[astroid]

Well in this case CoPilot confirmed my own inferences, it wasn't just working on my behalf and 'doing a thing for me'.

I was asking it to check the sources because I found every article was doing exactly what was described, and was starting to doubt my own ability to trace the story because it was just going in circles.

So it acknowledging exactly what I observed, and adding additional context (which it was clear about) is not exactly a mark against it.

If I simply asked it to do a thing and it hallucinated something, sure. If I hadn't already done the work manually, sure.

That isn't close to what is happening here though. It correctly identified the issues in the reporting, and attempted to add additional context and still found there was no first party source. Which is all true.

David Lebryk and/or Scott Bessent could confirm this story right now and put everything to bed. Neither has anything else to lose. They haven't.

I'm sure someone will say "but what if Trump has them KILLED" or some nonsense like that -- they already came out and spoke against him, and if you have to resort to that kind of imaginary threat and use nothing but 2nd and 3rd party anonymous sources to make the claim.... you are floating a 'conspiracy theory'.