"I know everyone I talked to today was embarrassed about the hiring," mostly due to Mulvaney's history of inaccurate comments, one CBS News employee told the Post. Another employee said "everyone is baffled" by the hire.

But CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani "seemed to lay the groundwork for the decision in a staff meeting earlier this month, when he said the network needed to hire more Republicans to prepare for a 'likely' Democratic midterm wipeout," the Post reports, citing a recording of a meeting Khemlani held with CBS morning show staff.

"If you look at some of the people that we've been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms," Khemlani said, according to the recording. "A lot of the people that we're bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation."

Mulvaney also knows how to speak truth to power. As White House chief of staff when the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country in February 2020, he went to the Conservative Political Action Conference and put his finger on the real problem — the press. Mulvaney criticized journalists for giving the pandemic “so much attention” because “they think this is going to be what brings down the president.”

“We know how to handle this,” he said.

Trump and Mulvaney did not, in fact, “know how to handle this,” leading to a catastrophic death toll from COVID-19, which has now taken the lives of roughly 1 million Americans.

Mulvaney also speaks bluntly. For example, as reporting revealed that Trump had conditioned vital military aid to Ukraine on its government’s willingness to open an investigation that would benefit him politically, some Trump partisans denied that there had been an explicit quid pro quo. But Mulvaney, who as head of the Office of Management and Budget had overseen the scheme, had the guts to go to the White House lectern and explicitly say that’s exactly what had happened and that reporters should “get over it” (though he later blamed the media for misconstruing his words to “advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump”).