This 6 January 2015 email chain shows Tom Phillips updating Luke Lewis on the paused BuzzFeed/CEN investigation and explaining that work had been delayed because Craig Silverman had been “completely tied up” at the end of the previous year. The document is significant because Phillips says he and Alan White needed time to “plough through the stories we’ve gathered” and then decide how many had been debunked, how many needed more digging, and whether BuzzFeed needed “people on the ground” to help, especially because many of the stories were from India. At the same time, Phillips says Silverman would need to be paid for his time at a likely rate of USD 400 per day, probably around USD 2,000 in total, with discussion of whether the cost should come from the UK budget or from BuzzFeed News because senior people in New York were “fans of Craig” and Ben Smith was due to meet him about Emergent. The document is important in the wider evidence chain because it shows BuzzFeed willing to budget thousands of dollars for Silverman’s external verification role while still treating direct reporting, local checking and language/source verification as unresolved questions to be considered later. It should be read alongside the “easy bit” documents, later Craig Silverman/Emergent material and language-verification evidence, because it helps document how the investigation’s resources and momentum centred on Silverman’s authority rather than on building a direct original-reporting base for the disputed stories.