Topic: WorldNetDaily
We noted how the Media Research Center not only embraced President Trump's CrowdStrike conspiracy theory that's tangentally related to his infamous phone call to the president of Ukraine, it even referenced right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh's embrace of it. Meanwhile, WorldNetDaily -- which just can't refrain itself from pushing conspiracy theories, no matter how much it damages its credibility -- totally took Rush's bait.
An anonymously written Sept. 25 WND article gushed over Rush's conspiracy, in which he claims that Trump's reference to CrowdStrike in his phone call "should concern the Democrats."The article went on to claim: "CrowdStrike was the company that examined the Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 presidential race and concluded they were hacked by Russia. Later, DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks. The DNC didn't allow the FBI to examine the computers to verify the claim."
As we also noted, CrowdStrike turned over complete forensic copies of the servers to the FBI, so there was no need for the FBI to examine the physical servers. And as we've previously noted, to insist on making that claim reveals a serious misunderstanding of how servers and investigations work.
But WND couldn't stay away from even more discredited conspiracy theories it once enthusiastically embraced:
Lawyer Ty Clevenger obtained the documents as part of a lawsuit on behalf of businessman Ed Butowsky, who claims columnist Ellen Ratner told him murdered Democratic National Committee worker Seth Rich and his brother provided WikiLeaks the DNC emails before the 2016 election, not Russia.
But the anonymous WND writer managed to get that wrong too. What Butowsky -- who's currently embroiled in a libel lawsuit linked to his promotion of the disproven conspiracy theory that Rich was the person who leaked the DNC emails -- apparently actually did was tweet out a 2016 video in which Ratner (for many years a token liberal columnist at WND) said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told her that he did not obtain the DNC emails from a Russian source but, rather, an "internal source." She said nothing about Rich.
WND failed to mention that the Mueller report detailed how the Russians hacked into DNC accounts to steal the emails. It has also never apologized for nor retracted its bogus Seth Rich stories.
