in september 2002, following a two-week investigation, salon removed from its website an article authored by leopold about army secretary thomas e. white's role in the enron collapse, due to questions about the validity of an e-mail and allegations that portions of the article had not been adequately credited to the "financial times". the disputed e-mail was said to have been from white, telling the recipient to "close a bigger deal to hide the loss." according to salon, leopold's article "used seven full paragraphs amounting to 480 words, virtually verbatim, from the ft. there were two attributions to the ft within the passage, but they appeared to apply only to the specific sentences that contained them, not to the full passage." leopold later admitted that he had been careless by not providing the "ft" with additional credit, but insisted that "salon"s editors had all the relevant documents, including the disputed white email, before the story was published. paul krugman of "the new york times", who wrote a piece based in part on leopold's work, also had to backpedal, acknowledging that he should not have cited the e-mail.