

Hillary Clinton greets voters at a house party in Windham, N.H., on July 16. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Some updates from the weekend on the backlash over the New York Times’s flawed article on Hillary Clinton’s latest e-mail troubles.

*Rep. Elijah Cummings, in a Saturday Huffington Post op-ed, criticized the paper for its work on the article, saying that the reporters didn’t do their homework. “[I]f the Times spoke with Republicans in Congress, even off the record, they could have checked their facts with me or other Committee Democrats,” wrote Cummings, who took strong issue with the statement of New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet that the paper’s errors may have been “unavoidable.”

*Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for the Clinton campaign, told CNN’s Brian Stelter in an interview, “It took them not just a long time to correct it, but it took them an indefensible time to get rid of ‘criminal’ in the headline and the lede.”

True critique. The piece in question, published on July 23, originally alleged that two federal inspectors general had issued criminal referrals targeting Clinton for her use of e-mail during her tenure as secretary of state. As it turned out, only one IG had made a referral; it wasn’t criminal in nature; and it didn’t directly target Clinton. The story carries two corrections but still needs another: Whereas only one IG made the referral, the Times story still says that referrals came from two IGs.

That’s a point hammered home by Cummings in his op-ed. Summing up a discussion with the State Department IG, Cummings writes, “he said officials from the Intelligence Community IG — not the State Department IG — notified the FBI and Congress that they had identified information they believed was classified in several mails that were part of the FOIA review.”

Yet the New York Times story remains defiant:

Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The irony here is that this error has sat uncorrected for 11 days on an article that Times editors apologized for being slow to correct. “We should have explained to our readers right away what happened here, as soon as we knew it,” said Baquet to New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan.

The Erik Wemple Blog asked New York Times Associate Managing Editor for Standards Phil Corbett this morning why the paper hadn’t addressed the bogus double-IG referral question. He responded that he would check on the situation.

A high-profile story already freighted with corrections and needing one more: That’s an issue tailored for Sullivan, the paper’s internal watchdog. Yet she hasn’t pressed the matter. After interviewing editors and reporters about the misfiring story, she wrote a critical post last Monday about how the paper relied excessively on anonymous sources and rushed its reporting into print. It didn’t mention the lingering correction problem. Nor did a wishy-washy Sunday column in which Sullivan went thinky on the newspaper’s relationship with Clinton.

So we asked Sullivan why she wasn’t advocating for the Times to take that last step, along with another question: “My primary role is to respond to the concerns of Times readers. That’s the approach I took in writing on this subject twice in the past week,” she responded.

Hey: I’m a reader! The Erik Wemple Blog is a New York Times subscriber and demands to know!

Another thing we’d like to know from Sullivan is why she sat on the letter that the Clinton campaign sent to the New York Times on July 28. It was a blistering response to the New York Times’s poor response on the e-mail screwups and contained the news that the paper barely — if at all — gave the Clinton campaign a chance to respond to the sort of allegation that could well sink her shot at the presidency. The New York Times chose not to publish the letter, but can’t the public editor, an independent actor, use it as a basis for a quick-strike post? Two days after sending it, the Clinton campaign released it.

Over Twitter’s direct messaging pipe, Sullivan tells the Erik Wemple Blog that she did cite the campaign’s letter in her Sunday column regarding relations between the newspaper and the campaign. Indeed, but she didn’t address head-on the revelations in the letter — revelations that she was unable to pry out of New York Times staffers for her original post.

Is that asking too much from a single ombudswoman? Maybe, but consider the circumstances. After the New York Times’s failure on the story, Sullivan was granted wide access to the players — a courtesy that doesn’t appear to have been extended to others. From the looks of things, then, the New York Times decided it was going to give its version of events to Sullivan, write up an editor’s note and then move on. That setup places a great deal of pressure on Sullivan to digest everything and then deliver precisely the right level of condemnation.

That didn’t happen — Sullivan’s roundup was critical though not nearly tough enough, which left an accountability void into which the Clinton campaign jumped with the release of its July 28 letter. Last week, the Erik Wemple Blog requested a full-on interview with Sullivan about this stuff. She, sounding a lot like a private editor, declined.