Journalism!
The Washington Post has retracted its anonymously sourced claim that 147 FBI agents are detailed to the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, and is now reporting that the real number is fewer than 50.
Mind you, fewer than 50 is itself not the same thing as nearly 50; for example, 5 is also less than 50, as is 17 or 23. All we really know is that the original story was, to use a technical term, garbage, and almost certainly garbage that came out of the same anonymous trash chute that Rep. Trey Gowdy uses to disgorge all the rest of his committee's theories on the malevolence of Hillary Clinton. It also doesn't tell us a whole lot about the state of the "investigation," such as whether those agents are ensconced in a dedicated Hillary Clinton Is Bad room or if that's the grand total of anyone who's had to so much as touch the case, in the FBI's apparent message-by-message attempt to see if any of those emails should now be considered classified even if they weren't before, and so on. We don't know.
But what the hell. Let's try to save this story by erasing those old headlines and putting in new ones!
There are dozens of FBI agents involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation
There ya go. Don’t bother changing the rest of the story, it’s all still good.
We'll be riding this Republican hobbyhorse all the way to the election. (And no, it doesn't matter whether previous secretaries of state had similar email arrangements. Those were in the before-times.) In theory it once had something to do with Benghazi, but there are kids today who are going to college on the proceeds their parents got from writing Hillary Killed Vince Foster or Hillary Made Too Much Moneys or Hillary Personally Flew Cocaine Into America On Her Private Plane stories and books and audiotapes.
It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that the Republican efforts to "investigate" the last Democratic administration led to the conservative blogosphere we see today, a conspiracy-addled place full of Drudges and Breitbarts, and that conservative efforts to repeat the process with Obama are what gave us the grand marshal of birtherism, Donald Trump. They can't govern for crap, but if you could somehow harness the leaks from Trey Gowdy's "investigation" that hydraulic windfall could power all the lights in Vegas.