In a podcast interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this month, former television host Billy Bush tried to connect the 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape—which featured then-candidate Donald Trump bragging about assaulting women—to the Clintons by claiming that the reporter who broke the story of the tape and published the recording was a groomsman in Marc Mezvinksy and Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.
Bush, a cousin of former President George W. Bush and nephew of former President George H.W. Bush, was with Trump in 2005 as an Access Hollywood host to record an episode when Trump made his infamous comments about sexually assaulting women. Trump’s comments were picked up on the filming crew’s microphones and, 11 years later, published by David Fahrenthold in the Washington Post in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election.
Carlson asked Bush how the Washington Post might have obtained the recording from NBC News, and Bush responded by citing Farenthold’s friendship with the president of NBC, which produces Access Hollywood. From the transcript:
Billy Bush: “We don’t know exactly, but if you want to begin the internal investigation, Noah Oppenheim is the president of NBC, he’s the head of the—he’s general manager of The Today Show. His coeditor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper, back when he was a Harvard man, was a writer named David Fahrenthold from the Washington Post. And Fahrenthold is the one—they ran the Crimson together, they were both groomsmen in Hillary—in Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.”
Tucker Carlson: “Actually?”
Billy Bush: “Co-groomsman. Oh, yeah. Because one of their other buddies was the guy that Chelsea married [Mezvinsky]. So, they were groomsmen in the wedding together, anyway, that guy’s the one who released—it’s like the paper trail is terrible.”
According to the New York Times, where Fahrenthold currently works as a reporter, he neither attended Mezvinsky and Clinton’s wedding nor ever met Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton. “David Fahrenthold has never met Chelsea Clinton and was not at her wedding,” Naseem Amini, a senior manager of external communications at the New York Times, told The Dispatch Fact Check.
One week after the Carlson interview, Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, responded to the podcast interview on X, mentioning Bush’s claim while also sharing a 2018 Fox News story by Brian Flood on internal turmoil within NBC News’ leadership. “So apparently Brian Flood reported this years ago but I missed it,” Hemingway tweeted. “The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was leaked by NBC in 2016 to the Washington Post, as we all know. (Billy Bush was collateral damage in the leak operation.) Anyway, he notes the head of NBC was this guy named Noah Oppenheim. Oppenheim’s coeditor at the Harvard Crimson was none other than Fahrenthold, the recipient of the leak. And they were both actual groomsmen in Chelsea Clinton’s wedding!? Shortly after running the information operation against Trump, Fahrenthold was given a contributing gig at MSNBC.” She added, “Here is Brian [Flood]’s story that mentions all this,” and included in her tweet a link to the article.
Flood’s Fox News article from 2018 stated that Oppenheim was “close friends” with Fahrenthold, adding that the pair were “also tied” to Marc Mezvinsky, Chelsea Clinton’s husband, and that they were groomsmen at each other’s weddings. While Oppenheim reportedly made his connections with both Fahrenthold and Mezvinksy during his time at Harvard, Flood made no note of Fahrenthold attending Mezvinsky and Clinton’s wedding, nor any other specific connection between one another. As Flood wrote in his 2018 piece:
“Furthermore, Oppenheim’s role in the ‘Access Hollywood’ debacle has been the object of negative attention within Comcast, sources tell Fox News, as he is close friends with Fahrenthold from prestigious Harvard University. NBC has denied that Oppenheim leaked the tape to Fahrenthold—who with Oppenheim is also tied from Harvard to investor Marc Mezvinsky, the son-in-law of Hillary Clinton. Oppenheim and Mezvinsky were groomsmen in each others’ weddings and continue to revolve in the same privileged social circles.”
Hemingway later replied to her own tweet with a link to a thread by Gabe Fleisher, author of the political newsletter Wake Up To Politics, that debunked the connection between Fahrenthold and Clinton in a series of tweets. However, she has not deleted the original tweet.
The Dispatch Fact Check has reached out to the Hot Mics With Billy Bush video podcast, David Fahrenthold, and Mollie Hemingway for comment.
If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com.
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.
With your membership, you only have the ability to comment on The Morning Dispatch articles. Consider upgrading to join the conversation everywhere.