The owner of Maryland’s biggest paper and TV stations is keeping close tabs on his outlet’s investigation of the state’s governor.

In recent months, The Baltimore Sun has brought on a team of investigators from sister television station Sinclair to comb through Gov. Wes Moore’s records as he seeks reelection and eyes a potential White House run in 2028.

The team, according to records shared with Semafor by Moore’s office, is digging into whether Moore had exaggerated his military record, as well as his high school and collegiate basketball tenure. Beginning in November, the group from the Sun sent a string of letters and emails to Moore’s team with detailed document requests regarding the governor’s service in the Army, the basketball scholarships he’d been offered, and other questions about his youth athletic history and college and fellowship applications.

By February, the team had grown frustrated with what they felt was Moore’s reluctance. So one of the investigators, Drew Sullins, fired off a note to the governor’s communications director, David Turner.

“Governor Moore has said, and continues to say, that he is transparent in all things. The reality is that he has been anything but. He and his team (of which you are a big part) have failed repeatedly to answer the most basic questions about his time in the Army and his deployment to Afghanistan. This is hardly becoming for a public servant occupying the position of high elected office that he does. This lack of transparency suggests — to even the average observer — that he’s afraid of something (or several things) in his military background. In this case, Governor Moore’s silence is actually deafening,” Sullins said.

The Sun’s investigative team was thrilled with the email.

“That’s a hammer!” Sean Lawlor, another investigator working on the Sun project, responded — accidentally including Moore’s team on the reply.

Minutes after the note was sent, several email addresses attempted to “recall” and unsend Lawlor’s email, a feature in some email clients. One of the people trying to recall the email: David Smith, the owner of the paper, who had not been visibly included on the original emails, according to a copy of the request shared with Semafor.

Smith has no official role at the paper, which he acquired in 2024 after its grim decline in the hands of hedge fund owner Alden Global Capital. His name does not appear on the masthead. But Smith, best known as the Trump ally who has steered the Sinclair television affiliate network to the political right, has been the driving force behind the Sun’s transformation from a well-known, fairly old-school, by-the-book regional newspaper to a new, more ideological local media hybrid.

The paper’s new driving force, according to current and former staff who spoke to Semafor, is to expose local and state fraud and the misdeeds — real and perceived — of Democratic politicians who may have had a role in it.

The paper’s rapid changes have not sat well with many on the paper’s staff, some of whom have left for other rival news organizations. They also haven’t gone over well with the Democrats who say the Sun used to cover them more fairly (or favorably).

Smith and the Sun did not respond to multiple requests for comment.