From the NY Mag story, above:

“During the campaign, Charles “Chuck” Johnson, an early supporter of Ted Cruz, said Lewandowski tried to hire him to do opposition research. Johnson said he declined the offer but that he and Lewandowski remained friends. Periodically, Johnson would use his website GotNews to prop Lewandowski up, once announcing, when there were murmurs he might work in the White House, “HE’S BACK!”

Johnson liked to call himself a journalist and “debunker of frauds,” but he was known primarily as a pervasive far-right menace, an oddity with few personal boundaries who’d once raised $150,000 for a neo-Nazi’s legal defense fund. In 2012, he had promoted unfounded accusations involving underage prostitutes and Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, on the conservative website the Daily Caller. At the time, the publication’s executive editor overseeing the Menendez coverage was David Martosko. Today, Martosko is the political editor of the Daily Mail. About the Daily Mail’s Porter scoop, “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say,” Johnson told me. “Probe-Media, from my understanding, is going to be doing a lot more work with private eyes.”

Johnson was always taking credit for things he didn’t seem to have any connection to. He was usually wrong, but he did seem to know things, sometimes, that turned out to be true, and, sometimes, he seemed to know them before anyone else. He also seemed to benefit from the fact that the new administration was populated by people who hadn’t been following politics very closely in recent years. He claimed he knew about Porter months in advance of the stories, and that some mysterious “we” was pleased with how things unfurled, even if he was surprised it took so long. Johnson said Lewandowski had nothing to do with the stories and that he wasn’t among the people he’d told about Porter. (Reached repeatedly for comment, Lewandowski did not answer questions.)”