Why this conspiracy take? It’s perfectly reasonable for a respectable news org to dot their t’s and cross their i’s with their lawyers before they come out with the story.

It is plausible that they waited to publish it after the elections. But august vs october imo does not matter, this was a thing for much longer anyway, so the "why now" still stands and refers to when the leak initiated rather than when it was published.

What? That’s the opposite of what I said. They got a tip, they took the time to investigate it. How is that “ writing everything they see exactly when they see it?”