And its political implications? “People talk about finding the smoking gun. What got sent to us was not just a smoking gun; it was a gun still firing proverbial bullets,” said Maddow, who went on to note that it “names a specific person in the Trump campaign as working with the Russians on their hacking attack on the election last year.”

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And that wrinkle was just one of the fishy details in the over-the-transom tip. According to experts consulted by Maddow and her staff, it’s unlikely that a U.S. citizen would be named in a document of this sort. Other telltale signs relate to printer codes and digital sleuthing that Maddow presented in her trademarked long-form TV narrative style — the particulars of which we won’t detail here. May it suffice to say, however, that “The Rachel Maddow Show” took a pass on this potentially explosive document, except to point out that it appears to be a forgery.

As to who may have sent the document to the show, Maddow says, “We’re working on it.” It could have come from a two-bit trickster or some hanger-on with no agenda whatsoever. Then again: Maddow outlined a scenario with frightening implications for the tip-receiving media on the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia:

Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it, trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact blow that reporting up. You then hurt the credibility of that news organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it’s true, right? Even if it’s true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent — who knows — as to whether that too might be false like that other story, whether that too might be based on fake evidence.

No way this is the first time that a media organization has received a forgery or a bogus tip. It happens all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Maddow herself pointed to CBS News’s 2004 reporting on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, which stemmed from documents whose origin Maddow described as “murky.” Explaining that CBS News was “ripped to shreds” over its approach to the story, she noted, “that was a spike through the heart of the story of George W. Bush’s National Guard service keeping him out of Vietnam, which was a true and interesting story and which really might have been a serious ongoing political liability for candidate George W. Bush. But nobody was ever willing to touch it again during that campaign because of the way those documents purporting to prove out the worst aspects of that story blew up like a pipe bomb at CBS News.”

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