@wandeljw,
I thought it might be too early for Snopes to have picked up on this so didn't even check there. So thanks Wandel.
But who 'fact checks' Barbara Mikkelson?
I expect layman grass roots eye witness accounts to get various names and numbers wrong. For years I sat in on depositions, hearings, and mediations, and took recorded statements from witnesses, and read hundreds of police reports and there will almost always be sometimes even broad variances in the fine detail in the telling even when people are trying their very best to get it right.
How many times have we watched live telecasts of some major tragic event or election night coverage with information being reported as it comes in and then is corrected when this or that information is learned to be false.
And maybe you're too young to remember a parlor game in which one person whispers a statement to another who whispers it to another until it makes its way all around the room. The last person states it out loud and it is sometimes laughably different than the original statement.
It is also understandable that eye witness accounts might be quite different from what is reported in the newspaper or radio or evening news. I can testify to that from political events I have attended and experienced or watched on an unfiltered source like Cspan versus what was reported in the media. Sometimes I wondered if the reporter and I were actually at or watching the same event.
All this is to say that the fine detail almost certainly has been skewed in the telling and retelling of this particular email and some of the facts may in fact be based on rumor without foundation. But the fact that Snopes did not dismiss it outright as 'false' suggests that my original perception that it had a 'ring of truth' was probably right.
