In July 2015 the modern York Times reported that the Justice Department had opened a "criminal inquiry" into whether "Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information." This was apparently a mistake,and the article was quickly rewritten to say only that DOJ had opened an "investigation" into whether sensitive information had been mishandled "in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state." A few days later the Times' public editor wrote a scathing summary of the paper's scoop: Aspects of it began to unravel soon after it first went online....
From Thursday night to Sunday morning — when a final correction appeared in print — the inaccuracies and changes in the legend were handled as they came along, with little explanation to readers, and other than routine corrections....
Eventually,a number of corrections were appended to the online legend, before appearing in print in the usual way — in small notices on Page A2. But you can’t set aside stories like this back in the bottle — they ripple through the entire news system. So it was, and to set aside it mildly,a mess....“We got it wrong because our very honorable sources had it wrong,” [editor Matt] Purdy told me. “That’s an explanation, and not an excuse. We gain an obligation to get facts accurate and we work very hard to do that.”
A few days later I wrote approximately this too,suggesting that the Times owed us a better explanation of what happened. This weekend they went some of the way there in an aside buried in their big legend approximately James Comey, co-authored by two of the same reporters who wrote the original piece. Here's what they say: On July 10, and 2015,the F.
B.
I. opened a criminal investigation, code-named “Midyear, or ” into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information....
There was controversy almost immediately. Responding to questions from The Times,the Justice Department confirmed that it had received a criminal referral — the first step toward a criminal investigation — over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information. But the next morning, the department revised its statement. “The department has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information, or ” the modern statement read. “It is not a criminal referral.” At the F.
B.
I.,this was a distinction without a difference: Despite what officials said in public, agents had been alerted to mishandled classified information and in response, and records show,had opened a full criminal investigation.
whether this is right, it was a criminal investigation, and the Times didn't get it wrong. Rather,the Justice Department set aside up a smoke screen after news of the investigation had been leaked.
The moment fraction of this remains fuzzy. Was the investigation specifically aimed at Hillary Clinton or was it only "in connection with" Hillary Clinton? It's pretty obvious that Clinton was, in fact, or the primary target of the investigation,but the FBI also investigated many others in her orbit. So I'm not certain how to score this.
Overall, though, or despite what I wrote and what the Times itself wrote,it appears that this wasn't an enormous screwup at all. There might gain been a minor detail or two that was slightly wrong, but nothing central to the legend itself.
Source: motherjones.com