https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxd3y5/docs-prominent-journo-showed-draft-of-narrative-driving-russiagate-story-to-oppo-firm

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the high-profile Washington reporter Franklin Foer, according to recently-published documents, did something that would, in all likelihood, get an intern run out of town: He showed a full draft of an unpublished story to one of the co-founders of Fusion GPS, the Democratic-allied research firm notorious for producing a dubious dossier containing the claim that Donald Trump was being blackmailed by the owners of a "pee tape." More troublingly still, this isn't the only time Foer has contravened a fundamental journalistic norm—or the only time his editors have apparently let it slide.

Foer is a fancy, connected, and well-known journalist, formerly the editor of The New Republic and currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, who is working on what will presumably be an insidery and well-sourced book about the first 100 days of the Biden administration. The brother of famed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and author of ponderous, well-reviewed books like How Soccer Explains the World, he’s the sort of journalist whose dispatches set the tone not just for what will be covered by, but how it will be covered in, the elite centrist press. Throughout the summer and fall of 2016 he was far ahead of most of the mainstream press in forwarding the theory that Trump was in essence a Russian agent, publishing conspiratorial articles with headlines like “Putin’s Puppet” and “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”