Michael Fumento, columnist and science maven for the Hudson Institute, has been dropped by the Scripps Howard News Service, in the wake of an article in BusinessWeek charging Fumento with accepting payola from agribiz giant Monsanto.

Eamon Javers, the author of the exposé, somehow unearthed the damning evidence that Monsanto donated $60,000 to the Hudson Institute in 1999, and that Fumento wrote something nice about Monsanto in a column seven years later, without mentioning said donation.

Catherine Siepp says she has “no sympathy” for Fumento, who “has long been suspected of accepting money from corporations he so admiringly opines about in his better-living-through-chemistry pieces, and now we all know for sure.” She equates Fumento’s case with that of the disgraced Doug Bandow, who took money under the table from Jack Abramoff to write warm and fuzzy columns about his clients.

But Fumento says it’s a witch hunt, and points out that his own case is unlike Doug Brandow’s in salient respects. The $60,000 from Monsanto was not paid to Fumento; it was a donation to Hudson Institute, a registered 501(C)(3) charitable organization. It was charity.

Fumento draws a salary from Hudson, but his pay was not augmented at all by the Monsanto donation. In other words, he got nothing. The donation was not under the table, but on the books, and a matter of public record. Furthermore, Fumento has never failed to disclose his relationship with Hudson. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that he’s proud of it.

You know what? It looks like a witch hunt to me, too.

By way of full disclosure, I have never taken a penny from Monsanto, or from Fumento, for that matter.