Virginia Governor and unindicted Clinton bagman, Terry McAuliffe, made a rather over-the-top claim in an interview about Charlottesville with the New York Times.

McAuliffe told The New York Times in an impromptu street interview Sunday morning that police in Charlottesville did their best considering the circumstances.

“It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this, 80% of the people here had semiautomatic weapons,” McAuliffe said.
…
Though McAuliffe strongly commended law enforcement’s handling of the event, he appeared to suggest that police were unprepared for who actually showed up to the rally.

“You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army … I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; [the militia members] had better equipment than our State Police had,” McAuliffe said. “And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”

McAuliffe’s response that law enforcement’s handling of the violence was successful because there were no bullets fired and “zero property damage” would appear to ignore that dozens were left injured and a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when an apparent white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd.

There were “militia” at the demonstration but a) they were not involved in the confrontations and b) according to the Washington Post they totaled 32.

And the Virginia State Police disagreed:

“No, the State Police did not have inferior equipment,” Corinne Geller, Virginia State Police public relations manager, told the Free Beacon. “Our personnel are equipped, and were equipped, with the necessary protective and tactical gear for their safety and, obviously, to protect those that were in attendance of the event.”
…
Virginia State Police referred the Free Beacon to the governor’s office for comment on his thinking but speculated he may have been “speaking in generalities.” The governor’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

This, for instance, is a VA State Police MRAP in the streets of Charlottesville:

pic.twitter.com/HNiHG3fZkJ

— Ronald Bailey (@RonaldBailey) August 12, 2017

As the heat was turned up on McAuliffe’s blatant fabulism, the New York Times swooped in for the rescue.

FYI, these striking quotes from McAuliffe disappeared in the NYT's write-thru without explanation. https://t.co/nM9Td2j8rf pic.twitter.com/n5XVNqF2ok

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) August 14, 2017

The quotes about the Virginia State police being outgunned and the militias have been erased:

The McAuliffe quote has since been edited and rephrased by the Times in the hours since the piece was originally published but the paper did confirm the quote is accurate. “We regularly edit web stories—especially breaking news stories—to refine the story, add new information, additional context or analysis,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, VP of communications for the paper told the Free Beacon. “We only make note of changes if they involve an error. Making note of every change is unrealistic and would not serve the reader. In this case overlapping information was trimmed due to space limitations for print.”

“Yes, the entire quote was accurate. The current version of the story includes portions of the quote and paraphrases it.”

The news here isn’t that McAuliffe wouldn’t recognize the truth if it leapt out of the tall grass and bit his ass. We know that about McAuliffe. That McAuliffe said this and received no challenge from the New York Times, indeed, he received their assistance in mitigating the damage, is simply a sign of the degree to which the media has dropped all pretense at being a neutral player in American politics and has openly allied itself with the Democrats.