Turns Out The New York Times Clinton Email 'Botched Story' Actually Wasn't

In July 2015 the New York Times published the scoop of a lifetime when top Department of Justice sources told reporters that inspectors general at two separate agencies had asked the DOJ to open an investigation into Hillary Clinton's email use after discovering the then-secretary of state had sent emails containing classified information.

But within the next 48 hours, the Times made two major corrections. First it changed the story to indicate that the referral was for an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email and not necessarily Clinton herself. Then its Department of Justice sources suddenly reversed themselvesand said that the referral was not "criminal" in nature, but a "security review."

These were always distinctions in want of a difference. The Department of Justice is charged with investigating and punishing criminals. You only refer matters to them when there is evidence of possible lawbreaking, and you usually don't need to tell them that. Likewise, the DOJ does not investigate servers and it does not investigate emails. It investigates human beings.

But the Clinton campaign, which requested the corrections in the first place, seized on those small inconsistencies and attempted to use them to discredit the entire story. The campaign wrote a nearly 2,000-word public letter to the Times demanding an explanation for the "egregious" story and attacking the paper's "apparent abandonment of standard journalistic practices."

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