“I want to talk about the sourcing here,” Hayes said. “And I obviously know there are anonymous sources you are protecting. But in a general sense, I had two reactions when I read the piece. One was” ‘Okay, why didn’t you tell us this before? And why not be on the record, whoever you are out there?’ I mean, this is — what you are saying here is very serious stuff. It is an incredible condemnation of the president’s character and just his humanity, obviously. What is your response to that?”

“It is interesting. And obviously I push. And obviously I know that other reporters who cover this area are pushing various people to say what’s on their minds,” Goldberg said, before offering some possible hints about the identify of some of his sources. “I think there is a couple of things. There is this idea of a code that, you know, you don’t interfere. I think people are torn. On one hand they don’t want to interfere in democratic electoral processes.”

“On the other hand, you are talking about a president who is unlike anything they have ever experienced,” Goldberg continued. “I think there is also fear. I think — and we see this across the board in Donald Trump’s Washington — there is a fear on a kind of a superficial level of a Twitter mob. There is also real fear of personal safety, fear for your family, fear for what you put everybody around you through if you started talking about this sort of thing.”