A National Journal article last year about media reliance on faulty sources for stories concerning Hillary Clinton touched off a debate within her campaign about an informal adviser featured prominently in the article.

The story quoted Phillippe Reines, a deputy assistant secretary of state under Clinton and now a managing director of Beacon Global Strategies LLC. Reins complained that so many stories about Clinton used sources who were not truly part of Clinton’s inner circle.

“This makes me very nervous. Do you know what his status is going to be next year? Is she going to keep him as a consultant?”

“What gets lost is there are no consequences for [the source or the media] when they’re wrong — there just aren’t,” he told the Journal. “If you were to go back and look at the last three, four, five, six months of coverage about Secretary Clinton, you’re going to see certain reporters who cover her closely whose accuracy rate is less than 50/50.”

Reines also claimed Clinton’s staff usually could figure out who the anonymous source was.

“It’s not like you read something and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that could have been 97 people.’ You tend to know,” he said. “Not 100 percent of the time, but … I think sources would probably shrivel up if they knew that when these things happen, there’s usually a four-minute conversation about, ‘Oh, that was probably X.’”

Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill passed the story to key campaign staffers on Feb. 18 of last year, according to an email chain released by the hacker group WikiLeaks. He wrote that Reines felt so strongly about the issue that he decided to break his “no-more-press-calls rule.” Merrill took a shot at The New York Times.

[lz_jwplayer video=xD2EGd8u]

“We talked through a lot of the things we have often discussed on these calls about people selling themselves as something they are not, and the resulting misinformation that percolates at the highest levels of journalism (Read: The New York Times),” he wrote.

But campaign manager Robby Mook did not like it.

[lz_related_box id=”226070″]

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

“This makes me very nervous,” he wrote. “Do you know what his status is going to be next year? Is she going to keep him as a consultant?”

Campaign Chairman John Podesta responded that he “may be losing it” but thought Reines’ comments in the article were helpful to the campaign.

Mook wrote that he worried that stories quoting Clinton advisers complaining about the press would serve only to exacerbate an already rocky relationship with journalists.

“I worry that (a) he’s going on the record without checking about what he should say — not the end of the world now, but definitely a problem after we file — and (b) I don’t think it’s helpful for any of us to be amplifying process stories about our world being [expletive] up or how reporters aren’t doing their jobs,” Mook wrote. “To me, it reinforces our bad relationship with the press and is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Podesta sent a one-word reply from his iPad: “Chill.”