I'll drop by to give my 5 cents about this whole mess.
The Smear Campaign Plans definitely were accessible in game at least up until Patch 1 or 2, since I did come across a few, rare people who actually did have a couple or so of them and got them around the time of the Odissey release. Which means that, they mustn't have been super-hard to find.
So, my suspicions lay on the idea that, rather than not being in the game, they are just glitched or something along these lines. In the sense that, either they do not spawn like they should, or there's such a massive quantity of trash data spawning where the Smear Campaign Plans should, that they clog up it all up to the point that they are unintentionally made into an uber-rare drop.