REPORT: Matthew Kacsmaryk committed a different type of misconduct than he was initially accused of

The Washington Post did a story claiming that Article III blogger and would-be head of the FDA Matthew Kacsmaryk took his name off of a crackpot law review article that may have lessened his chances of being confirmed. The Washington Free Beacon says that this is a “smear”:

This report is based on dozens of interviews with experts on legal ethics from across the political spectrum, attorneys at First Liberty, and people involved in Kacsmaryk’s nomination process. It suggests that Kacsmaryk did not write the article in question but insteadsupervised the attorneys drafting it, stepping back from that project—and many others—once his nomination was imminent.

So what Kacsmaryk was actually trying to do wasn’t to conceal an article with radical views, but was…trying to claim sole authorship of a journal article he had virtually nothing to do with writing or researching?

There are some contexts in which that’s common practice. An op-ed with a senator’s byline was almost certainly written by staff. But it is not normal in academic work. And it’s not what the future judge appears to have told the editors of the journal he was submitting to.— @[email protected] (@normative) May 1, 2023

So after two weeks, they’ve come up with a story that makes Kacsmaryk look much worse. OK then!