Covering MAGA and Trump is a bit like an old-time, hard-boiled detective novel. Everyone’s bad. Or at least shady. The challenge is distinguishing between the merely shady sorta bad and bad bad. And apart from the bad and those who were merely drawn that way, sometimes you have two really bad people. In that scenario, one may still be victimizing the other, making the latter person a victim while also being bad. Which brings us to this quote from an article in the Washington Post about Eric Schnabel, the Chief Operating Officer of the National Institute of Health (NIH) who, as I noted earlier this week, was fired and marched off the premises Monday, allegedly for directing a contract to a company which employed his wife. This is a text he sent to a WaPo reporter after the Post tried numerous times to contact him and his wife.
“I need your help. I didn’t do what they said I did,” he texted. “This was a political hit job. Please call me.” Schnabel didn’t reply to numerous further attempts to contact him. (The quote was added after I originally linked to the piece.)