Despite everything we’ve been told about Hillary Clinton being on track to win this election handily, her team is not taking any chances. Their coordinated dumps of information about Trump’s legendary handsiness and sexual entitlement were expertly deployed. The campaign’s coordination of the Alicia Machado story is something that could only be done with a very friendly press, but the Clinton camp did a great job setting up interviews and keeping all of the negative information about Machado at bay until the story was fully operational.

But as this failed Russia research dump shows, it pays to be a tad more diligent about how we cover these two candidates.

That’s particularly true when considering the rather bizarre and opposite response of kowtowing to Clinton demands that Friday’s news about the investigation being reopened instead be mostly about the formerly sainted Comey.