Has NBC News caught up to the latest from their Facebook source, the one they claimed might “loom” in an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh? NPR caught up with the source herself, Cristina King Miranda, who pulled her post claiming to know that the attack Christine Blasey Ford alleges took place, only to have NBC later report it as a major development even after Miranda specifically disavowed it on Twitter. King now tells Nina Totenberg that she has no idea whether an attack took place at all … and that the Senate Judiciary Committee can please stop trying to contact her:

A former classmate of Christine Blasey Ford tells NPR that she does not know if an alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh took place as she first suggested on social media. “That it happened or not, I have no idea,” Cristina King Miranda told NPR’s Nina Totenberg. “I can’t say that it did or didn’t.” That’s different from what Miranda wrote Wednesday in a now-deleted Facebook post that stated definitively, “The incident DID happen, many of us heard about it in school.”

So why lie about it and claim that she knew the attack took place? King felt … empowered?

“In my [Facebook] post, I was empowered and I was sure it probably did [happen],” Miranda told NPR. “I had no idea that I would now have to go to the specifics and defend it before 50 cable channels and have my face spread all over MSNBC news and Twitter.”

Empowered? That’s certainly an interesting word choice, and a clever hijacking of empty self-improvement slogans, but it literally makes no sense at all in this context. By whom was Miranda “empowered”? Apparently by herself, which isn’t “empowered” at all but arrogant. And not only arrogant, but also ignorant on a couple of levels … especially the level on which someone injects themselves into a national controversy as a witness in order to gain attention for herself, and then is shocked, shocked with the attention she gets as her claim is scrutinized.

By golly, that’s Captain Louis Renault Award territory there. Especially about the shock over MSNBC’s interest in the story.

However, trolls often show up in these situations. The most amazing part of this is that NBC considered Miranda a reliable source, highlighting her deleted Facebook post as a significant part of the Kavanaugh-Ford story even after she’d retracted and retreated from it. In fact, it’s still up as of the writing of this post at 8:30 am. Perhaps NBC will also be shocked, shocked to discover that Facebook sources don’t make for reliable reporting. Or maybe they just feel empowered to dispense with journalistic frills such as verifying and corroborating sources. We’ll be charitable and include them in a joint Renault Award with the woman who discovered fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Or maybe arrogance alone explains it, for both Miranda and NBC. I’ll give Jeryl Bier the last word here.

“because it served its purpose" may just be the most honest, accurate, and telling statement during this entire sordid affair. pic.twitter.com/bRZYuQ4ZZh — Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) September 20, 2018

Update: NBC has finally edited its story to note that Miranda doesn’t actually have any knowledge of the situation, John Sexton discovered, but …

This is now graph 5 in the revised NBC story. pic.twitter.com/1ASxB152mV — John Sexton (@verumserum) September 20, 2018

Maybe NBC should have asked the questions Totenberg did before publishing this report, eh?