Fox's “news” side finally broke some news that is damaging to the Trump administration this weekend. But in true Fox fashion, the network promptly buried its own news, and now the story seems to be falling apart. Worse still, if the report holds up, it’s a devastating commentary on the network’s ethical standards.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has been pressuring Ukrainian prosecutors to investigate former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden since earlier this year, citing a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence. Trump currently faces an impeachment inquiry following a whistleblower’s report that he had corruptly leaned on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Giuliani on the probe, in an apparent effort to impact the 2020 presidential campaign.

On Sunday, Fox anchor Chris Wallace appeared to break major news on the story when he reported on Fox News Sunday that Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, a high-profile husband-and-wife team of Republican lawyers who are relentless Trump defenders, “have been working with” Giuliani to dig up “dirt” on Biden in Ukraine. Citing an unnamed “top U.S. official,” Wallace said that the trio has been reporting directly to the president about the “oppo research” they were generating.

It is vanishingly rare for Fox to produce original reporting that undermines the Trump administration. The network’s “news” side apparatus normally generates reporting that advances Republican narratives, serving up tidbits that Fox opinion hosts use to attack Democrats. Until this weekend, Fox’s big “scoop” on the whistleblower story involved credulously providing a platform for an anonymous administration official to downplay the impact of the pending release of a document detailing the call between Trump and Zelensky -- a report that fared poorly after the damning document was made public.

Several news outlets considered Wallace’s scoop important enough to report on. But true to form, Fox itself has all but ignored it. His report was mentioned only a handful of times on Sunday and Monday morning. FoxNews.com’s homepage similarly downplayed the network’s scoop on Sunday, giving top billing to an interview Giuliani did that day. By Monday morning, the story’s only homepage presence was in a sidebar of Fox “exclusive clips.”

In any case, by midday Monday the story appeared to be on life support. That’s when The Daily Beast reported that diGenova had said that while Giuliani had asked them to represent Ukrainian whistleblowers “who wanted to provide information to U.S. law enforcement,” the representation had never actually occurred, in part because Giuliani canceled a planned trip to Ukraine in May. He further denied that the president had ever been involved in the scheme.

It’s certainly possible that diGenova is lying, that his firm’s work with Ukrainains went further than he is acknowledging and that Trump was read in on it. But Fox already seems to be distancing itself from the report. Rather than defending his work directly, a Fox spokesperson passed on to the Beast Wallace’s own statement that he stands by his single-sourced reporting.

Adding to the confusion, in a Lou Dobbs Tonight segment last week, Toensing took credit for the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Yovanovich, a 33-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, had reportedly worked to thwart Giuliani’s effort to push Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 U.S. presidential election. “We got on your show and tried to get rid of her, remember?” Toensing told Lou Dobbs. “And we did.”