Two sides of the same coin: 'Hillary & Rupert Chummy Breakfast Fund-Raiser'

New York Daily News
Jul. 19, 2006

Two of the most public people in the world had a chummy breakfast yesterday, but media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) tried to keep their political get-together as secret as possible.

There were no Fox News cameras to record the odd couple breaking bread together at Murdoch's News Corp. headquarters in midtown, where, after years of attacking her, the conservative Murdoch hosted a fund-raiser for Clinton's Democratic Senate campaign.

The campaign refused to even confirm the time or location of the controversial fund-raiser. No estimate of the take or number of people who attended was released.

New York's junior senator did not make an appearance on "Fox and Friends" on her way out of the building just after 10a.m. She didn't even go through the News Corp. lobby, slipping out a side door onto W.48th St., where the CBS show "Without a Trace" was filming up the block.

Fans of Clinton and Murdoch were shocked and upset when the fund-raiser was announced, and the senator and the mogul have since sought to downplay the event.

Murdoch insists he is stuffing more cash into Clinton's overflowing coffers simply because she's an effective senator.

After hosting Clinton, Murdoch was expected a few blocks north at a Republican Senate campaign fund-raising luncheon featuring Clinton's rival in the 2008 presidential opinion polls, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Asked whether Murdoch was playing both sides of the street, McCain said with a smile, "He's a great American."

Former Sen. Al D'Amato, who hosted the GOP fund-raiser, said the Clinton-Murdoch coziness was just good business. "She's a force to be reckoned with and if you're in the business community, you have to understand that," he said.