How the Kochs tried to destroy a journalist reporting on their political machine

The Koch brothers are all over the news once again this week, and not in a good way for them, thanks to the new book from New Yorker investigative reporter Jane Mayer. The book, Dark Money details the rise of the radical right and how it's been financed by a handful of billionaires, in particular Charles and David Koch. This isn't the first time Mayer has delved into the Kochs. In 2010, she wrote a piece for the New Yorker that examined the huge secret ideological network they had created, the "Kochtopus." For her efforts she became a target of smear campaign. She writes about it in her book, as David Corn reports for Mother Jones.

While reporting for her book, Mayer discovered that after her story was published, the Koch political machine assigned six or so operatives, who were working in borrowed space in the lobbying firm operated by J.C. Watts, a former Republican congressman, to dig up dirt on her. She notes that a source told her, "If they couldn't find it, they'd create it." And Mayer maintains that a private investigative firm, Vigilant Resources International, was hired for this job, as well. (This company was founded by Howard Safir, who had been New York City police commissioner when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.)

Mayer writes that she was at the time unaware of this effort, but she began to spot clues. A blogger asked her if she had heard the rumor that a private detective firm was on her trail. At a Christmas party, a former reporter told her that a private investigator had mentioned that some conservative billionaires were looking for dirt on a reporter who had written a story they disliked. Then, in January 2011, a New York Post reporter, Keith Kelly, contacted David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, to get a comment on "allegations" that would soon be published claiming that Mayer had borrowed heavily from other reporters. Shortly after that, as Mayer puts it in her book, Jonathan Strong, then a reporter at the conservative Daily Caller, emailed Mayer and Remnick and asked whether her work fell "within the realm of plagiarism." He sent several examples of her purported theft. […]

The Koch operatives, Mayer was later told by a source she doesn't name in her book, "thought they had you. They thought they were going to be knighted by the Kochs." And Mayer observes, "Their search for dirt had started with my personal life, I was told, but when that turned up nothing truly incriminating, they moved on to plagiarism." Later on, the general counsel of Koch Industries sent a letter to the American Society of Magazine Editors decrying the article in an attempt to prevent the New Yorker from winning a National Magazine Award for the piece.

Mayer was able to defuse the plagiarism allegations simply by contacting the writers she had referenced and credited in her article, who all said they didn't think they'd been plagiarized. She provided that information to the outlets and the story went away. That, however, left the Post reporter, Keith Kelly trying to figure out who was behind the smear campaign. Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller editor, told Kelly he had "no clue where we got it." That may or may not be true, but the Kochs certainly seemed to be covering their tracks well. Neither the Kochs nor Safir would comment then on whether they were the investigators. They remain mum now, responding neither to Mayer nor to Corn, for this article.

As Corn says, "this is a cautionary tale for any reporter who digs too deep into the world of dark money." If these guys are willing to spend billions to buy a government, they're certainly going to be willing to spend whatever it takes to destroy the free press trying to report on them. Kudos to Jane Mayer for taking them on. But she has practice facing down pure evil. After all, she wrote the definitive book on Dick Cheney and the "Dark Side."