Koch Biographer Jane Mayer's Strange Denials of Her Family Nazi Connections

From The Weekly Standard:

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.
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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.

The Mainstream Media, otherwise known as Democratic Operatives with bylines.