With an hour and a half before the start of the final debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Kimberley Strassel, a longtime columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a member of its powerful editorial board, tweeted what she hoped would be a bombshell tease. “WSJ edit page also obtained the Bobulinski emails/texts; we’ve been through them all,” she wrote. “My coming column--online v. soon--will relay a disturbing story of Hunter [Biden], Joe and the Chinese. It’s quite something. Hold tight...”

Her column soon appeared, sharing the breathless claims of Tony Bobulinski, a “Navy veteran and institutional investor” who, according to Strassel, provided her with the “ugly details” of the Biden “family brand” from the time, in 2017, when Bobulinski was the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings, which she described as being “a venture” between the “Bidens”—meaning Joe and son Hunter and Joe’s brother James—and CEFC China Energy, a Shanghai conglomerate. The deal they supposedly were working on together fell apart, Strassel explained, after the Chinese failed to pony up a promised $10 million.

But that didn’t stop Strassel from having a field day with Bobulinski’s stash of emails and texts purportedly about the Bidens and the “venture,” including a document that allegedly claimed that Hunter Biden was going to get 20% of the company’s equity and “the big guy”—Joe Biden, allegedly— was going to get 10% of the equity. This was all supposed to be a very nefarious example of the Bidens trading on their name and their political influence to make some major money. Trump raised the issue obliquely at the debate on Thursday night—he referred to Biden as “the big guy”—and Strassel noted that Biden was given “ample opportunity” to “deny” the “authenticity or facts” of the Bobulinski story and “didn’t.” Strassel concluded, “The former vice president is running on trust and good judgment. The Hunter tale is at best the story of a wayward son and indulgent father. At worst, it is an example of the entire Biden clan cashing in on its name with a U.S. rival.” (It’s hard to ignore the irony that Trump has of course abused nearly every domestic and foreign connection he has to enrich himself, his family, and many of his political and financial cronies, but whatever.)

Just hours later, in its news pages, two Wall Street Journal reporters seemed to debunk Bobulinski’s claims about Joe Biden’s involvement and Strassel’s assertions. “Text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture,” the reporters wrote. They also included a statement from Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates: “Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever. He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.”

Disagreements between the editorial side of the Journal and its reportorial side are nothing new, of course. And such disputes are not just a Wall Street Journal thing. As my colleague Joe Pompeo explained recently, the New York Times is in the midst of its own civil war of sorts too. But whatever is going on between the Journal’s editorial and news pages these days caused Richard Tofel, a former assistant publisher at the Journal and the founding manager of ProPublica, to tweet late Thursday night: “There has frequently been little love lost between the WSJ news and opinion pages. But tonight’s dueling stories are a real embarrassment to the latter, and a great short course on the difference between reporting and stenography.”

“Stenography” is a brutal word to describe the work of a journalist, which was no doubt Tofel’s point. Who might Strassel be a stenographer for, you ask? The answer may be no one, of course, or it may be found in the ongoing, and profound, relationship between Strassel and her colleagues on the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. By its own admission, the Bradley Foundation, with some $850 million in its coffers, is “considered a cornerstone of conservative philanthropy nationally,” dispersing between $35 million and $45 million annually to conservative causes “that strengthen civil society and uphold our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The foundation was derived from the wealth of the Bradley family, which, in 1903, started what became the Allen-Bradley Company, in Milwaukee, to make resistors used for electronics. (It is now part of Rockwell Automation.) Think of the Bradley Foundation as sort of a smaller and less well-known version of what the Koch family does with its billions. In a May 2001 editorial, the Wall Street Journal wrote about the foundation, saying, “There’s scarcely a part of America’s culture that Bradley hasn’t touched—and left the better for it.” The editorial noted that the Bradley Foundation supported the Federalist Society, “which believes judges should interpret law rather than make it” and which of course Trump has relied upon nearly exclusively to find the three conservative judges he’s nominated to the Supreme Court, as well as supported the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The editorial came in support of Michael Joyce, who was resigning as head of the Bradley Foundation “amid rumors of alcoholism and erratic and self-destructive behavior,” according to a 2016 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer and author of the highly acclaimed, best-selling book Dark Money.

