Former Department of Health and Human Services vaccine expert Rick Bright says he was sacked this week because he heroically "pressed for rigorous vetting" of the malaria drug touted by President Trump as a possible treatment for the coronavirus, the New York Times reports.

Politico, however, tells a different story. Bright’s firing was a long time coming, dating back almost a year. And not only did Bright praise the White House’s push for the drug that his attorneys now claim he opposed, but he was also instrumental in acquiring it for the Trump administration.

So, whom to believe?

On the one hand, there is the New York Times, whose report is based on a letter authored by Bright, an anonymous source who claims the former HHS official was pressured “to rush access” to hydroxychloroquine, and Bright’s attorneys, who say his firing was "retaliation, plain and simple.” His attorneys, by the way, are the same ones who represented Christine Blasey Ford during the Senate nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Politico, on the other hand, did some reporting. The outlet has produced materials showing the effort to oust Bright dates back several months. Internal HHS emails also show that Bright previously praised and strongly supported the president’s move toward hydroxychloroquine.

Politico reports:

Three people with knowledge of HHS' recent acquisition of tens of millions of doses of those drugs said that Bright had supported those acquisitions in internal communications, with one official saying that Bright praised the move as a win for the health department as part of an email exchange that was first reported by Reuters last week, although Bright's message was not publicly reported.

"If Bright opposed hydroxychloroquine, he certainly didn't make that clear from his email — quite the opposite," said an official who claims to have seen the internal emails.

Elsewhere, Politico reporter Dan Diamond shared a screengrab of a text conversation between himself and an unidentified source who said on Jan. 2, “[Bright] is going to be removed from his job for incompetence and insubordination.” Note that Jan. 2 is before the coronavirus pandemic.

Politico even quotes an HHS official, spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley, who goes on the record to say Bright was involved in acquiring the malaria drugs for the Trump administration.

"As it relates to chloroquine, it was Dr. Bright who requested an Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for donations of chloroquine that Bayer and Sandoz recently made to the Strategic National Stockpile for use on COVID-19 patients," she said. "The [Emergency Use Authorization] is what made the donated product available for use in combating COVID-19."

My best guess is that this story is exactly what it sounds like. Bright’s firing is probably the result of an internal power struggle dating back long before the coronavirus pandemic. He lost his job, and so, he and his attorneys went to a newspaper that will believe any anti-Trump story whatsoever, no matter how thinly sourced, and portrayed himself as a martyr of Trump's obsession with hydroxychloroquine.

However, the real story of Bright’s firing does not seem like it has anything to do with that drug. He just framed it that way because he correctly calculated that such an allegation would be irresistible to the New York Times and the many newspapers that would pick up the story without doing any further investigation. So, just like that, Bright gets to control the narrative of his firing.

If not for the diligence of Politico, you would think Bright was merely a “casualty of the president's war on scientists,” as CNN’s gullible White House reporter Jim Acosta put it Wednesday evening.

But it seems there is much more to this story than an alleged war on science. Welcome to Washington, D.C., where ousted career bureaucrats and their attorneys may or may not always be telling the truth.