The firm compiled a list of nine reporters and commentators it claimed were part of the Echo Chamber, including The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, The New York Times’s Max Fisher, and NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell. Fisher is described as having “heavily advocated” for the Iran deal and “placed himself at the service of Rhodes’s ‘Eco-chamber,’” while Mitchell is at one point identified as being a “vessel for Rhodes’s ‘eco-chamber.’”

Apparently, the theory was based in part on a 2016 New York Times Magazine story, in which Rhodes discussed the Obama White House’s strategy for selling the Iran deal to the press. “We created an echo chamber,” he claimed, describing how his communications team prompted sources to parrot their points of view: “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this . . . We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups.”

Rhodes was widely mocked in the press for those boasts, and the “Echo Chamber” memo is even more ridiculous on its face. Media organizations never needed a ringleader to coordinate their reporting on Trump—a president who generates negative headlines the way most people breathe air—and if they did, it is hard to imagine why any journalists would take their cues from Rhodes. (He, Kahl, Fisher, Mitchell, and Goldberg have all denied being involved in a sustained coordinated attack on the Trump presidency—“This is one of the stupider conspiracy theories circulating through a city currently drowning in stupid conspiracy theories,” said Goldberg, putting a fine point on it.)

The memo itself may be ludicrous, but its existence represents the firmest link yet between the White House and Black Cube, the latter of which attempted to discredit supporters of the Iran deal, as first reported by The Guardian, ahead of Trump’s deadline to either scrap or maintain it. (At the time, a N.S.C. spokesperson declined the paper’s request for comment.) Over the course of its operation, Black Cube sought to dig up “dirt” on officials who’d been integral in carrying out the deal: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told The Guardian. And while it’s still unclear whether the firm’s report and the White House memo are connected, it’s evident that the Trump administration considered the theory to be a matter of grave importance, circulating the “Echo Chamber” memo “at senior levels.”