Trump criticizes op-ed writer

President demands person be turned over to government.

WASHINGTON — Pushing back against reports his own administration is conspiring against him, President Donald Trump criticized the anonymous senior official who wrote a New York Times opinion piece claiming to be part of a “resistance” working “from within” to thwart his “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 wild guessing game as to the identity of the writer, and swift denials of involvement in the op-ed 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, and 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, he tweeted 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.”

To some observers, the ultimatum appeared to play into the very concerns about the president’s impulses raised by the essay’s author. Trump has demanded that aides identify the leaker, according to two people familiar with the matter, though it was unclear how they might go about doing so. The two were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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 .... A wounded lion is a very dangerous animal, and I think Donald Trump is wounded.”

Trump called around to confidants to vent about the disloyalty of the author and fumed that the so-called Deep State within the federal government had conspired against him, according to a person familiar with the president’s views but not authorized to discuss them publicly.

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 text of the op-ed was pulled apart for clues: The writer is identified as an “administration official”; does that mean a person who works outside the White House? Do references to Russia and the late Sen. John McCain suggest someone working in national security? In a tweet, the Times used the pronoun “he” to refer to the writer; does that rule out all women?

The newspaper later said the tweet referring to “he” had been “drafted by someone who is not aware of the author’s identity, including the gender, so the use of ‘he’ was an error.”