Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post published an article on Page 1 of the Post today, in which he reported “unusual” donations to John McCain’s campaign. While it never actually charged wrongdoing, it alleged it much like the NYT’s McCain/Lobbyist article. Only one problem with the article: The “unusual” donors never actually donated to McCain’s campaign. Seriously.

The Post issued the following correction:

Correction to This Article
The first name of McCain donor Faisal Abdullah was misspelled in some versions of this story, including in the print edition of The Washington Post. Also, the article incorrectly identified a Rite Aide manager and two Twilight Hookah Lounge owners as being among the donors Sargeant solicited on behalf of McCain. Those donors – Rite Aid manager Ibrahim Marabeh, and the lounge owners, Nadia and Shawn Abdalla – wrote checks to Giuliani and Clinton, not McCain.

The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton.

Translation: So you know all of those people we said unusually donated to McCain? Well, they never actually donated to him.

It would’ve likely gone unnoticed if not for the work of Amanda Carpenter:

That means these people Mosk alleged had been somehow forced to make campaign contributions to McCain through a third-party bundler NEVER DONATED MONEY TO MCCAIN.

The very lede of Mosk’s front-page story, included in my previous post linked above, was wrong.  What’s going on with the Washington Post? How could they have blown this one so badly? And where did the March 12 contribution date come from?

Thank God for their layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers!