(…) The Intercept was one of the media outlets that Sussmann and Fusion GPS shopped the Alfa Bank hoax to back in late 2016 before the Presidential election that November. Not only did The Intercept not publish the Alfa Bank Hoax, they called it out, while pointing out that many other outlets who got the same hoax offered to them also did not publish.
Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee and Morgan Marquis-Boire at The Intercept went on to do an excellent job in an investigative piece on November 1, 2016, just before the election, explaining exactly why the claim that a Trump Tower server was functioning as some sort of secret communications channel between presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin – was almost certainly not true.
The Intercept’s investigative team discovered that this same hoax had been shopped around to many different outlets besides Slate. While Slate’s Franklin Foer leaped to publish the allegations, The Intercept wasn’t the only one that greeted the hoax with skepticism: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast and Vice also got the same handoff – and they also held back on publishing the story.
As The Intercept relates in the linked article:
