Questions surround chaotic week
Double blow to White House sends administration on the offensive
Immediately after the Labor Day holiday, the White House as well as average US households faced a laborious double task: how to digest and deal with the release of excerpts from an explosive book on Tuesday, which painted a picture of a chaotic US administration?
Plus, how to react to the publishing of a bombshell, anonymous op-ed piece by The New York Times on Wednesday, which claimed that a “resistance” inside the Trump administration is working to “thwart” the president’s “worst inclinations”.
Stunning details from the book Fear: Trump in the White House by Pulitzer-winning journalist Bob Woodward have prompted President Donald Trump and his advisers to call the pages “nasty stuff” and deny its accounts, while the unsigned column “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, has caused Trump’s top lieutenants to line up to declare “Not me”.
There are tons of questions and guesses being raised and weighed inside the West Wing and across the media spectrum. But in terms of the unnamed op-ed, will The New York Times find out the author’s name, and would the US Justice Department investigate the identity of the writer?
Unlikely, perhaps, is an answer to both questions.
If the Times learns the identity, it could raise “serious questions” about the newspaper’s ability to protect a confidential source among people who don’t know — or don’t believe — that one part of the newspaper will keep important information away from another, the AP reported on Thursday.
Within hours of the essay appearing on the paper’s website on Wednesday afternoon, President Trump posted on Twitter: “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
James Dao, the newspaper’s op-ed editor, said he could not see any circumstances under which the name would be divulged.
“There’s nothing in the piece that strikes me as being relevant to or undermining the national security,” he said in the paper’s Daily podcast on Thursday.
Trump had said he wanted US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to probe the source of the essay.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to Fargo, North Dakota, on Friday, Trump said: “I would say Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it’s national security.”
Trump’s call is the latest test of the independence of his Justice Department, which is supposed to make investigative and charging decisions without political interference from the White House.
Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani also suggested that it “would be appropriate” for Trump to ask for a formal investigation.
“Let’s assume it’s a person with a security clearance. If they feel writing this is appropriate, maybe they feel it would be appropriate to disclose national security secrets, too. That person should be found out and stopped,” the AP report cited Giuliani as saying.
But the New York Times argued that though the article was “strongly critical” of Trump, no classified information appears to have been revealed by the author or leaked to the newspaper, which would be a crucial bar to clear before a leak investigation could be contemplated.
Meanwhile, Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman of the Justice Department, said on Friday: “The department does not confirm or deny investigations.”
The nearly 1,000-word op-ed aside, Woodward’s new book is expected to roll out this week.
Readers and residents alike may have to gear up for another session of laborious digestion of information, and decipher for themselves whether it is “a total piece of fiction” and “totally discredited”, as described by President Trump.