Shabby reporting at the NY Times on SoS Clinton

SoS Clinton and Australia's PM Kevin Rudd. Courtesy of Wiki.

The NY Times doesn't have a spotless record on its investigative reporting. I still recall its published apology for its coverage of the US invasion of Iraq. Most recently the Times has been called out for its attempt to muddy Hillary Clinton's reputation at the State Department by accusing her of breaking a rule that wasn't put into effect until after she left office. Wonder when the Times will apologize for this shabby reporting?

 Igor Bobic at the Huffington Post writes:

The Daily Beast and Media Matters on Tuesday pushed back against a New York Times report that suggested former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have violated federal law by using a private email address for her official government communication.

The Times on Monday reported that Clinton "did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act." The existence of Clinton's private email address was first reported by Gawker in 2013.

Critics accused Clinton of failing to uphold her commitment to transparency by choosing which personal emails to turn over to the State Department for public record, as well as putting potential high value information at risk to hacking by foreign agents. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Clinton's potential rival in the race for president in 2016, immediately called on her to submit unclassified emails to public record.

A report by Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast, however, cast a heavy dose of skepticism over the Times' reporting on the regulation that required officials to preserve email communications. A State Department official told Tomasky that employees were told in October 2014 that personal email should generally not be used for government business, but if it is, communications must be forwarded to a government account in order to be appropriately preserved. Clinton left the Department prior to that, in February of 2013, however.

"So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly? And, if this is true, why did the Times not share this rather crucial piece of information with its readers? No one could possibly argue that this fact isn’t germane to the story. It’s absolutely central to it. Why would the Times leave it out?" wrote Tomasky.

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