Three MSNBC contributors leaving network to join Biden administration

Jon Meacham, one of the contributors failed to mention that he was already working with Biden.

President-elect Joe Biden hasn’t even taken office yet but he’s hiring.

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Biden was able to snag four MSNBC contributors. On Wednesday, the network confirmed to The Hill that health expert Ezekiel Emanuel, legal analyst Barbara McQuade, political analyst Richard Stengel and historian Jon Meacham will no longer be paid by the network. They will all be moving on to work with Biden in various capacities or have already started.

All of the former contributors will be invited back as unpaid guests with full disclosure of what their participation is in the Biden administration.

Emanuel was the special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2011, per The Wharton School’s website. He will serve on Biden’s coronavirus task force though he’s currently facing backlash for a piece he wrote in 2014 saying he hopes to be dead by 75, per Newsweek.

Biden, his new boss, turns 78 this month.

Joe Biden president-elect MSNBC
President-elect Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden honor military veterans with a stop at the Philadelphia Korean War Memorial at Penn’s Landing on Veterans Day on November 10, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden continues the process of the presidential transition as President Donald Trump continues to contest the election. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Living too long is also a loss,’ Emanuel wrote in the piece, which ran in The Atlantic in October 2014. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived.”

Barbara McQuade is the former US attorney for Michigan, per her Twitter account. The Detroit native will join Biden’s legal agency review group.

Stengel is a former Time magazine editor. The native New Yorker also served as Under Secretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs under the Obama administration, per his personal website. He will be joining Biden’s agency for global media.

Per the Washington Post, Meacham will also no longer be a paid contributor as he failed to mention he was helping Biden craft his victory speech. It makes sense considering the Tennessee native is a noted historian, writer, and journalist who won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson.

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Their affiliations with the network raised a conflict of interest due to network policy. Contributors under contract to a news network typically cannot do paid work with presidential campaigns or run for office.

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