Is Harry Reid threatening to sue John Solomon (now of the Washington Post) and the Associated Press (his former employer) over Solomon's highly controversial and by most sentient standards discredited story about Reid's Las Vegas land deal?

It sure looks like something's going on. This evening at AmericaBlog, John Aravosis flagged a three day old AP day story that notes that Reid retained a high-profile specialist in libel law, Martin Singer, to "respond to a story by The Associated Press that was critical of a Las Vegas land deal involving the senator."

The report cites FEC records showing that Reid paid Singer $25,000 on December 14th, a bit more than two months after the story appeared.

Conceiveably that's for work he'd done in the preceding two months. But it looks more like a retainer, i.e., for future work, which would suggest that the legal wrangling continued well after the initial publication and possibly continues still.