As of 4 pm ET on March 20, The Atlantic editors have added to “Bernie Sanders Just Hired His Twitter Attack Dog”:

On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for The Guardian, Deepal Patadia, said that Sirota informed the newspaper that he was in conversations with the Sanders team starting in January, and did not file a column forward from that point. Patadia did not address if this account was based on anything other than Sirota’s characterizations, and whether The Guardian was aware of conversations that Sirota was having with Sanders aides through 2018, as people with direct knowledge say he was. Sirota himself would not address this on the record.

It contains a terribly vague assertion Edward-Isaac Dovere made when The Guardian requested a correction. Who are these “people with direct knowledge”?

Did these “people with direct knowledge” see David Sirota meeting with someone who is now working for the Sanders campaign back in 2018? And what is wrong with that?

Sirota was a journalist. Any of these people who are now Sanders aides could have been talking to him on background for a story.

Sanders did not officially launch his campaign until February. Just like Sirota, these aides were free to do anything, including journalism, without answering for their allegiance to Sanders before there was a launched campaign.

Needless to say, The Atlantic’s update does not make Dovere’s story any less slimy. It was written for the benefit of longtime Democratic Party campaign staffers, consultants, speechwriters, and strategists, as well as pundits like Dovere, who are afraid of losing influence in a world where Sanders is a presidential contender.