Talk about playing "gotcha."  Regular readers are likely to be aware of the release of a huge mass of illegally obtained emails among leading climate scientists of the observational stripe. RealClimate, I think, handled it nicely.

A lot of attention is being placed on Phil Jones'
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
I have never been one to defend the caginess about data and methods that the century-scale data folk are alleged to have; I don't have enough information myself either to defend them or to accuse them.

But the purportedly damning quote is obviously being misused.

I don't think anybody is hiding any evidence or tricking any audience. The word "trick" is to be understood as a programmer would understand "hack"; a clever shortcut. And the word "hide" is almost surely meant as "filter" meaning "the thing we want to do with this data is hard because there is another signal there hiding the one we are looking for, but we can subtract it out for the purpose at hand". It would seem to be about the minutiae of data processing, not about hiding data for publication or subverting a published result.

There is a lot to think about here, some of it both subtle and important. But I think the words "trick" and "hide" are being taken out of context. I believe that they are used here as part of ordinary day-to-day innocent data processing back-and-forth, and do not mean what they are being taken to mean.

It's a travesty that the fate of the world is being reduced to word games.