The Joy Reid “hacking” saga has taken another weird turn.

The MSNBC host now says she's not so sure shadowy online criminals hacked the Wayback Machine Internet Archive to make it appear as if she published several anti-gay articles on her now-defunct personal blog , The Reid Report, more than 10 years ago.

“Reid and her team no longer believe the archive was hacked, and the Internet Archive has denied any such manipulation could have occurred,” the Daily Beast reported this week, citing the cable news host’s independently contracted cybersecurity “expert” Jonathan Nichols.

I use quotation marks around the word “expert” because everything points to the likelihood that Nichols is a crank-for-hire. After all, he “had trouble producing the promised evidence” of a hack, the Daily Beast noted, adding that, “what he did produce failed to withstand scrutiny. … Blog posts that Nichols claimed do not appear on the Internet Archive are, in fact, there. The indicators of hacked posts don’t bear out.”

The real takeaway here is that Reid and her team of supposed “experts” (who are are not official MSNBC employees) are backing away from their earlier suggestion that the Wayback Machine was manipulated by hackers.

This comes shortly after the people who maintain that archiving site said in no uncertain terms that they could find nothing to substantiate her claims their records were hacked.