NY Times ‘broke’ this story that Marco Rubio had 4 traffic infractions. Then Free Beacon discovered only American Bridge, a liberal opposition research firm, was on the record for pulling the citations. They questioned the NY Times who then gave this story to Politico’s Dylan Byers.

The New York Times says its report about Sen. Marco Rubio and his wife’s traffic violations did not came from an outside source, denying a Free Beacon allegation that the information was provided by American Bridge, a left-wing super PAC founded by Hillary Clinton loyalist David Brock.

The Free Beacon reported Friday “that each of the citations mentioned by the New York Times were pulled in person by American Bridge operatives on May 26, 2015,” according to Miami-Dade County court records. The Times’ report cited “a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets,” but did not state who conducted that search, and neither the authors of the article nor the researcher appear on the court dockets.

However, in an email to the On Media blog on Friday, Times Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan denied that the information came from an outside source.

“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.“

But as Free Beacon reporters note, there is no record of any ‘document retrieval service’, just the opposition research firm.

We look forward to the NY Times explanation of this seeming lie inconsistency…