Journalistic institutions, especially in our increasingly complex social media era, tend to follow a simple (if also increasingly complex) mantra: make the news, don't be the news. During the course of a long weekend, BuzzFeed has lived both realities in the extreme. On Thursday night, its news organization published an extraordinary report alleging, among other things, that the special counsel’s office had documentary evidence that Donald Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie before Congress—a head-spinning detail that launched a news cycle of impeachment-centric commentary. By Friday night, however, Robert Mueller’s spokesman issued a statement declaring that the “description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

The careful language left BuzzFeed a little bit of wiggle room, but the response from the ordinarily taciturn and hermetic special counsel team was nonetheless widely interpreted as a blanket denial. On Twitter, and during subsequent TV hits, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith doubled-down on his organization's reporting. In journalism circles, though, people wondered if Smith’s career was on the line.

On Sunday afternoon, Smith and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anthony Cormier, one of the two reporters on the piece, appeared on CNN and proffered BuzzFeed’s strongest, most unequivocal defense of the story. Far from entertaining the possibility that some intricate nuance had been lost in translation, or that one of their two senior law enforcement sources had possibly misconstrued a detail, Smith and Cormier doubled-down on their double-down. “This is going to be borne out. This story is accurate,” Cormier told host Brian Stelter, who questioned him about whether a source could have been incorrect. “They’re not. They’re not. I’m confident,” Cormier replied. “We continue to report like mad, as we always do, but what we reported—the President of the United States directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress—is accurate. That is fundamentally accurate. We’re going to get inside the room where it happened and bear it out.”

The dichotomy between Mueller’s denial and BuzzFeed’s resolve has left many within the journalism world scratching their heads, including those who cover law enforcement and the Mueller probe. “I’m just mystified,” one national security reporter told me. “Anthony is so forceful, and so unequivocal in his defense. I just can’t find a way to square that with what Mueller is saying. They seem so damn sure, and I can’t tell if that’s real confidence because their sources are crazy good, or confidence because they know the implications of being wrong.”

Many recognize that BuzzFeed's credibility is now at stake. The organization has spent the past five years building up its reputation as a serious global news outlet with the chops to match its legacy media competitors. Its investigative reporting team, from which the Trump-Cohen-Mueller story originated, now numbers around 20 people. The site has broken a wide of array of major stories, including on the Trump-Moscow connection, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize last year. It recently prevailed in a high-profile court case involving its publication of the infamous Trump dossier in early 2017, another potentially reputation-damaging episode from which BuzzFeed ultimately emerged mostly unscathed.

Further, Smith is well-regarded among his peers as fearless and innovative: he built the news organization himself, and bravely led it through some of the darkest moments of the Dossier lawsuit. “Like most journalists, I’m holding my breath and hoping against hope that BuzzFeed can absolutely verify this story,” said Jill Abramson, the former New York Times executive editor who chronicles BuzzFeed extensively in her new book, Merchants of Truth. “Part of the reason I would be discomfited if the story is proven false is that BuzzFeed has really matured as a news organization. These are talented editors, and I admire Ben Smith’s transparency. He gets out there, and he’s standing by his reporters, standing by this story. He seems confident they’re gonna come out clean, and I am hoping that he has really great reasons to be saying that.” And if it turns out he doesn’t? “BuzzFeed has to be held accountable.”