The question I have is: is it possible that there was such an incredible threat to national security that even an auditor could be convinced by a federal agency to give a false report? If it really didn't happen, how could a reputable news agency get a report so wrong? What exactly is going on here?
I got into a brief argument in comments here not too long ago about the saying "you can't prove a negative" which got bogged down in (what I considered to be) pedantic semantics; what we mean in practice is this kind of "negative." Instead of the conspiracy-minded folks providing proof that powerful, shadowy forces have come out in force against Bloomberg to discredit and suppress their reporting on an actual national security incident, they're demanding that skeptics prove that they haven't. And how can we do this? The complete lack of evidence for this happening might just mean that the shadowy, powerful forces are really good at hiding their tracks. We can posit that if they were really that powerful, they'd have suppressed the original reporting, but we can't prove that Bloomberg didn't just get lucky, or that their diligent, plucky reporters didn't somehow catch the Deep State off-guard for just a moment. We can point out that generally when we see this kind of story, other reporters in other organizations would have corroborated and even expanded the story by now, and that other reporters have said that they've tried and failed to do so. But that might mean the conspiracy is covering their tracks. That they've got to them. That the rest of the journalistic world is IN ON THE CONSPIRACY, MAN.
But it's also possible that the reason it increasingly looks like Bloomberg got played is that, well, Bloomberg got played. Like a cigar, sometimes a bad article is just a bad article.