Yale Alumni Magazine profiles Mann; quotes Morano as saying "Mann is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with climate science today. He is a hardcore political activist"; claims "the decline wasn't hidden"

Yale Alumni Magazine | The most hated climate scientist in the US fights back

Michael Mann is taking a stand for [junk] science.
...“You go after the things that are important, that are iconic, that are visual, visceral, powerful, and easily interpretable,” Santer says, referring to Mann’s work and the hockey stick graph in particular. “And if you can’t attack the underlying science, you go after the scientist.”
...to critics like Morano, Mann is a glaring example of someone whose politics have shaped his research and who is spearheading a massive effort to dupe the American people. “The ‘climate con’ to which I refer is a lavishly funded climate machine that is lobbying for laws and uses every bit of data or new study to proclaim ‘it’s worse than we thought’ or we must act now,” Morano wrote in an e-mail. “Man-made global warming fears are a grand political narrative, not science.” Morano, the communications director of the advocacy group CFACT (Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow), has a BA in political science and has worked as a journalist and national television reporter and producer. He continued: “Mann is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with climate science today. He is a hardcore political activist, very thin skinned, does not take criticism well at all, and he surrounds himself within his own little world of supportive warmist activists.”
...As for “hide the decline,” Jones wasn’t referring to declines in temperature; he was referring to a drop seen in certain types of tree-ring data after 1960. And he wasn’t referring to Mann’s work—but to that of another scientist, Keith Briffa of the University of East Anglia. Pre-1960, Briffa’s tree-ring density records track the temperature records. Post-1960, there is a decline in the response of certain trees to temperature (possibly due to pollution): the actual recorded temperatures are consistently higher than what the tree-ring data would predict. The temperature records are the more important and reliable data, so Briffa had to discard the tree-ring “decline” records. But the decline wasn’t hidden. It was clearly discussed and labeled in Briffa’s paper. And Mann’s paper didn’t rely on any of those data.