I don't understand how that reply works. Can you elaborate?
(The best way for me to reconcile those would be to interpret it as a snarky "you're realizing it's useless, they also realized that, so they withdrew it" but that doesn't answer the question of why they made the request in the first place. Or I could interpret it as "the quote below is why they withdrew it" but that's even further from answering the question of why they made the request in the first place. Is it supposed to mean "they withdrew it so we don't find out what they'd learn"? It's hard to see how withdrawing the request helps very much there. Overall, I'm lost.)
most likely the fbi was monitoring some website somewhere and the person of interest posted a link to or talked about the article and it was 35 min after the story was posted when the guy linked to it.
It could be a smoke and mirrors response to get people to say “well in that case...” but the article does answer the question.