There’s more Scott Beauchamp stuff at Pajamas Media, as they explain how TNR was suckered.

Robert McGee, a then-assistant to The New Republic’s publisher, went looking for the host. He is curious what Foer thinks about the building scandal. He wants the inside dope.

He finds Foer on the front porch and asks as casually as he can: “So, what’s up with this?”

As McGee recalls the conversation, Foer immediately volunteered the standard answer: conservatives have an ideological grudge to settle because they perceive the magazine to be anti-war, anti-military and so on.

“He sounded almost rehearsed,” McGee said.

What bothered McGee about the conversation was that Foer saw the questions from the bloggers as a completely ideological attack. “Foer wasn’t acknowledging that at least some of the attacks on the [Beauchamp’s] ‘Shock Troops’ piece came from active-duty military members whose skepticism was factually grounded, and not just from stateside political pundits.”

Perhaps because McGee worked on the business side of the magazine on the first floor and not with the editors and writers on the second, Foer didn’t consider him a genuine insider—and therefore gave him the company line. But McGee believes that Foer was speaking his mind.

Then the conversation turned to Beauchamp himself. Foer told McGee that soldier-writer was “an articulate guy on the front lines.”

McGee disagreed, thinking Beauchamp “wasn’t that rare of an asset.”

The web is fat with currently serving soldiers in Iraq posting their views as well as the reporting of embedded journalists and retired officers. He told Foer that “the military bloggers were just as qualified, if not more.”

“At that time, my main reason [for talking to Foer] was that I was sympathetic to the military service members who had already weighed in,” McGee explained. “Sympathetic (a) because I felt their skepticism was reasonable on factual grounds, and (b) because I fully understood their grievance that Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s anecdotes — though written in the breast-beating tone of a first-person confessional — effectively attacked the professionalism of everyone around him, and not just the personal character of Beauchamp himself.”

Foer did not see it that way.

What Foer did not tell McGee was that Beauchamp was married to Elspeth Reeve, one of the magazine’s three fact-checkers (a point that the press missed too). So Beauchamp was effectively an insider—and would get treated as such.

That understandably human decision would have painful consequences for The New Republic’s reputation.

Bob McGee was fired. Franklin Foer still his job, for what that position is now worth.

Read the piece.