This does raise an interesting point. Parker was hired to be an editor. Nobody expected him to personally produce a bunch of crossword puzzles. So if it was perfectly legitimate for him to accept submissions from puzzle makers, why didn’t he just do that? Why plagiarize past puzzles rather than buy new submissions?
One possibility is that he was pocketing the money he was supposedly paying out to the fictitious people that he claimed made these puzzles.
If I had been in charge of Parker, I would have has some cross words for him.
Parker has not been fired. He is on a leave of absence to learn how not to be a bad person and will return to his old job.
Maybe this leave/not fired thing is something the lawyers came up with so that it doesn’t look so bad in court if someone sues.
The official statement says that Parker has “stepped back” from his job while the investigation is going on. So while it’s not officially permanent, I can’t imagine any circumstances under which Parker will be invited to return to work.