Today’s NYT runs an oddly loving piece about Larry Summers’ work with D.E. Shaw. Summers participates, but if the reporter ever said something to him like, “Mr. Summers, how can the American public believe that you’re impartial when the very companies you’re now regulating have made you a rich man?”, there’s no sign of it.

Instead…

Mr. Summers said in an interview that his experience at Shaw, however brief, gave him valuable insight into the practical realities of Wall Street, insight he is now putting to use in shaping economic policy in the White House.

“I have a better sense of how market participants sort of think and react to things from sort of listening to the conversations and listening to the way the traders at D. E. Shaw thought,” he said.

The “sort of”s in that sentence suggest that it is B.S., and that Summers knows it. They’re not a normal verbal tic for him; you’ll rarely hear Summers say “sort of,” and certainly not twice in one sentence. They reflect a pyschological awkwardness and hesitation that come when the speaker is shoveling it.

There’s more evidence that Summers turned to Bob Rubin for help looking for a job; he considered working at the two banks with which Rubin was associated and which later paid him some $200k in “speaking fees.”

…Mr. Summers discussed job possibilities with Goldman Sachs, long considered the premier Wall Street bank, and with Citigroup, where Robert E. Rubin, Mr. Summers’s predecessor as Treasury secretary, had become a senior adviser.

That’s a great example of bad journalism/poor editing, describing Rubin as “Summers’s predecessor as Treasury secretary.” That descriptive clause should read something like “his friend Robert E. Rubin, Summers’s predecessor at Treasury and a fellow member of the Harvard Corporation who helped negotiate Summers’ exit from the Harvard presidency…” Because after all, one of implicit issues in the article is backscratching for profit.

Again, we get more about how smart Summers is.

In a rare interview, David E. Shaw, who founded the firm in 1988 above a communist book shop in Greenwich Village, put it simply: Mr. Summers is “a brilliant, brilliant guy.” That is from a former computer science professor at Columbia who now spends his time researching areas like treatments for cancer, while others run his hedge fund day-to-day.

The second sentence of that paragraph is extremely odd. It’s like saying, “And just in case you don’t believe him….he’s really smart too!” Again: poor editing. The Times seems to be endorsing the sentiment of the quote.

The Times reassures us that Summers would never, ever do anything that risked a conflict of interest. [Emphasis added.]

Friends of Mr. Summers say he has always been meticulous about avoiding conflicts of interest and that he was just as careful at D. E. Shaw. For instance, Mr. Summers went to lengths to pay the Social Security taxes on payments he made to even occasional babysitters from the 1980s, said Jeremy Bulow, an economics professor at Stanford, who has known Mr. Summers since graduate school.

Now, wait a minute. First of all, I’m going to call bullshit on that paying Social Security taxes in the 1980s thing; No one paid Social Security taxes on babysitters in the 1980s—and if the babysitting was truly “occasional,” you didn’t have to—and of course Summers’ friend over at Treasury isn’t about to check it out. If it is true, I’d wager that Summers’ first wife, a Washington lawyer, was the reason for it.

But in any event, paying Social Security taxes on babysitters has nothing to do with avoiding conflicts of interest, it’s a straight-up legal issue. So the example provided isn’t actually an example, it’s a non sequitur.

What is a conflict of interest? Oh, taking $8 million in one year from financial institutions when you are the leading presidential candidate’s top economic adviser. Accepting (before giving away) $45,000 from Merrill Lynch on November 12, 2008.

Those things are a conflict of interest.

The author of this Times piece, Louise Story, appears to be an idiot. She provides no evidence that Summers avoids conflicts of interest. I love that “friends say” part. Well, that’s what “friends” would say, isn’t it? Perhaps Story should have asked someone who wasn’t a friend of Summers? And how would a graduate school friend have the slightest idea what Summers was up to with DE Shaw?

We will call this Journalism 101.

Anyway, Story provides no evidence that Summers avoids conflict of interest, and yet, she ignores the massive evidence that he doesn’t—the very evidence that prompted the Times to run this story in the first place. Taking millions of dollars from the industry you are likely going to oversee is, by definition, a conflict of interest.

(Hell, even the White House has said that Summers will recuse himself from anything specifically pertaining to D.E. Shaw. Apparently they think that would be a conflict of interest.)

Here’s one final tidbit in the article that really caught my eye [emphasis added]:

At Harvard and at Shaw, Mr. Summers cultivated a small circle of financial professionals — particularly hedge fund managers — to serve as an informal brain trust. He consults with them on policy matters from his perch in the White House.

[Blogger: He did? There’s no source for that, so I’m going to say it’s from Summers himself. Interesting. Anyone out there ever bump up against this inner circle of financial advisers? Jack Meyer, maybe?]

Among these insiders are Kenneth D. Brody and Frank P. Brosens, the founding partners of another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, for whom Mr. Summers did consulting work from 2004 to 2006.

Wait a second—Larry Summers was consulting for a hedge fund for two years while he was president of Harvard?

Strange, right? And inappropriate.

Next question: Did Taconic have any dealings with the Harvard Management Company?

Which is to say, was a hedge fund with financial interests with Harvard paying off the president?

[Might one call this a conflict of interest?]

You’d think that the Times might have picked up on the fact that it’s unusual to be a college president and advise a hedge fund at the same time. But everything about this terrible piece—the cooperation of Summers and David Shaw (oh my gosh, a “rare interview”!), the details of Summers’ activities at the hedge fund, the generally fawning tone, the lack of attention paid to ethics questions (two short grafs)—suggest that this story was brokered by the White House to take some of the heat off Summers, and that the Times agreed to go easy on him in exchange for his cooperation (agreeing to be interviewed, asking Shaw to be interviewed, and so on). You can just imagine the White House spin people agreeing to pick one outlet with whom to cooperate, perhaps negotiating with the Times over the reporter (Louise Story? not one of the Times’ tougher business reporters), laying down the terms of the interview, and so on.

If you’re in the White House press operation, you’ve got to be delighted about this piece of propaganda.