Koch Brothers Accused of Hiring Former NYPD Chief to Dig up Dirt on Journalist

The Koch brothers, who control the second-largest privately held company in the United States, hired former NYPD commissioner Howard Safir to dig up dirt on journalist Jane Mayer, she claims in a new book.

Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, says that soon after she revealed how David and Charles Koch were using their fortune to exert an outsize influence over American politics in a lengthy magazine expose titled "Covert Operations," she found out that the brothers had assembled a team of operatives and private investigators to discredit her. One of them was Safir, who served as police commissioner under former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, she writes in her new book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind The Rise of the Radical Right.