In the main, the 20 honored, mostly multi-bylined articles are sourced to “current and former officials,” “people with knowledge of …” or similar formulations. Sometimes a specific number of sources is given, but with few exceptions there is little insight into who these people were beyond the adjectives “senior” or “foreign” to describe officials here and there.
Rereading the stories, I searched mostly in vain for answers to these questions: Which government departments did the sources work for? What were their motivations? Were any of them seeking to deflect attention from their own failure to prevent Russian meddling in the 2016 election? How many were current and how many former (i.e. Obama administration) officials? Were any of them connected to former high-ranking officials who publicly – and profitably — turned against Trump? (Men such as James Comey of the FBI, John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence.) For that matter, were those high-profile men also serving as anonymous sources? And – a problem little discussed in journalism – could the same people have been sources for multiple stories, creating a distorted, snowballing impression of major wrongdoing?
Just as important, apart from White House denials of allegations, I usually searched in vain for voices both inside and outside the government who dissented from the dark interpretations that were offered.
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