In July 2015, Hillary Clinton’s aides were out for blood.

The New York Times had just published an alarming report, originally titled “ Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton's Use of Email,” and the former secretary of state and her team were having none of it. They complained loudly, and the paper walked-back the story.

“The New York Times … rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page," Hillary for America communications director Jennifer Palmieri said in a 1,903-word letter to the paper's executive editor, Dean Baquet.

She explained further that she and her staﬀ even “attempted to reach [Times] reporters on the phone to reiterate this fact and ensure the paper would not be going forward with any such report.”

[Also read: Hillary Clinton: 'Very few' in the media did 'their job' during 2016 campaign]

Their main complaint was that the story reported incorrectly that inspectors general at two separate agencies had recommended the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s use of a private, unauthorized email server when she held the top spot at Foggy Bottom. They insisted, rather forcefully, that the Times was dead wrong to report that Clinton “was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement.”

The Times caved. It amended the headline to the slightly-less-alarming, “Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email.” Its public editor at the time, Margaret Sullivan, issued an exceptionally apologetic mea culpas, claiming the initial report was “ fraught with inaccuracies.”

“[T]he most recent story is both a messy and a regrettable chapter,” wrote Sullivan. Baquet himself said of the episode, “We should have explained to our readers right away what happened here, as soon as we knew it.”

The Times also issued two corrections:



Correction: July 25, 2015 An article and a headline in some editions on Friday about a request to the Justice Department for an investigation regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email account while she was secretary of state misstated the nature of the request, using information from senior government officials. It addressed the potential compromise of classified information in connection with that email account. It did not specifically request an investigation into Mrs. Clinton.

Correction: July 26, 2015 An article in some editions on Friday about a request to the Justice Department for an investigation regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email account while she was secretary of state referred incorrectly, using information from senior government officials, to the request. It was a “security referral,” pertaining to possible mishandling of classified information, officials said, not a “criminal referral.”



Here’s the thing, though: These corrections are grossly misleading. The Times was actually closer to the truth before it succumbed to Clinton pressure.

The specific wording of the article may have been off slightly, but federal officials were indeed investigating Clinton in the summer of 2015, as the Times report initially indicated. Former FBI Director James Comey notes all of this in his new book, “A Higher Loyalty.”

“Though The Times may have thought those clarifications were necessary, their original story was much closer to the mark,” Comey writes. “It was true that the transmission to the FBI from the inspector general did not use the word ‘criminal,’ but by the time of the news story, we had a full criminal investigation open, focused on the secretary’s conduct.”

The public knew long ago that the Clinton camp’s push-back on the Times’ 2015 report was incorrect. (Palmieri defends herself now by claiming she didn’t know her boss was under criminal investigation when she wrote that long letter of protest to Baquet.) Comey’s version of events is just further confirmation of that fact.

This episode may seem like a small thing, especially compared to President Trump’s many oafish attacks on the press. But in an era when members of the press sermonize regularly about the importance of facts and truth, it seems like it should be a bigger deal that the 2016 Democratic nominee successfully pressured the nation’s leading newspaper into printing materially false corrections.

All attacks on the free press are equal, but I guess some are more equal than others.