Quote: "John and I are fully responsible".

Analyzing the semantics of a phrase and then stating it implies "person A is saying/doing X", when right there person A is explicitly saying/doing Not X, is nonsensical.

My favorite color is blue. I like coffee => "his favorite color is brown!".

You're quoting from a section of the text where they are explicit in their responsibility to disprove that they use distancing language in a different section of the text.

They don't need to repeat it every paragraph just to satisfy the cynics. It's a single piece of writing. They owned it.