Officials denounce anonymous essay
The opinion piece in the New York Times leads to denials from several Trump administration officials who say they did not write the column.
WASHINGTON — Gutless. Cowardly. Amateur. Laughable.
Those were the words of choice as senior officials stepped forward one-by-one on Thursday to denounce the author of an anonymous op-ed claiming there is a “resistance” within the Trump administration — and to make sure the president knew they didn’t write it.
Yet, if the endless parade of denials was aimed at tamping down talk of an uprising, it may have had the opposite effect, propelling the story to new heights and delighting Democrats who reveled in the paranoia pulsing through the ranks of President Donald Trump’s backers in Washington and beyond.
“It probably won’t take long for us to find out who wrote it,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., said almost gleefully as she responded to a question about the bombshell New York Times op-ed at her weekly news conference.
“The vice president — that was my first thought. Then Coats, Pompeo, they denied that they had written it,” she said, referring to Trump’s director of national intelligence and secretary of state. “I guess by process of elimination, it’ll come down to the butler.”
The op-ed, published online Wednesday afternoon, was written by a senior official in the Trump administration, according to the Times.
Trump erupted in anger at the piece Wednesday night, first denouncing it as “anonymous — meaning gutless,” then floating an accusation of treason and finally calling for the New York Times to turn over the author “for National Security purposes.”
On Thursday morning, Trump tweeted: “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy — & they don’t know what to do.”
Amid frenzied speculation about who was hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, Vice President Mike Pence was the first to assert that he had not penned the New York Times piece.
“The Vice President puts his name on his Op-Eds,” Pence spokesman Jarrod Agen wrote in a morning tweet.
“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.”
Speculation about Pence had been rampant on social media and cable television because of the op-ed writer’s use of “lodestar,” an archaic word that the vice president has used in multiple speeches.
Pence’s denial opened the floodgates for other administration officials to follow suit. They included National Intelligence Director Daniel Coats, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who issued his denial while in India.
By midday, White House press secretary Satah Huckabee Sanders had taken to Twitter to speak out once again, chiding the media for what she called a “wild obsession” — even as some administration officials rushed to denounce the piece unprompted — and urging citizens to call the Times opinion desk if they wanted to learn the identity of a “gutless loser.”
Yet the denials continued to roll in.
They included Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Homeland Security Secretary Kirtjen Nielsen and U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, who denied writing the piece in a statement tweeted by an embassy spokeswoman.
First lady Melania Trump weighed in on the controversy, saying in a statement that if “a person is bold enough to accuse people of negative actions, they have a responsibility to publicly stand by their words.”
Congressional Republicans had plenty to say Thursday about the brouhaha.
“I like to pride myself on having a vivid imagination, but I can’t possibly construct a fact pattern under which a congressional committee would look at the source of an op-ed,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told reporters he viewed the author as “a person who is obviously living in dishonesty.”
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., dismissed the speculation over the letter, which he said revealed nothing that wasn’t already known about Trump’s leadership style.
“I don’t know why there’s a big uproar. I think people inside the White House have understood the situation from Day One. It just hasn’t been news to me,” Corker said.