The Washington Post claims they have not actually “retracted” their story about a phone call in which President Trump allegedly told George election investigator Frances Watson to “find the fraud” in the 2020 election and she’d be a “national hero.” They've merely clarified it. They’d like us to believe it’s one of those “fake but true” stories liberal outlets are so fond of spreading. Follow me on this:

First of all, the Post outed their anonymous source of the original quote as Deputy Georgia Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs. Fuchs defended herself, saying, “I believe the story accurately reflected the investigator’s interpretation of the call. The only mistake here was in the direct quotes, and they should have been more of a summary.”

So even though the original quotes from the Post’s story were the crux of the outrage over it, and were cited verbatim in Trump’s second impeachment trial, they actually were not his words but a “summary” of his alleged intentions as interpreted by someone who was quoted by someone else who wasn’t there, or as that’s known in court, “hearsay.” Well, no wonder the Post is standing by it. What more do you need than that?

But as Arthur Bloom at The American Conservative points out at the link, this only scratches the surface of the disturbing news about this story. Read it all. I’m not even going to try to summarize all the convoluted twists of this story, but it could possibly involve a state official secretly recording a phone conversation with the President (which may have been recorded in Florida, where that’s illegal) and misrepresenting its contents to the media while trying to destroy the evidence.

There are also allegations that Fuchs was obsessed with the Washington Post and may have also been the source of another leaked phone call with Trump from 10 days later. She denies that, which if true means there’s more than one recorder/leaker of private official phone calls in the highest levels of the state government.

By the way, if WaPo really believes that “Democracy dies in darkness,” how come they print stories with such shadowy sources?