The timing of the leak spoke just as loudly. Breitbart is positioning itself as the loudest voice on the right against the new American Health Care Act (AHCA), the House Republicans’ health-care bill, which the White House is backing. The publication of Boyle’s story on Monday instantly sparked speculation about what it might indicate about Bannon’s, or Trump’s, level of support for the bill. Will they abandon it if it looks doomed to fail, and leave Ryan holding the bag?

“Breitbart is obviously attempting to savage Ryan in the way they always have--it's what their base expects now,” said former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro, who left the site in protest last year. “But to imagine that they're doing all of this against Bannon's wishes strains credulity.”

“There’s a lot of general philosophical animus towards Ryan” at Breitbart, said one current Breitbart staffer. “By making it their lead [story] and everything else and going after Ryan right now with our readers, it’s interesting. It feels like Matt [Boyle] to me, it doesn’t feel like Bannon at all.”

“Definitely no concerted effort but yes Boyle doesn't like [Ryan],” said one friend of Boyle’s, who noted that Boyle leads the site’s politics coverage.

Bannon didn’t return requests for comment; nor did Boyle. The last time Boyle took aim at an ally of the president was in a recent story about White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, blaming Priebus for a litany of the administration’s problems, including his failure to purge the government of Obama holdovers. That story didn’t go over particularly well with his former boss, who told me the piece was “absurd” and reportedly excoriated Boyle in private for it. At the time, Bannon and Priebus were executing a full-court press effort to tamp down rumors that they were clashing within the White House.

Breitbart’s story on Monday wasn’t the first time the site had taken aim at Ryan over AHCA, which it has dubbed “RyanCare” or “Obamacare 2.0.” It has published a flurry of stories slamming Ryan for the bill. Other establishment types have sustained collateral damage in the process. Monday night’s story included a swipe at White House press secretary Sean Spicer, a close Priebus ally, who “is working internally as hard as he can to help Ryan on this front regardless of the impact on Trump along with a handful of other White House aides who came from the Republican National Committee and are not Trump loyalists,” Boyle reported.

The cascade of anti-AHCA, anti-Ryan stories came after a short period in which the site offered favorable coverage of Priebus allies. It published, for example, a glowing profile of deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh. But the AHCA changed things. “We are Breitbart,” Boyle wrote in an internal slack message obtained by Business Insider last week. “This is war. There are no sacred cows in war.”