Swisher was presumably referring to the fact that three of Murdoch’s beloved organs—the Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News—have been firing missiles at the Mueller probe in what would appear to be a three-pronged attack. “I’m watching now and screaming,” a Fox News personality told CNNabout the network’s coverage earlier this week. “I want to quit.” One Journal veteran compared the paper’s recent opinion-page coverage of Mueller to the way it handled the Clinton controversies of the early 90s, telling me: “It’s like living through the Vince Foster years.” (Foster, a close Clinton colleague and friend, was a target back then; his suicide in 1993 amid pressures stemming from the Clinton probes was fuel for conspiracy theories, similar to how the Trump era’s most right-leaning talking heads have seized on the murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich.)

Members of a group of prominent conservatives pushing congressional Republicans to support the Mueller investigation told The Washington Post they were worried that the influence of Fox, the Post, and the Journal would encourage Trump to fire Mueller and “spark a constitutional crisis,” as Post reporter David Weigel put it. One of the conservatives cited the recent Journal writings, telling Weigel, “The infotainment side of the conservative media, they’ve been completely Trumpified for some time. The Wall Street Journal was another story. That was surprising to me. I didn’t regard them as part of the Trump right. When they wrote an editorial suggesting that Mueller resign, I felt that needed a response.”

Journal reporters, who have long accepted the paper’s role in the conservative-thought ecosystem, aren’t generally fazed by the writings of the editorial page. But several current reporters told me that the recent Mueller commentary—particularly the call for him to resign—has been a source of frustration. That frustration partly stems from the fact that the Journal, which was left eating The New York Times’s and Washington Post’s dust during the early part of the Trump administration, has been breaking through in its coverage of the White House and the Russia probes. Over the weekend, for instance, it didn’t go unnoticed that the Journal, unlike the Times and the Post, was able to corroborate CNN’s explosive reporting that Mueller’s first indictments were imminent. In the preceding weeks and months, the Journal landed scoops about a grand jury being convened; about the details of the suicide of a Republican activist who had been trying to get his hands on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from Russian hackers; and about a concurrent Manafort investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office. “People are always mad about our editorials undermining our reporting,” a Journal reporter told me, “but it is definitely more infuriating on this topic than anything else since we’ve made good progress on Russia lately. It’s frustrating to have to contend with this, even if smart people recognize the separation between the editorial side and news.” As another reporter told me, “We could disprove half the stuff” the opinion writers “are saying if they just read our own reporting. It’s like living in some alternate universe.”

The discrepancy can be awkward. Recently, national security reporter Shane Harris tweeted a link to that October 26 editorial, which was titled, “Democrats, Russians and the FBI; Did the bureau use disinformation to trigger its Trump probe?” Along with the link, Harris wrote, “US intel agencies developed their own reporting on Trump/Russia contacts. Some back to 2015.” And in a subsequent tweet: “Dossier didn’t exist when FBI investigation began. Fmr snr intel official also told me it played zero role in conclusion of Russian meddling.” A reader asked, “then why is your editorial board putting out garbage editorials saying the opposite?” “I have no role in what the editorial board chooses to write,” Harris replied. Indeed, while the Journal didn’t have a comment for this article, a spokeswoman pointed me to a tweet yesterday from @WSJopinion reinforcing its independence from the newsroom. Editorial page editor Paul Gigot also declined to comment.

The latest editorial-page meshugas has agitated nerves in a newsroom already on edge. In addition to layoffs, buyouts, restructuring, and gender-imbalance concerns, there’s been a well-documented drama this past year-and-a-half over editor-in-chief Gerry Baker’s direction of the paper’s Trump coverage, and I’m told that murmurs about a looming leadership change have reached a “fever pitch.” But one of the most morale-killing developments for many insiders has been the exodus of valuable newsroom talent to competing outlets, including prominent reporters like Adam Entous (to the Post and then The New Yorker) and Devlin Barrett (the Post), as well as high-ranking editors like David Enrich (the Times) and, most notably, Rebecca Blumenstein (ditto), who was seen as the beating heart of the newsroom before she left back in February.