There is plenty of evidence that the Bradley Foundation has touched the Wall Street Journal editorial board. But is the group better off for it? Since 2003 the Bradley Foundation has annually awarded up to four $250,000 cash prizes to “distinguished individuals whose extraordinary talents have influenced American scholarship and debate.” Four of the recipients since then have been members, or former members, of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board or, in one case, a writer who reports to Paul Gigot, the editor of the editorial page since 2001. In addition to Gigot, who won the $250,000 award in 2010, Strassel won it in 2014. According to its website, Strassel served as the master of ceremonies for the 2019 Bradley Prizes event. Also in 2014, Terry Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, was awarded the $250,000 Bradley Prize. (Teachout reports up through the Journal hierarchy to Gigot.) In 2018, Jason Riley won the Bradley Prize. Riley, who writes a weekly Journal column, left his full-time role and the editorial board in 2015 (though, as of Tuesday, he was still referred to online as an editorial board member). Other winners of the Bradley Prize include such conservative stalwarts (or reformed stalwarts, given the Trump fiasco) as the late Roger Ailes and Gary Becker, George Will and Michael Barone. Bret Stephens, a former Wall Street Journal columnist now at the New York Times, was nominated for the award three different years, never receiving it. Peggy Noonan, the longtime Journal columnist, has also been nominated for the award many times without winning it.

In sum, the Bradley Foundation has awarded $1 million to current and former members of the Journal’s editorial board or to writers on the paper’s Opinion side. Curiously, only Strassel lists winning the $250,000 Bradley Prize in her Journal bio; the other three do not. Gigot lists his Pulitzer and his Overseas Press Club award but not the Bradley Prize. (He once was considered as an addition to the board of the Bradley Foundation.) When the Journal wrote about Teachout winning the prize in 2014, it mentioned other winners of the prize, including Fouad Ajami, Bradley Smith, John Taylor, and Heather Mac Donald. But there was no mention of Teachout’s colleagues Gigot and Strassel having won the prize. The Journal’s article about Strassel winning the prize mentioned Teachout but not Gigot. There was no news article in the Journal about Riley winning the prize.

Apparently accepting such large gifts may be okay for the editorial side of the paper. According to a 2019 Journal article, editorial page writers are allowed to accept compensation for speaking to “nonprofit groups.” Newsroom employees are prohibited from accepting compensation for speaking engagements, with some exceptions for student groups. Whether receiving such large sums of money over the years from the Bradley Foundation has influenced the editorial board’s editorials is hard to know, of course. But one favorite target of the editorial board is Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island. He has been an outspoken critic of the Bradley Foundation on the national stage.

For instance, on October 13, during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Trump’s new Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, Whitehouse didn’t ask her a single question. Rather he focused on the powerful influence of “dark money” in our politics. “My experience around politics is that when you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows,” Whitehouse said. He then explained that the Bradley Foundation had given $5.6 million to 8 of the 11 organizations that wrote amicus briefs in a Supreme Court case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a case that it hoped would lead the Supreme Court to alter the shape of the CFPB. And Bradley’s funding of organizations that wrote amicus briefs to try to overturn existing case law was not a “one-off,” he continued, but part of a pattern of “dark money” that supports conservative causes and then tries to hide in the shadows.

Whitehouse’s bit of pageantry during the hearing earned him a beatdown from a Journal editorial later that day. “Sheldon the Vampire Slayer,” according to the editorial, “devoted his time instead to a Glenn Beck–style tutorial on the vast right-wing conspiracy that is supposedly buying the federal courts…. Like all obsessives, Mr. Whitehouse has a single theory that explains everything: ‘dark money.’” The Journal has written some 26 unsigned editorials featuring criticism of Senator Whitehouse in the past 14 months, including the latest in Tuesday’s paper. None of the unsigned editorials mentioned that Gigot, Strassel, and Riley had each won the Bradley Prize and might have a conflict of interest.

“The Bradley Prizes are public information, announced at a public event, and we’ve never made any effort to hide them,” Gigot said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “The prizes and the Bradley Foundation have no influence on what we write. We wrote critically about Sheldon Whitehouse on his lobbying for a judgeship for his tort-lawyer friend John McConnell (2009), his support for a punitive death tax (2010), his attack on the Supreme Court (2010), his version of a carbon tax (2013), and his support for using RICO against fossil fuel companies (2015), among other things, long before his recent campaign about ‘dark money.’ Our criticism of his attempts to stifle political speech and to threaten the judiciary are consistent with our philosophy over many decades. This is another attempt by Sheldon Whitehouse to smear anyone who disagrees with him with false political conspiracy theories.” (A spokesperson for the Bradley Foundation said it “doesn’t guide or make any requirements of the work of prize winners.”)

