“The editorial page has been doing crazy shit for a long time,” a former long-serving Wall Street Journal editor told me this week. This person was referencing the time-honored divide in most journalistic organizations between the newsroom and the opinion desk. At the Journal, that divide can be particularly fraught. While the paper has long been a leading bastion of conservative thinking, its editorial writers are known to take positions that are more extreme than many of their colleagues in the newsroom can stomach.

The friction is, in some ways, a hallmark of the institution. A decade ago, an editorial-page columnist attacked a 2006 Journal series about the practice of backdating stock-option awards that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The page also once defended billionaire junk-bond king Michael Milken, who got a 10-year sentence for securities fraud in 1990 based in part on exposés by Journal reporters. Nevertheless, several Journal veterans I spoke with described the current rift as among the more fractious they’ve witnessed. “It does feel like this is a different level of crazy,” the veteran editor said.

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In recent days, of course, the opinion coverage has produced controversial commentary on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, often flying in the face of the Journal’s own news reporting. On October 23, political scientist Peter Berkowitz proclaimed that the probe into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign “threaten[s] the rule of law.” Days later, an October 29 piece by two attorneys from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations called on President Donald Trump to “immediately [issue] a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion.” Meanwhile, Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel filed an October 26 column raining opprobrium on Fusion GPS, the intelligence outfit that commissioned former British spook Christopher Steele to compile the now infamous Trump-Russia dossier. Most recently, there was an editorial that acknowledged the indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates for non-campaign-related alleged money laundering. The editorial’s main thrust, however, seemed to be to excoriate Democrats for “their role in financing Fusion.” The editorial referred to Fusion as “sleazy operators”; it didn’t mention that the guys who run Fusion were previously Wall Street Journal reporters. Former high-ranking Journal editor Bill Grueskin spoke for many when he tweeted, “WSJ edit page has gone full bats--t.”

The entry that really made people spit out their coffee, however, was an editorial published last week declaring that Mueller, who once ran the F.B.I., “lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe.” It also proposed that Mueller “could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.”

The piece was published on October 25, but it didn’t explode until Sunday, when Twitter was flooded with disparaging reactions as media and political junkies eagerly awaited the following morning’s indictment fireworks. “There are no words to describe how disgraceful and dangerous this coordinated attack against Robert Mueller is,” noted Joe Scarborough. Recode’s Kara Swisher, a Journal alum, sneered, “I feel sorry for every decent reporter at the WSJ for this claptrap from Rupert Murdoch’s ever desiccated soul.”

Swisher was presumably referring to the fact that three of Murdoch’s beloved organs—the Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News—have been firing missiles at the Mueller probe in what would appear to be a three-pronged attack. “I’m watching now and screaming,” a Fox News personality told CNN about the network’s coverage earlier this week. “I want to quit.” One Journal veteran compared the paper’s recent opinion-page coverage of Mueller to the way it handled the Clinton controversies of the early 90s, telling me: “It’s like living through the Vince Foster years.” (Foster, a close Clinton colleague and friend, was a target back then; his suicide in 1993 amid pressures stemming from the Clinton probes was fuel for conspiracy theories, similar to how the Trump era’s most right-leaning talking heads have seized on the murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich.)

Members of a group of prominent conservatives pushing congressional Republicans to support the Mueller investigation told The Washington Post they were worried that the influence of Fox, the Post, and the Journal would encourage Trump to fire Mueller and “spark a constitutional crisis,” as Post reporter David Weigel put it. One of the conservatives cited the recent Journal writings, telling Weigel, “The infotainment side of the conservative media, they’ve been completely Trumpified for some time. The Wall Street Journal was another story. That was surprising to me. I didn’t regard them as part of the Trump right. When they wrote an editorial suggesting that Mueller resign, I felt that needed a response.”