I think the answer to what the agenda is, is exactly how the reporters received these secret emails.
1. On Sunday Homer's 150$/week man-servant is shown emails showing the delay is due to the lawyers, the man-servant is given the green light to post on the forum that he has seen the lawyers emails it is their fault.
2. At the same time Homero sends the same emails to a handful of confidantes? Why? What does he say to them, 'look guys I am not lying here are the emails from my lawyer saying I cannot proceed'? Did he send them to this handful of confidantes solicited? Or did the respond to him having his man-servant view and detail them on his forum.
3. 2 days go by and two news .orgs surface with copies of these emails. The question is why? The bigger question is what exactly did the sender(s) say to the news .orgs? What part of the email did they suggest the report look at. 'he look at these emails it confirms your story that there is an SEC investigation' or ' hey look at these emails see Homero isn't lying the lawyers have him tied up and he cannot proceed'.
What introduction and what was the given reason to each reporter as to why they should look at these emails. And why two days later if Homero did indeed CC all the confidantes on Sunday but just allowed his man-servant to post confirmation of them.
We've had the emails since the night they were sent but need at least three confirmations per our policies that we've posted on our site:
http://coinfire.io/2015/02/02/clarifying-our-editorial-process-and-guidelines/The initial email was not prefaced by the source, they've given us materials in the past and knew that sending it to us would help give us clarification on the situation inside GAW. Our initial emails with them stated we weren't interested in running them as we didn't know the legalities of doing so.
We would speak with our attorneys and legal representation extensively the next morning regarding the emails and received even more of the bigger picture from another source. As the day progressed we received further confirmation from multiple sources and began investigating the authenticity of the emails. What started with a simple screenshot would later evolve in to being forwarded the entire emails with RAW headers in tact.
No one was trying to lead us to a story here, everyone sending us materials was just doing what they have been doing for a while now... sending us RAW materials.
We spent the better part of this afternoon discussing how we should handle the situation while drafting a post and speaking with further legal representation.
Ultimately we decided that it was news-worthy because the emails showed that a lie had been perpetuated via a blog post on PayBase and that was newsworthy.
We receive a large number of tips regarding a wide range of topics each day including GAW and most will end up in the trash. This one happened to come in via several sources and we knew that we could verify the authenticity of the messages when one source very familiar with the entire situation turned over several records relevant to the entire situation. We sent someone in person nearby to verify and everything fell in to place to bring this piece to light.
To reiterate, we received screenshots first, then RAW emails, and finally the last piece of the puzzle was delivered in real life to one of our contributors who happened to be near one of the sources that allowed us to further verify the information.
No conspiracy exists regarding the "timing" of this feature. We simply worked through our own clear process and the piece was released when it was ready, not in coordination or at the request of a source or even rushed for sudden page-views.
We standby our reporting and our process but we are working to make this more transparent using GitHub to let others make suggestions as to how things could be done better.