On a Thursday night in December, I got a breathless call from a Heritage Foundation senior scholar. John Malcolm and Jessica Reinsch, the director and a deputy director of the think tank's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, had just been summarily fired.
A Heritage spokesman would later accuse Reinsch and Malcolm of conduct inconsistent with the organization's mission and standards and breach of fiduciary duty. Sources close to the situation say they were actually dismissed after their superiors learned they were about to take jobs elsewhere—and realized that they may not be the only ones. A few days later, the bulk of the think tank's economic and legal/constitutional studies teams decamped en masse for Advancing American Freedom (AAF), a nonprofit founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.
