Lessons from the Justice Department’s Orlando Transcript Bungling

On Monday morning, the Justice Department released a redacted transcript of a call to 911 that Omar Mateen, the shooter responsible for the deaths of forty-nine people at the Pulse night club, in Orlando, placed during the attack. (There was more than one call; a couple of others, apparently between Mateen and hostage negotiators, were vaguely described, but no transcripts were released.) By Monday afternoon, after a torrent of criticism, the Department decided to release the full transcript. The redactions in the first version would have been the stuff of farce had so many people not been in mourning. The key passage read like this: