The Philadelphia Bulletin reports that the New York Times – “all the news that’s fit to print” – sat on an election-season about illegal ties between the Obama campaign and ACORN because it could have been a “game-changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

This demands further investigation. If the Obama campaign did indeed send out this ‘maxed-out donor list,’ it acted in breach with campaign financing laws. Furthermore, ACORN faced severe criticism last year for illegally influencing the vote (by registering dead people for instance). American voters would not have liked it that Obama coordinated his efforts with this extreme-left organization.

If true, the NYT lost all the respect I once had for this major investigative newspaper. Killing a story out of political reasons is what political operatives not what journalists do.