If they're proven wrong, BuzzFeed would be finished. Same for the reporters.

I am in a truck in south Texas. So hard to keep up.

They had two sources who claimed that Cohen will testify that Trump told him to lie in his Congressional testimony.

Mueller's office released a vague statement saying that the BuzzFeed report was not accurate but didn't clarify so it was unclear what it meant.

Now BuzzFeed is saying that they are standing by their story. If they're right, they'll be very successful. If they're wrong, they'll have lost all credibility.

but I'm troubled that they have not expanded their story to provide additional details and sources to support their contention. I'm also skeptical that no other news agency has stepped forward to corroborate their reporting with independent information.

It could still happen, and I hope it does, so I'm just sitting back, uncommitted, with eyes wide open for now.

Time will tell.

News agencies wouldn't have such sources if they didn't agree to maintaining anonymity, so instead, an agency vets their source, using resources far more expansive and superior to anything we have, and then they stake their reputation on their confidence in that source. If an agency simply reported that a certain person told them something then that agency would be safe from criticism and the task would fall upon their readers/viewers to decide if the source was credible.

The greater the reputation of a news source, the greater the confidence you can have in the reports they relay from their anonymous sources, because even if you don't know who the anonymous source is you can be sure the agency knows and trusts them, and you trust the agency.

see what might come out from the other side. Would Buzzfeed trade in this kiteflying ?

Trump associates gave them enough to go on, why wouldn't they run with it ? We already know that Guiliani has pushed out stuff to get ahead of the story.

Could anonymous FBI agents be sending a red flag about what is going on with
the mueller investigation (hint: it's not Mueller's doing)?

And I don't feel called upon to believe anything at this point, except that there's a lot riding upon how this unfolds.

That's how little faith I have in my fellow Americans.

What's certain is that WE are screwed.

Fun dayn moyl zu Got's oyem.

polling models were looked at and redone. 16 years later the polls were again wrong. I don’t think so. Just like Rs stole the election in 2000 they did it again in 2016.

of Buzzfeed it seemed to me. I turned it off.

The sharks are poised to bite at nearly any bait and they ARE being baited by those who trade on confusion rather than clarity. Lord Rupert is laughing at this one.

are probably feeling just a little jealous.

It may jeopardize his case.

I wouldn't use that characterization.

A source, whether of a journalist or an intelligence service, gets ranked. Access, accuracy, verifiability, reliability over time, confirmations over time from other sources or from information released publicly. Mueller's office, for whatever reasons, threw Buzzfeed's reporting into question.

Buzzfeed says, hang on a minute, Mr. M, we're pretty confident. On Monday, Buzzfeed says, hey, Mr. M, we're darn confident.

At this point, it's no longer a bet, IMHO.

They have a source - probably multiple sources. They have determined that these sources have access to the information. The sources have been shown to be reliable, which means that information they provided previously has proven to be spot on, i.e., consistent, correct, high-level, etc., etc. Whether the source is in Mueller's office is unknown. I would guess probably not. But the information that Mueller has received on this issue was available from any number of sources (even if that number is very small). That's where the Buzzfeed information has to be coming from. That may require an awful lot of parsing in terms of both accuracy and protecting sources. That's par for the course for investigative journalists.

So, is it really a bet if the confidence level is sufficiently high. Unless Buzzfeed is fucking around in some way, I would say that it's not a bet, but a sure thing.