The timing of this story couldn't be more conspicuous.

Trump is right in the middle of ramping up his criticism and questioning of the intelligence community's conclusions about Russia's alleged hacking of Democrats in an effort to influence the 2016 election. He's still not granting that Russia did the hacking. And just this week he put the word “intelligence” in quotation marks in a tweet and suggested the intelligence community was out to get him — was scrambling to find proof to back up their preferred theory.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and Adm. Mike Rogers, the National Security Agency director, are both testifying before Congress this morning, and Trump is set to be briefed (again) on Russian hacking on Friday. All of which comes at a time when Trump's questioning of the intelligence community has driven a wedge between him and some Republicans.

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It's not clear what's going on here, but the fact that this would come out at this particular juncture in time is too difficult to ignore.

Let's step back and acknowledge some well-established D.C. dynamics. The first is the tradition of floating plans that may or may not be likely to come to fruition — either to send a message or because they're trial balloons. One of the Journal's sources essentially admitted this was a response to what the Trump transition team viewed as politics seeping into the intelligence-gathering process — the same argument some Trump defenders have used to question the intelligence pointing to Russian involvement in the hack. And as they prepared to testify Thursday and brief Trump on Friday on a story line he really doesn't like — sharing information he may not want to see — intelligence officials got a reminder that, whether he chooses to use it or not, he has the power to make their lives very different/difficult.

The other dynamic is the continuing communication issues and conflicting signals inside Team Trump, where it often seems no one is more surprised by what the president-elect or some of his aides do or say than other senior staffers or surrogates.

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Still, Spicer's denial is pretty full-throated here, which begs the question: Where did this come from? Did someone close to the Trump transition team totally concoct these plans whole-cloth? If so, why? Is this merely a possibility rather than an actual plan?

The report is based on anonymous sources and has been echoed by other outlets, we would note. Somebody is saying this stuff. It's also not presented as an ironclad proposal or something that's definitely going to happen — more as something the Trump transition team is looking into and planning on. So if it doesn't happen, there's really no accountability.

It all reinforces just how much Trump's incoming administration presents a tough choice for journalists. Usually these kinds of plans do leak out through anonymous sources like this — either because they aren't ready for an official public announcement or because someone gets ahead of the official operation and an entrepreneurial journalist scoops his or her colleagues.

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But when you can't even expect the president to follow through on his many publicly stated proposals — see: prosecuting Hillary Clinton, mass deportation, Muslim immigration ban, etc. — how can you rely on anonymous sources to provide accurate information about what will happen in the future? There are just no guarantees. Even if a plan were embraced by Trump, there's no guarantee he might not alter or discard it before it's announced — or even after.