Representatives of Koch Industries, the company run by libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch, on Monday accused MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow of lying about the company and its owners in a segment last week.
Maddow on Thursday attempted to tie the Kochs to a law in Florida that would require welfare recipients to be drug tested. Neither the company nor its owners had taken a position on the law.
Koch has funded a group called the State Policy Network (SPN), an affiliation of state-based, free-market think tanks. One of SPN’s members, the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability, supports the law.
"The Koch brothers […] have been promoting forced drug tests for people on welfare," Maddow said.
Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel for Koch Industries, called that claim "a knowingly false and malicious statement" in an email to Rachel Maddow Show producer Amy Shuster.
Koch posted that email and a number of others with MSNBC staff on its website Monday. The exchange shows that Shuster first reached out to Koch for comment less than an hour before the Maddow segment aired.
"We suspect you intentionally sent the email at that time so Ms. Maddow could claim on the air that we did not respond to your request for a comment," Holden wrote.
Holden and other Koch employees asked that Maddow correct her claims regarding Koch's support for the Florida law, which was struck down by a federal judge last week.
Maddow did not correct or apologize for tying the Kochs to the law. She instead doubled down on Friday, saying the initial report was honest and accurate.
"I’m not going to renounce my own reporting on this story because the reporting on this story stands," she said.
"The Koch brothers’ lawyers are not denying that they fund these networks or that the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability is one of the groups that has been funded through these networks," Maddow said.
Other groups that have received funding from the Kochs, such as the Reason Foundation, have criticized the Florida law requiring drug tests for welfare recipients.
Maddow’s segment revisiting the issue drew fire from Koch Industries on Monday.
"Ms. Maddow’s failure to admit her dishonesty is disappointing but not surprising given her and her network’s past pattern of obsessive, inaccurate, and misleading coverage of Koch," the company said on its website.
Shuster did not respond to a request for comment on Kochs’ latest statement.