Powerline has obtained an email received by a reader inquiry to Jeff Smith of WaPo. It's fascinating for its confirmation that (1) WaPo DID have the accurate info in advance, and some unnamed reporter(s) other than Smith botched the article so badly. Since the only other reporter's name on the byline is the highly biased lib Walter Pincus, that would seem to suggest rather strongly that Pincus just patched together what he and Sen. Carl Levin wanted the IG's report to say, rather than what it actually did say.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/ One of our readers has now penetrated inside the Post through an email exchange with Jeff Smith, one of the Post reporters "credited" with the story. Smith is unhappy at being associated with the debacle. This is what Smith emailed to our reader:
I agree with you that this was an egregious error. I also had nothing to do with it. All I did was obtain a copy of the unclassified summary of the IG report and write a precisely correct account, which I turned over to the other reporters. I'm not happy my name was put on that story by the editors, and I was astonished by the mistake. I blew the whistle on it internally. So don't attribute the mistake to me.
Cheers,
Jeff Smith
So someone--Pincus is an obvious candidate--had the two-page public portion of the IG report, and also had an accurate account thereof, but nevertheless managed to misrepresent the report's contents to make it look more critical of Feith's group than it actually was. Is there any possible explanation for that "egregious" and "astonish[ing]" error, other than a political agenda that trumps all else?