Earlier this summer, after he and two other investigative journalists were forced to resign from CNN following the retraction of an article about Trump consigliere Anthony Scaramucci, Thomas Frank considered leaving journalism altogether. The drama surrounding the Mooch story had seized the public’s attention, and Frank suspected that in the immediate future, no news outlet would want to touch him with a 10-foot pole. After his defenestration, he spent a lot of time looking at job postings for things in the realm of public-policy analysis. Think tanks seemed like a good option. Even lobbying wasn’t looking so bad.
But within a few weeks, it became clear that the fallout from L’Affaire Scaramucci hadn’t turned Frank into a journalistic pariah. The story as it has unfolded is murkier, having as much to do with the idiosyncrasies of CNN’s journalistic culture—and its ongoing troubles with the president—as any error that may have been committed.
Frank now has a new job covering national security and counterintelligence for BuzzFeed, which he landed after applying through a link he saw on Facebook. He will start on October 2 as the Web site’s first full-time reporter on that beat. In particular, Frank will focus on the very story that his former colleagues at CNN’s investigative unit have reportedly been told to lay off of—the various probes investigating the Trump team’s potential role in Russia’s alleged 2016 election interference.
Frank, 54, is a seasoned reporter with 16 years in Washington and four stints in Iraq under his belt. Prior to joining CNN earlier this year, he spent more than a decade at USA Today, where he was a 2012 Pulitzer finalist. In his first public remarks since the imbroglio, Frank told me that his Scaramucci problem is mostly in the past. “I don’t think it’s gonna make it harder for me to report the [Russia] story,” he said. “It might mean people will be watching me extra closely, which I welcome. But of all the difficulties reporting this story, and there are many, I don’t think what happened to me is gonna be a huge difficulty.”
For legal reasons, Frank and the other two journalists who resigned over the Scaramucci piece, Eric Lichtblau and Lex Harris, are restricted from talking about the circumstances leading up to their departures. According to a recent New York Times exegesis on the Scaramucci incident, “Mr. Frank’s single source had wavered before the story was published, expressing concern about how the information was being presented. But Mr. Frank had not relayed that hesitancy to his colleagues.”
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said he had no trepidation about hiring Frank. “I haven’t seen or heard from any serious journalist who thinks the reporters” in that situation “are the ones who ended up with the black eye,” Smith said. He wouldn’t elaborate further about CNN’s handling of the matter. But in July, when he and I spoke about another in a recent string of CNN debacles—the one where Andrew “KFILE” Kaczynski was left to twist without corporate defense over a controversial legal caveat that was edited into a Trump-related story of his—Smith told me: “It makes me sick that they’re not out there defending a great reporter who is taking all the heat for them. Editors need to have reporters’ backs, and to take responsibility for screw-ups. This, and the recent firings send a terrible signal to reporters who are trying to do their jobs.”
The inescapable context of the dismissal of Frank and his colleagues is that CNN has been Trump’s journalistic enemy number one. There have even been concerns that Trump will try to use the Justice Department’s regulatory oversight of a merger between the network’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T as leverage to oust CNN President Jeff Zucker. The Scaramucci controversy was therefore all the more delicate, and the Trump administration seized on CNN’s retraction. CNN has since redirected its investigative unit to focus on subjects like the opioid crisis and environmental issues, while leaving Russia to the network’s White House team.
Smith said Frank would make BuzzFeed more competitive on the Russia story, which has largely been dominated by The New York Times and The Washington Post—though BuzzFeed has had some notable breakthroughs lately, like John Hudson’s reporting on a Russian plan for renewed diplomatic relations with the United States. Of course it was BuzzFeed that published one of the most blockbuster scoops of the Russia saga to date—the infamous unverified dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, over which BuzzFeed is now fighting a pair of lawsuits in New York and Florida. “I think we’ll break more news,” said Smith. “Tom brings a depth of experience and sourcing.”
