I admit it: I was dubious about Eileen McNamara's first New Bedford column, in which she said state officials failed the immigrants, because her assertion those officials knew about the raid ahead of time was based on word from a federal flack, and how could we trust that?

McNamara fills in the gaps today, and proves that not only did state officials know about the raid weeks ahead of time, Harry Spence and the governor who kept him on as DSS commissioner really should just learn to shut up rather than get caught up in a Big Lie:

... Told that, in fact, members of Patrick's Cabinet had briefed him about the operation weeks ago and that Spence had participated in a conference call with ICE the day before the raid -- a fact the commissioner himself acknowledged in yesterday's newspapers -- [a Patrick flack] reconsidered: "I'd like to retract that statement until I talk to someone who actually knows something about this timeline." ...