Bloomberg News is helping a Republican operative push out a dishonest smear of Hillary Clinton, hyping the aggregate cost of Clinton's air travel while she was serving as a U.S. Senator as something that could be scandalous. But the article's dubious premise is undermined by facts contained in the article, notably that Clinton's travel history was routine and completely within Senate rules.

“Hillary Clinton took more than 200 privately chartered flights at taxpayer expense during her eight years in the U.S. Senate,” Bloomberg reported, “sometimes using the jets of corporations and major campaign donors as she racked up $225,756 in flight costs.”

The article warned that Clinton's travel record could feed into Republican attacks that she is “out of touch.” 

But Bloomberg undermined the entire premise of its article, reporting that “the flights fell within congressional rules and were not out of the ordinary for senators at the time”:

There is no evidence her Senate trips, which ranged in cost from less than $200 to upwards of $3,000 per flight, ran afoul of Senate rules, which were tightened by a 2007 ethics law. Before the law was changed, senators were required to pay the cost of a first-class ticket to ride aboard a private jet -- or, in some cases, even less. In Clinton's final two years in the Senate, lawmakers who flew on private or chartered planes had to pay their proportional share of the cost of the flight based on the number of passengers.

Bloomberg's complicity in pushing a GOP smear campaign that it concedes is without merit is a troubling development given the relentless and deceptive conservative attacks on Clinton.