There is nothing unusual about making a media release good to go on the weekend. If you want to do well in politics you can't work 9-5 Monday to Friday. MPs have a surprising number of staffers. National will be treating this whole week as a crisis, with PR minions good to go 24/7

Given the circumstances the release would need to be ok'd at a very senior level. They had everything ready to go before two of our biggest media entities got the story up at all. There is also a weird narrative of the article saying "Paula Bennett was worried all week about JLR mental health"...That isn't a quote from the Nats. That is the writer of the article apparently making that remark...which doesn't seem like reasonable given Paula leaked information about his affairs.