OK, so what to make of the 24 hour BuzzFeed story extravaganza? To recap, BuzzFeed’s two reporters, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, put out a story late Thursday night with this lede: “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” The authors continue, “Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.”

There were other interesting pieces of the story but the real shocker was the words “directed” and “personally instructed.” The authors argued that the sources were not Michael Cohen himself (who pled guilty to lying to Congress about this matter in December). “The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.” Cohen’s guilty pleas had referenced doing illegal things “at the direction of Individual 1 (Trump)” but Mueller himself had not gone that far yet.

This allegation immediately fueled the prospect of impeachment for suborning perjury, one of the first impeachment articles filed against Nixon in 1974. If Trump “directed” Cohen to lie to Congress for him, it would be the end. So the story generated a lot of attention for good reason. It also got the attention of Congressional Democrats who immediately demanded to know if the story was true.

But there were some red flags that the media acknowledged in passing as it speculated on the “if true” consequences.

First, it was anonymously sourced. Typical of investigative reporting, but still reason enough to remain cautious.

Second, no other news outlet corroborated the story. This was a growing red flag throughout the day because other outlets tried to corroborate and couldn’t.

Third, the sources were described as “two federal law enforcement officials,” which raised the specter of a leak from Mueller’s Special Counsel Office (SCO).

Fourth, one of the authors (Jason Leopold) has a history of fabricating stories (though the other, Anthony Cormier, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016).

Fifth, Cohen didn’t work for Trump in 2017 so under what authority could Trump have “directed” Cohen to do…anything?

Sixth, the piece described the sources as “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails…” This was odd because the Special Counsel farmed out the investigation of the Trump Organization to the Southern District of New York (SDNY) US Attorney’s office. Why would the SCO be a source of information that would likely come from the SDNY?

So as the day moved along and nobody corroborated the BuzzFeed story, it looked like this story might go the way of the McClatchy Cohen-in-Prague stories. Which is to say that it might go down the memory hole, to be replaced by some new item.

But then something extraordinary happened. The Special Counsel office issued the first direct refutation of a story in the entire 2 year investigation: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”

There is a lot to parse in this statement but the real news is that it was issued at all. Why did SCO feel obliged to respond directly to this story and not the myriad other ones that were, at the very least, not entirely accurate?

So here’s my take on what’s happening here. SCO got nervous about four things and had to respond immediately:

1) The sources probably mischaracterized Trump’s communication with Cohen on the Congressional testimony. Cohen was Trump’s errand boy and felt pressured to serve his old boss. But that doesn’t mean Trump personally directed him to do so. FWIW, Ronan Farrow mentioned that his sources also told him that Trump would never have issued “direct orders” of the sort cited in the BuzzFeed article. So the BuzzFeed piece used far too strong language. Note that this does not mean Trump’s conversations with Cohen about the testimony were legal. If Trump coordinated or encouraged Cohen to lie, he is still guilty of suborning perjury and obstructing justice. But the exact wording would have to be scrutinized in context. Either way, SCO had reason enough to describe BuzzFeed’s characterization as “not accurate.”

2) There is a turf war between SCO and SDNY. SCO doesn’t leak. SDNY does leak. SCO wants to use Cohen as a witness. SDNY nailed him on the taxi medallion case and doesn’t care about Cohen’s fate. The “two law enforcement sources” are almost certainly in SDNY and not SCO. So SCO wanted to tell SDNY to stop leaking and to not jeopardize its key witness.

3) Related to this, SCO was increasingly worried that Cohen would back out of testifying in Congress because of fear of attacks against him. The BuzzFeed story ramped up the threats (real or perceived) to Cohen. So SCO wanted everybody to cool out and give Cohen space.

4) The rumblings from Congressional Democrats – including demands that information be made available before Mueller even finished his report – meant that Mueller needed to move fast to slow this story down.

This is what I think is going on here. There is always the possibility that the two BuzzFeed reporters completely fabricated the sources (though they’ve published other stories on the Moscow Trump Tower project that ended up correct). Or that the sources deliberately misled the reporters. Naturally Trump’s defenders are running around screaming “Fake News”, which is their prerogative. They’ve ironically ended the day praising Robert Mueller’s professionalism, which might come in handy in the end.

The wider lesson to everybody is to be leery of the “one big scoop”. Some scoops really are huge. Others are garbage. So remain critical but open-minded. And most of all, be patient and let Robert Mueller finish his investigation. By the end of today we’ll likely be talking about some other outrage anyway.