We often joke about media outlets that they would sound no different if they were run by the Clinton campaign. Well, it turns out that Politico literally allowed members of the Clinton campaign to write items in their Playbook morning newsletter. As the Blaze notes, Gawker uncovered an email that exposed the Clinton campaign’s hand:

A senior advisor to Hillary Clinton penned an item that appeared in Politico’s influential Playbook newsletter in 2010, emails published by Gawker Friday reveal.

The website published a conversation between State Department advisor Phillip Reines and its chief White House correspondent Mike Allen.

I normally don’t link to Gawker, but here they have exposed a massive media fraud and deserve some credit:

Most people in Washington attribute the success of Politico’s marquee morning newsletter, Playbook, to the superhuman work ethic of its main author and Politico’s Chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen. According to several 2010 emails recently obtained by Gawker, however, Allen has employed one unusual productivity trick: letting someone he covers ghostwrite an item for him.

Gawker has received the latest round of emails between reporters and Philippe Reines, the longtime Hillary Clinton confidante, former State Department spokesperson, and frequent pen pal of Mike Allen. This month’s batch contains yet another friendly email exchange between Reines and Allen whose contents belie Allen’s claim as an adversarial journalist. We have previously reported that Allen once promised to only ask pre-approved questions in an interview with Chelsea Clinton and assured staff members of a senior Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill that he would conduct a “no-surprises” interview with their boss. The following email exchange demonstrates the same tendency. In it, Allen permits Reines, then serving under Clinton at State, to actually ghost-write a Politico Playbook item about the State Department.

This frankly ought to be permanently fatal to the credibility at the very least of Mike Allen. For a political journalist to literally allow the subject of his coverage to write his stories for him is pretty much the worst kind of journalist malpractice I can even imagine. Further, Politico as a magazine ought to take harsh measures and undergo some serious soul searching as to how this was allowed to occur in the first place.

I suspect, however, that neither of these things will happen, and the world can go on knowing that Politico is little more than stenographers for the Clinton campaign.