During a press call with reporters a week ago, Mark Zuckerberg was adamant that he had not been involved in his company’s decision to hire Definers Public Affairs, a Republican opposition firm that had gone to questionable lengths to do damage control for Facebook, per a damning New York Times investigation. “This type of firm might be normal in Washington, but it’s not the kind of thing I want Facebook associated with,” he said at one point. At another, he added, “I learned about this relationship when I read the New York Times piece yesterday.” When the question was posed a third time, he shrugged it off with, “Someone on our comms team must have hired them.” Sheryl Sandberg, too, has denied involvement.

They’ve distanced themselves for good reason. Details of the Definers’s operations on Facebook’s behalf were among the most inflammatory of the Times exposé, particularly the claim that Definers promoted conspiracy theories tying criticism of Facebook to Democratic mega-donor George Soros. Facebook ended its relationship with the consultancy a week ago, but that hasn’t stopped observers from calling for Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s heads over its hiring. Which makes the timing of Facebook public policy executive Elliot Schrage’s memo all the more fortuitous. In an internal note obtained by TechCrunch, Schrage blamed himself for hiring Definers, justified the use of opposition research against Facebook’s critics, and apologized for letting his co-workers down.

“Responsibility for these decisions rests with leadership of the Communications team. That’s me. Mark and Sheryl relied on me to manage this without controversy,” he wrote. “I knew and approved of the decision to hire Definers and similar firms. I should have known of the decision to expand their mandate . . . I regret my own failure here.” He said that he didn’t ask Definers to publish fake news, but that he oversaw efforts to determine whether Soros had “any financial motivation” to criticize Facebook. “I want to be clear that I oversee our Comms team and take full responsibility for their work and the P.R. firms who work with us,” he wrote.

Schrage’s mea culpa essentially exonerated Zuckerberg and Sandberg, the latter of whom responded with a comment that placed her at arm’s length from his decision-making. “When I read the story in The New York Times last week, I didn’t remember a firm called Definers,” she wrote. “I asked our team to look into the work Definers did for us and to double-check whether anything had crossed my desk.” Sandberg conceded that “some of their work was incorporated into materials presented to me and I received a small number of e-mails where Definers was referenced,” a partial admission that simultaneously absolved her of guilt. Even better, Schrage’s memo came at no cost to him or to the company: he had announced in June that he’d step down in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and had only remained at the company during the search for a replacement.

Even as Schrage’s memo circulated, Zuckerberg was taking his own stab at damage control in an interview with CNN. Addressing many of the same questions he’d fielded from reporters over the course of the week, he reiterated that he would not step down from his chairman role, and said he planned to continue working with Sandberg. “Sheryl is a really important part of this company and is leading a lot of the efforts for a lot of the biggest issues that we have,” he said. “She’s been an important partner to me for 10 years . . . and I hope that we work together for decades more to come.” He added that Facebook had not been transparent about Russia’s interference in 2016 because “It’s a really big deal to say” that a foreign government is responsible for election meddling, and he didn’t want to point fingers prematurely. And he said that, despite Facebook’s role in things like ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and electing far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the platform remains a “positive force” in global politics. The message was clear: he and Sandberg will continue to hack away at Facebook’s myriad problems from on high. And where they fail, there will always be someone else to take the blame.