Christmas came early on Tuesday for news junkies addicted to the non-stop intrigue and speculation surrounding Robert Mueller’s long-running Trump-Russia investigation. There had already been a doozy of a development on Monday night, when the special counsel accused Paul Manafort of breaching his plea deal by repeatedly lying to federal investigators. Then, the following morning, E.S.T., the whole thing got even juicier when The Guardian dropped a bombshell of a scoop. The British news organization reported that Manafort—the erstwhile Trump campaign manager and veteran political operative who has been locked up in solitary for months as part of his prosecution for widespread financial fraud—had “held secret talks with Julian Assange,” the founder of WikiLeaks, “inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign.” One of the meetings, according to The Guardian, took place around March 2016, months before “WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic e-mails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.”

If true, the revelation would be the closest thing to a smoking gun yet uncovered in the highly secretive and impossibly murky Russian collusion codex. But among some prominent followers of law enforcement and national-security arcana, “if true” appeared to be the operative wording as the report ricocheted around the Internet on Tuesday afternoon. “I’d like to see some corroboration of this,” tweeted Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who was famously fired by Donald Trump in early 2017, only to emerge as America’s pre-eminent seer of all things related to the Mueller probe. “Put this in the category of huge if true,” agreed Benjamin Wittes, the Brookings senior fellow and editor in chief of Lawfare. “Because of the way this is sourced, color me a little skeptical. Let’s see if other news organizations confirm/match it.”

Indeed, major U.S. news outlets were hustling to do just that in the wake of The Guardian report. As of Tuesday afternoon, Carl Bernstein had nailed down an adjacent scoop, reporting for CNN that Mueller’s team has been looking into a 2017 meeting between Manafort and the president of Ecuador, and that investigators have asked if WikiLeaks or Julian Assange were discussed in the meeting. (Assange has been given refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since being accused of rape in Sweden in 2012, and he was granted Ecuadorian citizenship late last year.) The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others were hot on the chase as well, sources confirmed. But as the day dragged on, no stateside outlet had yet confirmed the Manafort-Assange meetings. And reporters I spoke with who cover law enforcement and national security were unsure what to make of The Guardian story—but were unwilling to dismiss it.

WikiLeaks issued a hard denial from its Twitter account. “Remember this day when The Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet The Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” In a reference to a German magazine that retracted the publication of an infamous forgery in 1983, WikiLeaks continued, “This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the ‘Hitler Diaries.’”

By late afternoon E.S.T., WikiLeaks had embarked on a full-charge social-media campaign to discredit The Guardian and its reporter with the lead byline on the story, Luke Harding. In addition to calling for the resignation of Guardian editor in chief Kath Viner, the organization circulated a side-by-side comparison of the Assange story as initially published and an updated version with some changes, to suggest that The Guardian was walking the story back. (The changes did hedge certain bits of language, but they did not significantly alter any of the core assertions in the reporting.) WikiLeaks also created and publicized a GoFundMe campaign in an effort to raise money to “sue The Guardian for fabricating a story that Julian Assange had secret meetings with Paul Manafort.” ($15,815 out of a $300,000 goal had been raised as of press time.)