It seems you are with rationalizing politics to decide the science, especially if you disagree with it; at least based on your points. Regarding 3) I did not attempt to make any larger point on climate science as such (only on climategate itself); These blatant statements simply unethical and unscientific attitudes of the leading manufactures of climate consent. These have well known context, and no need to re-interpret them.
If we stick to the climategate issue rather than commenting on our beliefs in validity of climate science as represented by the conclusions in the IPCC reports; again, these statements are standing on their own as a witness on the attitude of those authors which you cannot get from the sanitized wiki article.
> (1) I don't fault them for not wanting climate skeptics to be able to launder the prestige of being published in the IPCC to lend credibility denier narratives
Yikes. Suppressing scientific skepticism has always gone so well in the past.
I don't love playing fast and loose on a particular paper, but (1) I don't fault them for not wanting climate skeptics to be able to launder the prestige of being published in the IPCC to lend credibility denier narratives, (2) nothing about this changes the IPCC conclusion or the underlying reality of global warming and (3) if all you present is this one-off without context, it serves to spread the false impression that climate science writ large is uncertain.
Spreading that form of uncertainty without the benefit of context serves the purpose of spreading misinformation. That's the topline, and losing track of that topline is a failure in media literacy.