New York Times: “Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An ‘important piece’ in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day. ‘The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,’ a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline.”

“When Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. ‘You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,’ he told Mr. Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents. As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. ‘Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,’ The Journal reported. And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Mr. Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.”