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Clinton campaign complains of 'egregious' New York Times reporting errors

The Hillary Clinton campaign sent a nearly 2,000-word letter to the executive editor of The New York Times this week expressing "grave concern" with a recent and controversial report relating to the former Secretary of State's private email account.

"We remain perplexed by the Times’ slowness to acknowledge its errors after the fact, and some of the shaky justifications that Times’ editors have made," Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri wrote in the letter to Dean Baquet, which the campaign forwarded to the On Media blog late Thursday night.

"I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was," Palmieri continued. "The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement. Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound. This problem was compounded by the fact that the Times took an inexplicable, let alone indefensible, delay in correcting the story and removing 'criminal' from the headline and text of the story."

The Times' report, from July 23, claimed that two inspectors general had sought a criminal investigation "into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state." It later altered the language to eliminate the suggestion that Clinton was the target in the potential criminal probe. Then, on July 24, all parties involved in the story—the two inspectors general, the Justice Department, and the Clinton campaign—issued public statements saying that the sought-after investigation was not "criminal." Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Times did not remove the word from its headline and its story, nor did it issue a correction, until the following day.

Baquet, the Times' executive editor and the recipient of Palmieri's letter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday night. The Times has issued multiple corrections on the story and its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has written an article examining the Times' errors.

In one correction, the Times rightly stated that its use of the word "criminal" was due to information provided "from senior government officials." The On Media blog independently confirmed last week that the error was caused by misinformation provided to the Times by a Justice Department official.

That explanation hardly seemed to satisfy Palmieri, who accused the Times' reporters of relying on "questionable sourcing... without bothering to seek corroborating evidence."

"In our conversations with the Times reporters, it was clear that they had not personally reviewed the IG’s referral that they falsely described as both criminal and focused on Hillary Clinton," Palmieri wrote. "Instead, they relied on unnamed sources that characterized the referral as such. However, it is not at all clear that those sources had directly seen the referral, either. This should have represented too many 'degrees of separation' for any newspaper to consider it reliable sourcing, least of all The New York Times."

Palmieri's letter, which runs 1,915 words long, includes three other complaints: 1. That the "seriousness of the allegations... demanded far more care and due diligence than the Times exhibited prior to this article’s publication. 2. That the Times "incomprehensibly delayed the issuance of a full and true correction." And 3. That the Times' "official explanations for the misreporting is profoundly unsettling."

"I wish to emphasize our genuine wish to have a constructive relationship with The New York Times," Palmieri writes in closing. "But we also are extremely troubled by the events that went into this erroneous report, and will be looking forward to discussing our concerns related to this incident so we can have confidence that it is not repeated in the future."

Brian Fallon, the press secretary for the Clinton campaign, said Thursday that the campaign sent Palmieri's letter to reporters because Baquet refused to publish it in the Times after receiving it on Tuesday.

The entire letter can be read here.

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