In attempting to do a lame "hit piece" on Marco Rubio, the New York Times exposed themselves to be a full-fledged arm of the Democratic Party.

The Times ran a story breathlessly reporting that GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio and his wife had picked up 17 traffic violations in 18 years.  (Apparently, speeding is now a disqualification for running for president.)

It was a silly piece to begin with, given the fact that Marco Rubio picked up only 4 of the 17 tickets, compared to 13 for his wife.  But now, after a little digging, it appears that the traffic records were accessed not by New York Times reporters, but by an opposition research group known as American Bridge.

To make matters even more interesting, the Times are denying they were spoon-fed this story by a Democratic party oppo research group, and that they used a local document retrieval service to get the records.

Washington Free Beacon:

Records show that each of the citations mentioned by the New York Times were pulled in person by American Bridge operatives on May 26, 2015.

Take for example the time Rubio was pulled over in 1997. “Mr. Rubio’s troubles behind the wheel predate his days in politics,” wrote the New York Times. “In 1997, when he was cited for careless driving by a Florida Highway Patrol officer, he was fined and took voluntary driving classes.”

A look at the docket for that infraction on Miami-Dade County’s website shows that American Bridge was in Miami to pull records on that case at 11:42 a.m. on May 26:

Here's a graphic showing, in black and white, the lying of the New York Times:

None of the reporters involved responded to Washington Free Beacon requests for comment by press time.

In a recent Times story that actually cited Democratic sources by name, Jeremy Peters reported that “A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats.”

So scary, indeed, that Democrats appear to be feeding opposition research to the Times.

Ed Morrissey picks up the thread by reporting several updates to the story:

Update: The Times’ [sic] denies that they were fed the story by American Bridge, Dylan Byers reports based on an e-mail from the NYT’s Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan:

“We came across this on our own,” she wrote. “Steve Eder and Kitty Bennett noticed it on Tuesday while looking into something else – it is almost all on line. Eder planned to do it for First Draft next week. On Wednesday, another reporter, Alan Rappeport, got wind that others were looking at the same thing. He mentioned it to Eder, so we decided to get it in now. We hired a document retrieval service in Florida and got copies of the paper records ourselves. They came back yesterday.”

Also, Morrissey linked to this tweet that makes a liar out of the New York Times again, showing that no "document retrieval service" was used to get the records.

The people at the Times are stonewalling, of course, and will continue to do so.  Who's going to call them out on it?  Just a few conservative media outlets who can be easily discredited by the Democrats and their allies in the media.