or two.
MEYER: Okay. I just, yeah, I mean, it's just. But I mean, it's just it. I don't know. It's just so like when you start looking—
ROGAN: It’s dirty, like, that is Watergate, right? Wasn't that Watergate? Wasn't — they were spying? That was the whole reason why Dick Nixon got out of office. Because he was fucking spying. Yeah, yeah, that's — you're not supposed to do that.