The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has spent the last number of years writing on the Koch brothers. She's done her best to cast the two funders of libertarian and conservative causes as a shadowy threat to democracy, even though numerous holes have been poked in her reporting.

She recently released a book about them, which has been extensively covered by the New York Times. The book received a glowing review from the paper, as well as an article that played up one of the more scandalous accusations in Mayer's book: "Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says."

It seems that Fred Koch, the father of the Charles and David, did help build part of an oil refinery in Nazi Germany—but that was in 1933, six years before Germany invaded Poland. At the time, Coca-Cola, IBM, GM, and just about every big U.S. multinational was still doing business with Germany. The Times also failed to disclose that Mayer is married to one of the paper's top editors and that the reporter who wrote up the aforementioned article is thanked by name in the acknowledgments of Mayer's book. (For more on that, see this previous blog post.)

Well, there's one other aspect of this spurious accusation against the Kochs that bears mentioning. Mayer's great-great grandfather founded the now defunct Lehman Brothers investment bank. Lehman Brothers, as it happens, actually did business with the Nazis in a way that was seriously questionable. Via Powerline, this Haaretz article spells it out:

In addition to support for a boycott, there were those who expressed opposition to such a move, among them Judge Irving Lehman. He voiced concern that the campaign would escalate the situation, resulting in additional harm to German Jews. He cautioned that advocates of a boycott not let their anger at the Nazis lead to the death of German Jews. In his case, however, his opposition may have also been motivated by the interests of his family's business – Lehman Brothers investment bank, which was one of a number of U.S. banks that did business with Hitler's Germany (75 years before the bank collapsed in the global economic crisis of 2008).

Since this has been pointed out, Mayer has been pretty furiously spinning. According to Politico, "A source close to Mayer suggested the Nazi allegation was odd, noting that no one in her immediate family has anything to do with Lehman Brothers and she doesn't know a 'single relative' who worked there."

And an article by Fast Company, which I must say is impressive in its naked attempt to defend Mayer at the expense of objectivity, contained this curious paragraph that made a hash of the accusation against Mayer:

And just yesterday, conservative political fundraising group America Rising PAC went on the attack, accusing her of a liberal bias and claiming that Mayer's great-great-grandfather did business with Nazi Germany, though she says the person they're describing is not a relation of hers.

Emphasis added.

Naturally, Fast Company edited that paragraph without noting the correction, presumably after it was pointed out that Mayer's great-great-grandfather did found Lehmann Brothers. America Rising and others have never accused him of working directly with Nazi Germany. Fast Company then changed the paragraph to this:

...accusing her of a liberal bias and claiming that Mayer's great-great-grandfather worked at Lehman Brothers and did business with Nazi Germany, though she tells Fast Company that no one in her immediate family has ever worked for Lehman Brothers.

So now Mayer is trying to hide behind a semantic debate about whether her great-great-grandfather is her "immediate family." The trouble is that Mayer seems to have had no problem crowing about her association with Lehman Brothers in the past. Here's her wedding announcement from 1992 that was published in, yes, The New York Times:

Ms. Mayer, who is keeping her name, graduated from Yale University. She is a daughter of William and Meredith Mayer of New York. ... She is a great-great-granddaughter of Emanuel Lehman, a founder of Lehman Brothers.

It seems as if Mayer was fine noting this relation in her wedding announcement—indeed, the whole thing is a classic humblebrag about the accomplishments of her and her husband's respective families—it's hard to distance herself now. And that's doubly true given that she thought that an arguably more dubious Nazi connection was enough to drag the Koch brothers through the mud in on one of the nation's largest newspapers.

Correction: On January 27, Haaretz retracted its report that Lehman Brothers did business with Nazi Germany saying, "The assertion that Lehman Brothers had business connections with Germany under Hitler was incorrect and there was no evidence to support it." However, Irving Lehman -- the nephew of Mayer's Great-Great Grandfather -- did still publicly oppose boycotts on doing business with Nazi Germany.