In an interview, Whitehouse likened Gigot’s comment to me to “squid ink” in that “when you get near a squid, it squirts squid ink to distract as it makes its escape.” Whitehouse says that he doesn’t consider the Journal editorial board to be a mouthpiece for the Bradley Foundation—but “the mouthpiece of polluters.” He adds, “I can’t prove that their campaign against me is an adjunct to their constant excuses for and denial of pollution concerns, but it sure looks that way, and the more you look into who’s behind a lot of this dark money stuff, you know, Koch Industries and the Koch brothers’ political operation and Americans for Prosperity pop up like mushrooms everywhere. So I don’t think it’s just the Bradley Foundation. I think they have a larger clientele for this.”

In addition to the Bradley Prizes, the Bradley Foundation has also given around $20 million to start and to sustain Encounter Books, a publisher of books for “smart conservatives,” according to a tagline it has used. Encounter Books also seems to like the members of the Journal editorial board. Among the books published by Encounter are those by Stephen Moore, the Trump economist and a former member of the Journal’s editorial board, and also one by the aforementioned Riley. In 2017, Encounter also published a book by George Melloan, a longtime editorial board member who retired in 2006 (and passed away recently.) Melloan’s book, titled Free People, Free Markets, is about how, without irony, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page “shaped America,” according to the book’s subtitle. In January 2016, Melloan reviewed Mayer’s book Dark Money, which exposed much of the spider web of nefarious connections between the Kochs, the Bradley Foundation, and other deep-pocketed financiers of conservative thinking. Like theater reviews, book reviews at the Journal are also under the auspices of Gigot.

Although others had widely praised Mayer’s book, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award, Melloan mostly trashed it. “Some readers might grow weary of Ms. Mayer’s breathless style, which suggests that every paragraph unmasks some secret of the giant right-wing conspiracy,” he wrote. He then argued that “the cynicism behind the politics-for-sale claim, even when displayed by a talented writer like Ms. Mayer, reflects a distrust of the American democratic system—as if ‘the people’ are commodities to be purchased and not autonomous beings who can think for themselves. The cynicism also denigrates the work of activists and scholars who join up with Cato, the Manhattan Institute, Heritage, Brookings, Hoover, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Foundation, Common Cause—or whatever organization one might choose—because they believe in what those bodies stand for, not because they are the mindless slaves of some rich donor.” Meanwhile, Strassel’s 2016 book, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech—published by Twelve Books (an imprint of Hachette then run by my wife, Deb Futter, who did not work on Strassel’s book)—has been described to me by Lisa Graves, the founder of True North Research, a progressive policy research group, as “basically a defense of a number of the grantees of the Bradley Foundation, and how they’ve supposedly been intimidated by the left.”

During these highly polarized times, drawing links between the Journal editorial board and the Bradley Foundation is treacherous, especially for an author whose books have been reviewed in the Journal—without much favor—and who has tried, and failed repeatedly, to get opinion pieces published in the Journal. It could be that a quarter of a million dollars doesn’t buy much fealty these days for top journalists. But it certainly seems that Strassel, Gigot, and others at the Journal have had no problem defending the goals of the Bradley Foundation in recent years without disclosing fully their ties to the Bradley Foundation.

“There are deep ties between the editorial board and the Wall Street Journal and the Bradley Foundation, and also some other foundations as well,” says Graves. “It certainly seems like they are obsessed with Senator Whitehouse, who is so courageous in speaking out about the dark money that has surrounded the courts, in terms of trying to install people onto the court with a goal of those judges reversing precedent.” She is disturbed by the relationship. “Whatever the veneer of journalistic integrity that exists on the surface at the Wall Street Journal, the idea that they’re so close to these foundations that are advancing is very troubling,” she concludes. “I think it would be troubling on the left or the right.”

“The wider problem in our society as a whole is the appalling way that a small group of big special interests have taken advantage of Citizens United and the various dark money opportunities to try to have their way secretly and against the popular will,” Whitehouse says. “I described it as basically a covert op, like an intelligence operation that they’re running against and within their own country, and I see this series of Wall Street Journal editorials as part of a smokescreen that gets thrown up to try to discredit what I’m saying or deter other people from joining me and try to protect the dark money operation. Imagine if they went to all this trouble to pack a court with three judges who are loyal to the big interest behind the dark money operation and then that popped out as a scandal and all their good work went to waste. That would be a real upset for them.”

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