On the contrary, it's a smart and deeply reasonable move. Scott is being quite transparent about the reasons for his choice, and the NYT reporters' and editors' behavior will look far more suspicious than anything he's doing.
Except a journalist isn't going to sit back and take his "reasons for his choice" as true and go away, they're going to dig even more and he's smart enough to know that.
He just made things worse for himself by deleting that blog and drawing attention to himself.
Now it's not just the original reporter looking into this story, a whole bunch of journalists have dived in, and are now looking for an even bigger story.
They're going to "dig" in obscure web archives to try and make him look bad? Anyone could do that, but good luck trying to sell that as reasonable after you've doxxed the guy. It would be so obvious that this is what they're doing, they probably wouldn't even bother.
And Scott has no reason to care about "drawing attention to himself" at this point - you can't beat a NYT article (even a sympathetic one!) as far as "attention" goes, and that was already in the cards.
