Since late 2017, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr has emerged as a central character in the Trump dossier saga, including the contested way the dossier’s allegations were presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He has been an object of the president’s ire, of late, and so August 17 a trio of New York Times reporters, Michael Shear, Katie Benner, and Nicholas Fandos, came to the DoJ man’s defense with an article titled “ Embracing Conspiracy Theory, Trump Escalates Attack on Bruce Ohr.” To hear them tell it, Ohr is an innocent bystander. It’s an effort at elision so strained it makes one hope the Times writers didn’t hurt themselves.

“President Trump threatened on Friday to quickly revoke the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a little-known Justice Department official” the Times reports, describing Ohr as “a midlevel government worker.” Katie Benner had written a solo-bylined story two days before titled “ Little-Known Justice Dept. Official Makes Trump’s Security Clearance List.” Just in case anyone missed the drift, the first graph of Benner’s August 15 article describes Ohr as “a little-known career Justice Department official.” Two days later, Shear, Benner and Fandos wrote that in targeting Ohr, Trump “reached deep into the bureaucracy.”

Anyone familiar with Washington could be forgiven for assuming that means Ohr is a GS-14, or maybe at most a GS-15, the typical job scale for a midlevel federal careerist. You’d never think from reading the New York Times article that until recently Ohr was one of the most senior officials at Justice Department—associate deputy attorney general.

But the Times really, really wants us to believe that poor Bruce Ohr is a nobody