The New York Times made questionable edits this weekend to an investigative report on a sexual misconduct allegation against Joe Biden after the former vice president’s 2020 campaign complained.

The newspaper is standing by those edits, telling the Washington Examiner Tuesday that it is not unprecedented for it to amend its news coverage depending on the type of pushback it receives from the targets of its reporting.

"After our initial publication, we edited one clause that was imprecise and deleted a tweet that used the same imprecise wording,” a spokeswoman for the paper told the Washington Examiner. “In order to be fair and accurate, our editors are always open to critical feedback from readers, sources, subjects, or others on any story. Editors and the standards desk decide if any edits or corrections are warranted. In this case, the decision to edit the story was made solely by our Politics editor.”

She added, “For context, when the Biden campaign publicly criticized multiple lines of coverage last October, editors reviewed their concerns and decided no changes were warranted."

The New York Times’s since-amended April 12 story represents its first attempt to report on a woman’s claim that she was sexually abused by Biden when she worked for him as a Senate aide in the early 1990s. The former aide, Tara Reade, reiterated her allegations most recently on March 25 during a podcast interview.

The New York Times’s investigative report ended originally with a line that read: "The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable." However, the second part of that line was removed soon after publication. The paper said immediately in a public statement that the clause was deleted from the report because it contained “imprecise” language.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet also revealed later that the line was stricken from the story following complaints from the Biden campaign.

“Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper,” he told the New York Times’s Ben Smith.

Baquet added: “I think that the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say.”

The paper’s report covers not just Reade’s very specific allegation of sexual assault but also a lesser charge from a former Nevada state assemblywoman, Lucy Flores, who claims the former vice president made her uncomfortable when he kissed and pawed at her during a 2014 campaign event. The New York Times report also includes commentary from additional women who say the former vice president similarly made them feel uncomfortable with unwanted contact.

Though these examples do not establish a pattern of outright sexual assault, they do establish a pattern of inappropriate contact, the same type of sexual misconduct that ended Al Franken's career as a senator.

As for what the New York Times's editors mean when they say the since-removed clause in the Biden report was “imprecise," a spokeswoman for the paper explains:

“Our story documents unwanted behavior cited by other women that we covered last year; we have not described that behavior as ‘sexual misconduct’ in part because some women said such behavior with them was not misconduct,” she told the Washington Examiner. “Our intention was to focus on what our new reporting found, rather than conflate the new reporting and the complaints made about Biden's behavior last year.”

For the record, the New York Times has used the term “sexual misconduct” several times in the past to refer to the allegations against Franken, which include unwanted hugs, kisses, and touching.