BuzzFeed News

On August 28, 2016, Chris Hamby published a series of articles detailing how international investors were using the ISDS to "undermine domestic regulations and gut environmental laws at the expense of poorer nations.".[18] Beginning with his article The Court That Rules the World[19] and continuing for an eight article series, Hamby detailed alleged abuses of power of the court. The Pulitzer Prize nomination cited this as bringing attention to the court, and the articles were cited in a question to the European Parliament. In the articles, Hamby dives into cases such as Sajwani v. Egypt allowed investors who made deals with corrupt regimes to keep those deals after the fall of the regime. He also exposed how the threat of the court is used to prevent fines and expensive environmental cleanups, such as the leak of lead into the groundwater in Sitio del Niño, El Salvador.

The ISDS would go on to be a controversial part of NAFTA[20] and the TPP,[21] with the former being stripped of its ISDS provisions and the latter being rejected by the United States.

On January 10, 2017, CNN reported on the existence of classified documents that claimed Russia had compromising personal and financial information about President-elect Donald Trump. Trump and President Barack Obama had both been briefed on the content of the dossier the previous week. CNN did not publish the dossier, or any specific details of the dossier, as they could not be verified. Later the same day, BuzzFeed News published a 35-page dossier nearly in-full.[22][23] BuzzFeed News said that the dossier was unverified and "includes some clear errors".[24] The dossier had been read widely by political and media figures in Washington, and previously been sent to multiple journalists who had declined to publish it as unsubstantiated.[22] The next day, Trump responded, calling the website a "failing pile of garbage" during a news conference.[25] The publication of the dossier was also met with criticism from, among others, CNN reporter Jake Tapper, who called it irresponsible.[23] BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith defended the site's decision to publish the dossier.[26]

BuzzFeed News faced at least two lawsuits as a result of publishing the dossier. In February 2017, Aleksej Gubarev, the Russian chief of the technology company XBT, and a figure named in the dossier, sued BuzzFeed News for defamation. The suit centered on the allegations from the dossier that XBT had been "using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct 'altering operations' against the Democratic Party leadership".[27] In response, BuzzFeed redacted the name of the company and official in its published dossier.[28] In May 2017, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and German Khan – the owners of Alfa Bank – filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News for publishing the unverified dossier,[29][30] which alleged financial ties and collusion between Putin, Trump, and the three bank owners.[31][32] In January 2018, one year after the dossier became public, Trump's lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who was also named in the dossier, filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News.[33] The same day, Ben Smith again defended the publication in a New York Times op-ed, calling it "undoubtedly real news".[34][35] In February 2018, BuzzFeed News sued the Democratic National Committee to obtain their internal investigation documents regarding the hack of their server during the presidential campaign in order for the journal to better defend itself against Gubarev's lawsuit.[36] In April 2018, Cohen dropped his defamation suit.[37]

An exposé by BuzzFeed News published on October 5, 2017 documented how Breitbart News solicited story ideas and copy edits from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, with Milo Yiannopoulos acting as an intermediary. Yiannopoulos and other Breitbart employees developed and marketed the values and tactics of these groups, attempting to make them palatable to a broader audience. In the article, BuzzFeed News senior technology reporter Joseph Bernstein wrote that Breitbart actively fed from the "most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right," and helping normalize the American far right.[38][39] MSNBC's Chris Hayes called the article "one of the best reported pieces of the year".[40] The Columbia Journalism Review described the story as a scrupulous, months-long project and "the culmination of years of reporting and source-building on a beat that few thought much about until Donald Trump won the presidential election."[40]

On October 29, 2017, BuzzFeed News published the original story in which actor Anthony Rapp accused actor Kevin Spacey of making sexual advances toward him at a party in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26.[41][42] Subsequently, numerous other men alleged that Spacey had sexually harassed or assaulted them.[43][44] As a result, Netflix indefinitely suspended production of Spacey's TV series House of Cards, and opted to not release his film Gore on their service, which was in post-production at the time.[45][46] Spacey was replaced with Christopher Plummer in Ridley Scott's film All the Money in the World, which was six weeks from release.[47]

On January 17, 2019, BuzzFeed News published an article in which the authors accused Trump of ordering his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the timing of a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.[48][49] The article states that Trump was given updates by Cohen at least ten times and cites texts, messages, and emails as sources. In the day following the release of the report, many prominent democrats called for impeachment if the accusations were true, including former attorney general Eric Holder.[50]

The office of Robert Mueller disputed the report on January 19, calling it "not accurate". With the release of the Mueller report in April 2019, the report found that while there was evidence that Trump was aware that Cohen had provided false testimony to Congress, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony."[51] BuzzFeed News issued an update to their original story stating, "The Mueller Report found that Trump did not direct Michael Cohen to lie."[52][53] Ben Smith, then-editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, responded by releasing notes from the FBI interview with Cohen, which said "Cohen told OSC (Mueller's office) he was asked to lie by DJT/DJT Jr., lawyers."[51] Smith said, "Our sources — federal law enforcement officials — interpreted the evidence Cohen presented as meaning that the president 'directed' Cohen to lie. We now know that Mueller did not."[51]

In September 2020 Buzzfeed News alongside the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the FinCEN files a collection of 2,657 documents leaked from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN),