The attacks on the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, conservative lower court judges, and the conservative legal movement seem rather obviously to be coordinated to roll out in a daily drip from different outlets to create an impression of corruption that would dissolve upon close inspection of any individual story. That, of course, requires that the people and organizations coming up with these attacks have to give them to different journalists to run. The problem for journalists who are apparently being fed these stories is that some of them are hilarious failures, and others are just glaringly weak sauce on their face. Sometimes, it would be wiser to decline to run these stories. For example, as Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon details, an April Washington Post hit by Caroline Kitchener, Robert Barnes, and Ann E. Marimow on judge Matthew Kacsmaryk claimed that the judge covered up his involvement in a law-review article, but “almost every part of the story appears to have been misleading or false.” Sunday, Steve Eder and Jo Becker of the New York Times ended up running a big, splashy piece arguing that Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was somehow acting improperly by having Supreme Court justices — wait for it — teach classes to law students. Never mind that Harvard, a litigant in this year’s biggest case, had Stephen Breyer on its law-school faculty for decades, had Ketanji Brown Jackson on the college’s Board of Overseers, and still employs Elena Kagan (who has not recused from the Harvard college-admissions case) to teach. Would you be embarrassed to have run these articles? I would.

Today, it was the turn of Heidi Przybyla of Politico, who writes that Leonard Leo “obtained a historic $1.6 billion gift for his conservative legal network via an introduction through the Federalist Society, whose tax status forbids political activism.” What is exactly is the story here? There are plenty of tax-exempt groups that share donors, fundraisers, and leadership with political groups. A lot of the nonprofit world is structured that way. Przybyla never suggests that the Federalist Society has crossed any legal lines over the tax code. If her goal is to argue that the Federalist Society is really more partisan than it lets on, she undercuts that by spending several paragraphs talking about how Steven Calabresi, one of the Society’s founders and still a co-chair, has become vocally alienated from conservative politics in recent years.

That leaves a story that implies that Leo has taken advantage of the Federalist Society, who is the real victim. Here is the setup: “Leo first met Barre Seid, the now 91-year-old manufacturing magnate turned donor, through an introduction arranged by Eugene Meyer, the longtime director of the Federalist Society.”

I figured, upon reading that sentence in an article entitled “Leonard Leo used Federalist Society contact to obtain $1.6 billion donation,” that I should read the story further to find out when that happened, what the circumstances were, how much Seid has also donated to the Federalist Society, and what role Seid’s own thinking played in funding Leo’s openly political projects.

Thirty-four paragraphs later, I was still waiting. Przybyla simply didn’t deliver the goods she promised, yet she published anyway, just padding out the piece to make it look as if there was something substantial behind the title.