This is not a good look at all for USA Today.

The background here is that they received an op-ed from Margot Cleveland, a senior contributor to The Federalist, on the failures of the media over the Mueller report. Having written for them before, she turned in a piece that would run on Monday subject to a fact-check.

When news broke on Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had submitted his report on the Russia-collusion investigation to Attorney General William Barr, and that no further charges would be forthcoming, I penned an op-ed and submitted it to USA Today, which had published my work several times, including as recently as last November.

To her surprise, it was rejected for a lack of “reliable” sourcing because she cited The Federalist and Andrew McCarthy’s brilliant (and proven correct) work over at National Review.

Sunday evening, after reviewing my submission, Deputy Editorial Page Editor David Mastio replied via e-mail that the paper would publish it the next day, pending a routine fact check. I noted that I was happy to provide additional sources if needed. I then double-checked all of my supporting references and confirmed that they were solid, but sent on two additional links to congressional documents anyway, thinking they would be quicker to verify than the references I had provided.

Then came a shocker from Mastio: USA Today had instead decided to reject the submission because I cited The Federalist and National Review.

“Going forward, assertions of fact need to be backed up with mainstream media sources or original documents,” Mastio wrote. “Links to National Review or [T]he Federalist (or similar sites on the left) are not reliable.”

It’s important to note that The Federalist did some of the best work of any publication over the course of the last two years in regards to the Mueller investigation. While often being called conspiracy theorists by mindless “journalists” in the mainstream, the great investigative work they did has largely been vindicated now.

Worse, USA Today has previously and recently published op-eds citing The Federalist and had no problem with it. Mastio is simply coming up with a new, arbitrary rule in order to keep this latest op-ed out of the paper.

Never mind that USA Today just last month published an opinion article that directly cited The Federalist.

Cleveland responded to Mastio by pointing out how wrong his reasoning was for the decision.

“The entire point of my Op-Ed is that the media ignored the true scandal,” I fired back to Mastio. “And had your fact checkers bothered to look at the articles, they would have discovered that every statement of fact was backed-up with the original sources issued by the government.”

“[T]he articles laid out how the original sources established the facts—something the mainstream media refused to do,” I wrote. “Again, the point of my article.”

A second delicious irony came when I read the opinion article USA Today did publish on Monday—Never Trump Russian expert Tom Nichols’s op-ed entitled “Even after Mueller, we still don’t know what’s really going on with Trump and Russia.” Nichols’s opinion piece had nary a cite, but suggested as a real possibility that “[t]he president’s exoneration ironically rests entirely on Mueller’s caution and prudence.”