Exclusive: Bush Family Donated $100K to Fox News in 2004 as Network Endorsed Bush Reelection Campaign

In response to the lefty commenters at Hot Air who ask, “so what’s the story here?” in response to the headline, “Clintons donated $100K to the NYT in 2008 as paper endorsed Hillary candidacy,” just reverse the players as I did above. Doesn’t sound good, does it? So why will this story get a pass from Hillary’s supporters?

Just a coincidence, or a quid pro quo? The confluence of money and influence usually works in the opposite direction for the Clintons and their “charitable” efforts, but the Washington Free Beacon’s latest discovery suggests some flexibility in the Clintonian modus operandi. Through the Clinton’s separate fund for charitable giving, the couple donated $100,000 to a charity run by the New York Times in 2008 — the same year that Arthur Sulzberger overrode his editorial board to deliver the paper’s endorsement to Hillary Clinton:

A little-known private foundation controlled by Bill and Hillary Clinton donated $100,000 to the New York Times’ charitable fund in 2008, the same year the newspaper’s editorial page endorsed Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary, according to tax documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. …

The Times’ editorial board endorsed Clinton against Democratic challengers John Edwards and Barack Obama on January 25, 2008, writing that she was “more qualified, right now, to be president.”

At the time, there were reports that the Times board had leaned toward endorsing Obama, but was overruled by then-chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family controlled the paper. Sulzberger’s cousins and Times Company directors, Lynn Dolnick and Michael Golden, chaired the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund in 2008.

The Clinton Family Foundation did not list the specific date the donation was made in its public tax disclosure forms. Neither the Times nor a representative of the Clintons responded by press time to a request for comment. Clinton ended her presidential campaign on June 7, 2008.

When the Washington Free Beacon attempted to get a response from the Times to their story, two guesses as to where the Times went instead of responding to the WFP: Why of course! To the Politico, who for the third time in a month, plays the role of Hillary’s media fixer:

Last week, the New York Times got caught with its pants down on a nonsensical “scoop” about Marco Rubio and his four driving violations in 17 years. Not only was the story silly, but its provenance appeared to fully originate at American Bridge, as the Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher discovered from perusing the public records. Instead of responding to Scher’s request for comment, the New York Times ran to Dylan Byers of Politico to claim that they had gotten the documents on their own, through a document retrieval service. During an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show on which I guest-hosted, Scher told me that he had re-accessed those records after hearing this story from Byers, and discovered that no other activity had been listed for any of the records on traffic violations from Rubio and his wife since May 26th, which is when American Bridge pulled the records in person. So far, no one at the New York Times seems interested in addressing that point.

Today, Alana Goodman reported on the $100,000 donation to a New York Times charity from the Clintons in 2008, the same year in which the paper endorsed Hillary for president. Goodman tried to get the New York Times to comment, but instead the paper ran once again to Byers rather than answer the Free Beacon:

In an email, Times spokesperson Elieen [sic] Murphy categorically rejected the report: “The Free Beacon story is preposterous from start to finish,” she wrote. Nick Merrill, a spokesperson for the Clinton 2016 campaign, declined to comment.

Still, Byers managed to advance the story a bit:

The Clinton Family Foundation has not given to the Times’ Neediest Cases Fund since 2008.

As I wrote earlier, the context of the donation is important in determining what it means. Clearly, this shows that the value of this particular charity to the Clintons didn’t extend past their annus horribilis in that presidential cycle, with the obvious conclusion that they had something else in mind than just New York City’s “Neediest Cases” with their cash infusion. The NYT told Byers that this assumption was “preposterous,” at least on their part. The newspaper didn’t explain why reporting on this singular connection was somehow “preposterous,” especially frpm a media outlet that busies itself breaking scoops about traffic tickets from a candidate’s spouse.

I realize I’m quoting two Ed Morrissey posts here (catch Capt. Ed live and in person in December here!) but here’s your Allahpundit-style exit quote section: