Last year saw two particularly perplexing document leaks on record. One was the dossier of purported salacious acts linking President Donald Trump to Russian government or financial manipulators. Carpenter said her news bureau got a copy of the dossier after the election, but she would not have published it because it was too unverifiable. The magazine Mother Jones did run a story about the file eight days before the election, and the online site Buzzfeed published the entire contents. Trump has denied all the claims.

On the other hand, when an anonymous source provided 11.5 million documents pilfered from a Panamanian law firm revealing the money-laundering schemes of scores of wealthy individuals, Carpenter and her reporters joined a consortium of 370 journalists in 80 countries to parse the trove and publish what could be verified. They uncovered proof of illegal activity involving everyone from government leaders to greedy divorcees, who used a network of financial diversions stretching from tiny islands in the South Pacific to the Nevada and Wyoming corporate registries.

In the Panama Papers case, Carpenter said the unidentified leaker claimed he was motivated to fight injustice, income inequality and corruption. He was also willing to sell the database to the German government for about $6 million.