In a letter to the editor, Hillary Clinton's campaign expresses 'grave concern' with New York Times report

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign takes the New York Times to task. (Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)

The New York Times may have removed the word “criminal” from last week’s controversial report on a requested investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server, but for the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign, the correction was too little, too late.

In a letter nearing 2,000 words, Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, laid into Times executive editor Dean Baquet, accusing the paper of first relying on “questionable sourcing” and then of an “inexplicable, let alone indefensible, delay in correcting the story” once the source’s information had been thoroughly disputed.

“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,” Palmieri wrote in the letter, which Clinton’s campaign forwarded to reporters Thursday after Baquet reportedly refused to publish it earlier in the week. “Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound.”

The report in question, published July 23, stated that two inspectors general had specifically requested a federal criminal investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information by using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. The story was predictably picked up by a number of other news organizations and spread quickly before its allegations could be challenged. The next day, the Clinton campaign, as well as the Department of Justice and the two inspectors general, all issued public statements refuting the Times’ description of the requested investigation as “criminal.” Shifting their focus from the politician to the paper, other outlets such as Politico proceeded to independently confirm that the Times’ allegations had stemmed from misinformation provided by senior government officials.

Two days after the report was first published, the Times issued the first of two corrections, removing the word “criminal” from the attention-grabbing headline as well as the body of the story and clarifying that Clinton herself wasn’t actually the subject of the inspector generals’ request. On July 27, Times public editor Margaret Sullivan penned an op-ed describing the report’s publication and ensuing fracas as “a mess.” She concluded with a prescription for the paper going forward: “Less speed. More transparency.”

By then, what began as a scathing story about Hillary Clinton had already morphed into an indictment of the New York Times’ reporting standards. The liberal, nonprofit journalism watchdog Media Matters for America accused the Times of “failing to overcome its problems with sources that seek anonymity,” in spite of its updated Policy on Confidential Sources and creation of the public editor role following the 2003 revelation that a string of stories by reporter Jayson Blair were plagued by plagiarism and outright fabrications.

Writing in the Atlantic, Norm Ornstein called the Times’ handling of the Clinton report a “huge embarrassment” and “a direct challenge to its fundamental credibility.” And in an opinion piece for Newsweek, former senior Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald charged that the “bungled” Clinton report was not the paper’s first instance of misinformation regarding the former secretary of state’s emails. “What the hell is happening at The New York Times?” he asked. 

Concluding the letter to Baquet, Palmieri wrote, “I wish to emphasize our genuine wish to have a constructive relationship with the New York Times. But we are also 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.”

As of Friday morning, the New York Times had not responded to the Clinton camp’s letter.