ISDS exposé On August 28, 2016,
Chris Hamby published a series of articles detailing how international investors were using the
investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) to "undermine domestic regulations and gut environmental laws at the expense of poorer nations". Beginning with his article "The Court That Rules the World" 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 provisions were controversially included in NAFTA and the
TPP. The former was stripped of its ISDS provisions and the latter was rejected by the United States.
Steele dossier 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.
BuzzFeed News said that the dossier was unverified and "includes some clear errors". The dossier had been read widely by political and media figures in Washington. It previously had been sent to multiple journalists who had declined to publish it as unsubstantiated. The publication of the dossier was also met with criticism from, among others, CNN reporter
Jake Tapper, who called it irresponsible.
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". In response, BuzzFeed redacted the name of the company and official in its published dossier. 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. It alleged financial ties and collusion between
Putin, Trump, and the three bank owners. 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. The same day, Ben Smith again defended the publication in a
New York Times op-ed, calling it "undoubtedly real news". 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. In April 2018, Cohen dropped his defamation suit.
Leaked Milo Yiannopoulos emails 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 helped normalize the
American far right.
MSNBC's
Chris Hayes ranked the article as "one of the best reported pieces of the year". 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." Subsequently, numerous other men alleged that Spacey had sexually harassed or assaulted them. 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, although it was already in post-production at the time. Spacey was replaced with
Christopher Plummer in
Ridley Scott's film
All the Money in the World, which was six weeks from release.
Michael Cohen story 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. 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. 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."
BuzzFeed News issued an update to their original story stating, "The Mueller Report found that Trump did not direct Michael Cohen to lie." 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." Smith said, "Our sourcesfederal law enforcement officialsinterpreted the evidence Cohen presented as meaning that the president 'directed' Cohen to lie. We now know that Mueller did not."
FinCEN Files 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). ==Awards and recognition==