It was a familiar one-two in the age of Trump. On Tuesday, the day before Attorney General William Barr’s Senate testimony, The Washington Post published a staggering scoop, one that’s driven the news ever since: Robert Mueller had written a letter to Barr complaining that his initial summary of the Mueller report “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s work.

Minutes later, The New York Times published a story with almost precisely the same reporting. “I felt a flashback to the days of 2017 and 2018 when the Times and the Post published dueling scoops the way fighters trade blows,” CNN’s Brian Stelter remarked in his newsletter that night.

The Times and the Post are both well sourced and are often in pursuit of the same stories. In this instance, however, the Times has been left with the distinct impression that the Department of Justice intentionally screwed it by helping its competitor get the scoop. “We’ll certainly be more cautious going forward when we deal with D.O.J.,” a Times reporter familiar with the matter told me. (A D.O.J. official likewise told me the department will do the same when dealing with the Times.)

Here’s what happened, as far as I’ve been able to piece it together from multiple sources with direct knowledge of how things went down: the D.O.J. learned on Sunday that the Times was working on a story about the letter, which Mueller sent to Barr on March 27. The Times believes it was the first news outlet to nail down reporting on the letter and reach out to the D.O.J. On Tuesday, the D.O.J. confirmed the letter not to the Times, but to Devlin Barrett of the Post, and also allowed him to review it. Barrett and Matt Zapotosky broke the story for the Post just after 7 P.M. The Times immediately rushed out a story by Mark Mazzetti and Michael Schmidt, followed by other news outlets. By the next day, Times reporters had heard from contacts within the D.O.J. that the department had wanted “to teach Schmidt a lesson.” Here’s where the plot thickens: It turns out the Post had its first conversations about the letter with the D.O.J. the previous week, and from its perspective, it got the story fair and square.

In recent days, within the club of journalists who report on federal-law enforcement, there’s been a lot of chatter about how the Mueller letter leaked, and depending on who you talk to, the D.O.J. either laid some dark arts on the Times, or played ball with the Post in a respectable way. But the one thing that’s abundantly clear, based on hours of conversations I had about the episode on Friday, is that the tiff has only inflamed tensions between the D.O.J. and at least some of the Times reporters who cover it. (The Times and the D.O.J. declined to comment, as did the Post.)

Even before this, it’s safe to say there was no love lost between the D.O.J. and the Times, which by now has logged a deep backlist of stories—many carrying Schmidt’s byline—that have triggered conniptions at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, such as last year’s article about Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein reportedly suggesting that he might secretly record President Donald Trump, or that piece from April 3 reporting that some members of Mueller’s team thought Barr “failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry.” At least one D.O.J. official has communicated to Times reporters that the department believes the Times sits on stories, only to drop them at crucial moments—say, immediately before a high-profile congressional hearing. As a journalist from another news outlet observed, “In general, there’s a lot of bad blood at this point.”

At the same time, the truth is that reporting can be a film-noir activity, filled with horse-trading and dirty tricks and black eyes. As another Times reporter familiar with the situation put it, “If you’re gonna play in this sandbox on a big story, shit like this happens. But the game goes on.”

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— Cover story: Nicole Kidman reflects on her career, marriage, faith, and texting with Meryl Streep

— The investigations that could haunt Trump

— A mega-church pastor’s drug-running hustle

— Elizabeth Warren’s new approach: courting Game of Thrones fans?

— Why L.A. is ground zero for the next tech apocalypse

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.