for example, reckless speculation time
@Hayterade - they could have easily went to guys like Stu who were unhappy with their tv time, maybe feeling a bit annoyed that Colt is missing from his group and Punk is taking up a lot of tv time now and hes vs a guy in your faction in Hangman. You ask a guy like that the right framed question and other lower guys similar questions and you can get a story.
im not saying this is what happened btw, just there's like a lot of scenarios where this was not some big conspiracy to smear Punk from the start. To me that's like the least plausible option in my Occam's Razor theory