2017:

On Friday night, as CNN's Katelyn Polantz and Evan Perez explained in a Monday article, special counsel John Durham "accused a lawyer for the Democrats of sharing with the CIA in 2017 internet data purported to show Russian-made phones being used in the vicinity of the White House complex, as part of a broader effort to raise the intelligence community's suspicions of Donald Trump's ties to Russia shortly after he took office."

The accusation was couched in what Polantz and Perez described as "vague, technical language" in a court filing. It was not accompanied by any indictments or other prosecutorial steps. But pro-Trump media outlets noticed the filing and started to share it on Saturday.

The fact that this supposed "bombshell" had been buried in a motion related to claims about attorneys having a conflict of interest, and not an indictment, was the first sign that the story was not what right-wing outlets said. The second was that the initial stories never actually went beyond the technical language to explain what purportedly happened.

But the ideological outlets that blew the filing way out of proportion weren't incentivized to apply journalistic analysis to the filing. They were incentivized to do the opposite.

Among Trump loyalists, Durham's investigation into the origins of the FBI's Russia probe is a shot at vindication. Right-wing TV and radio shows regularly hype Durham as a hero who is trying to right the perceived wrongs of "Russiagate." Key word: Perceived. Even though government and media investigations confirmed dozens of links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and the candidate welcomed the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election, Trump boosters insist the issue was a "hoax" that was hyped by media outlets and intelligence officials to hurt Trump.

So in this pro-Trump media bubble, any scrap of information that supports the "hoax" hypothesis or the idea that Trump was right when he said he'd been spied on, no matter how irrelevant or incomplete, is turned into a big story.

In this case, the "entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news," Charlie Savage of The New York Times concluded in a point-by-point news article on Tuesday.

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