I think you're leaping to conclusions. What I'm getting is that his graduate student lied to him and falsified her data, leading to the publishing of these papers. When she left he discovered her work could not be reproduced, which led him to display his honesty by voluntarily detracting those articles at great cost to himself.
I doubt the grad student's decision had anything to do with politics, but more to do with wanting to get her Ph.D. and not making sufficient progress.
Suspect you are right. I also suspect that he might use more oversight on his future grad students' work in the future, especially before publishing.
detracting = retracting, although retracting necessarily requires detracting. . .