Trump lashes out against opinion piece

Perhaps as striking as the essay was the recognition of the long list of administration officials who plausibly could have been its author.

WASHINGTON — Pushing back against reports that his own administration is conspiring against him, President Donald Trump lashed out against the anonymous senior official who wrote a New York Times opinion piece claiming to be part of a “resistance” working “from within” to thwart Trump’s most dangerous impulses.

Perhaps as striking as the essay was the recognition of the long list of administration officials who plausibly could have been its author. Many have privately shared some of the same concerns expressed about the president with colleagues, friends and reporters.

Washington was consumed by a guessing game as to the identity of the writer, and swift denials of involvement in the piece came Thursday from top administration officials, including from Vice President Mike Pence’s office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, as well as other Cabinet members.

Trump tweeted Thursday morning that “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy - & they don’t know what to do.”

On Wednesday night, Trump tweeted a demand that if “the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called on the “coward” who wrote the piece to “do the right thing and resign.”

White House officials did not immediately respond to a request to elaborate on Trump’s call for the writer to be turned over to the government or the unsupported national security ground of his demand.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, a fierce Trump critic, called the op-ed “active insubordination … born out of loyalty to the country.”

“This is not sustainable to have an executive branch where individuals are not following the orders of the chief executive,” Brennan told NBC’s Today show. “I do think things will get worse before they get better. I don’t know how Donald Trump is going to react to this. A wounded lion is a very dangerous animal, and I think Donald Trump is wounded.”

The anonymous author, claiming to be part of the “resistance” to Trump “working diligently from within” his administration, said: “Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”

First lady Melania Trump also weighed in, praising the free press as “important to our democracy” before attacking the writer, saying “you are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions.”

The guessing game seeped into the White House, as current and former staff members alike traded calls and texts trying to figure out who could have written the piece, some turning to reporters and asking them for clues. For many in Trump’s orbit, it was stunning to realize just how many people could have been the author. And some of the most senior members of the Trump administration were forced to deny they were the author of the attack on their boss.

Hotly debated on Twitter was the author’s use of the word “lodestar,” which pops up frequently in speeches by Pence.

In a rare step, Pence’s communications director Jarrod Agen tweeted early Thursday that “The Vice President puts his name on his Op-Eds. The nytimes should be ashamed and so should the person who wrote the false, illogical, and gutless op-ed. Our office is above such amateur acts.”

Pompeo, who was in India, denied writing the anonymous opinion piece, saying, “It’s not mine.” He accused the media of trying to undermine the Trump administration and said he found that “incredibly disturbing.”

Coats later issued his own denial, followed by Defense Secretary James Mattis, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, budget director Mick Mulvaney and others; and with several prominent administration members delivering on-therecord denials, the focus could now fall on other senior aides to do the same, with questions raised about those who stay silent.

Sanders tried to head off reporters’ inquiries of Trump officials, tweeting that the questions should be aimed at The New York

Times, which she said was “complicit in this deceitful act.” Trump, appearing at an unrelated event Wednesday at the White House, lashed out at the Times for publishing the op-ed.

“They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them,” he said of the newspaper. The op-ed pages of the newspaper are managed separately from its news department.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said he did not know of any role Congress would have to investigate the identity of the author, though Republican Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Trump ally, said the legislative body could take part.

“Nothing in this town stays secret forever, and so ultimately I do think we will find out who is the author,” Meadows said.