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It wasn't me: Pence, Pompeo and a parade of Trump Administration officials deny writing NY Times Op-Ed

One by one, they came forward, almost as if in a virtual lineup. Not me, said the vice president. Nor me, said the secretary of state. Or me, said the attorney general.

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Who Is a Senior Administration Official? It Depends
By
Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman
and
Eileen Sullivan, New York Times

WASHINGTON — One by one, they came forward, almost as if in a virtual lineup. Not me, said the vice president. Nor me, said the secretary of state. Or me, said the attorney general.

In a spectacle that may be without precedent even for an administration that has seen many of those already, almost the entire Cabinet and leadership team working for President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to writing an extraordinary anonymous essay about plotting against him.

The unnamed author of the essay published by The New York Times was the target of a mole hunt by an infuriated president and the subject of an obsessive public guessing game that played out on television, online and in social media. While Trump and his staff lashed out at the news media, some privately wondered whether it would lead to a shake-up.

President Donald Trump comments on an opinion piece that a senior administration official published anonymously in the New York Times during an event with law enforcement personnel at the White House in Washington, Sept. 5, 2018. The mystery writer is not Vice President Mike Pence, a spokesman said Thursday. “Our office is above such amateur acts,” the vice president’s spokesman, Jarrod Agen, said in a morning Twitter post, referring to the Op-Ed published on Wednesday. Traveling in India, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state said if he felt he was not able to “execute the commander’s intent,” he would resign. “It is not mine,” he said. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., an ally of Trump, recommended the president force members of his administration to take polygraph examinations, and there was at least briefly some discussion of that among advisers to the president. Another option mentioned by people close to Trump was asking senior officials to sign sworn affidavits that could be used in court if necessary. One outside adviser said the White House had a list of about 12 suspects.

The White House spent the day condemning the unnamed official and The Times for publishing the essay. “Anyone who would write an anonymous editorial smearing this president who’s provided extraordinary leadership for this country should not be working for this administration,” Vice President Mike Pence said. “They ought to do the honorable thing and they ought to resign.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said anyone who wanted to know the identity of “the anonymous coward” should call The Times and she posted on Twitter the newspaper’s main switchboard phone number. “They are the only ones complicit in this deceitful act,” she wrote. “We stand united together and fully support our President Donald J. Trump.”

Even Melania Trump joined the denunciations. “To the writer of the op-ed — you are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions,” she said in a statement.

FILE — John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, watches as President Donald Trump spoke with the governor of Puerto Rico in the Oval Office, at the White House in Washington, Oct. 19, 2017. Thanks to an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times, Washington is consumed with the question of who exactly counts as a “senior administration official.” (Tom Brenner/The New York Times)

The anonymous essay, along with revelations in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, depicted an administration with a clutch of “unsung heroes” constituting a “quiet resistance” trying to thwart the president when he makes what the essay writer called “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions.” Senior advisers filch documents from his desk to prevent him from issuing rash orders and try to ignore or at least slow-walk those that are issued.

In the essay, the official wrote that there was even talk at one point of the Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to try to remove Trump from office on the grounds of incapacity, but the idea was given up because no one wanted a constitutional crisis.

Instead, Trump now faces a different sort of crisis, trying to govern with a team he has reason to suspect is not entirely on his team. An already toxic environment inside his White House turned even more corrosive as fingers pointed in different directions and the president railed about virtually everyone who worked for him.

“It’s unproductive and disruptive to governance,” said Sara Fagen, who was political director under President George W. Bush and has at times been critical of Trump on policy. “Like it or not, Trump was fairly elected and he deserves a staff who supports him and his agenda, even if that agenda lacks definition.” The anonymous author, she added, “should identify themselves and resign.”

White House officials called around to various departments asking if Cabinet secretaries were responsible and collected multiple denials. That helped incite an extraordinary parade of the nation’s top officials marching to news media microphones or issuing written statements through their aides disavowing the piece, with the most important audience sitting in the Oval Office.

Among those disavowing the piece were Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; Attorney General Jeff Sessions; Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. Others included the secretaries of agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs, as well as the CIA and FBI directors, the president’s trade representative, acting chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and his ambassadors to the United Nations and Russia.

“It is not mine,” said Pompeo.

“Patently false,” Coats said.

“It is laughable,” said a spokesman for Mnuchin. Some of them denounced the piece without explicitly denying authorship, but even the unequivocal denials may not be all that useful beyond assuaging Trump and hoping to avoid his wrath. Mark Felt, the deputy FBI director under President Richard M. Nixon, likewise publicly denied being the “Deep Throat” source for Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate, only to reveal himself three decades later.

But Washington was deeply engaged in the same sort of speculation that absorbed the capital about “Deep Throat” and, in later eras, the anonymous author of “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s scandal-tarred 1992 presidential campaign or the White House official under Barack Obama who posted anonymous Twitter messages mocking his colleagues.

Journalists, politicians and social media users picked through the Times essay looking for clues. The admiring citation of Sen. John McCain and reference to his funeral last weekend prompted some to focus on officials who might have had past associations with him or attended the service.

The writer’s use of the word “lodestar” sent some looking for those who had been known to use the word in public utterances. Since former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said “honor was John’s lodestar” in his eulogy at McCain’s funeral, that again made some wonder if it meant the author had been present.

Among the advisers to Trump who were at the funeral were John Kelly, the chief of staff; Jon Huntsman, the ambassador to Russia; Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer; Bolton; and Coats, as well as Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

The author, whose identity is known to The Times editorial page department but was not shared with the reporters who cover the White House, describes him or herself as one of many senior officials in the Trump administration who are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Inside the White House, a distracted Trump toggled between focusing on the essay and Woodward’s book, which will not be released until next week, complaining about the lack of a strong pushback to either, according to advisers. He has taken in recent days to grousing about whether Bill Shine, his relatively new communications director, is helping him in public perception. Some of Kelly’s colleagues fretted the issue would be used by his critics to try to urge the president to turn on him. Several West Wing officials looked skeptically at Pence’s staff and the vice president’s denial did not persuade them. There was also deep anger at The Times among several staff members for running an essay that the beleaguered advisers said offered little that had not been reported in the news media before. Lie detector tests have been proposed before in White House leak investigations but sometimes with combustible results. When President Ronald Reagan agreed to an aide’s proposal to polygraph senior officials in search for the source of a story about military operations in Lebanon, James Baker, the White House chief of staff, objected strenuously and Secretary of State George P. Shultz threatened to resign. Reagan backed off.

Many in Washington debated whether the anonymous official was heroic, motivated by duty, self-serving or treasonous. “I haven’t made up my mind whether this is honorable or dishonorable,” said Joel Johnson, who worked in the White House as a senior adviser to Clinton.

“It’s nothing new to have cutthroat factions at the staff level working to advance one agenda versus another but those arguments ultimately get settled by the president,” Johnson said. “Here they’re trying to prevent that from ever getting to the president or from implementing a presidential directive.”

Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was deputy White House chief of staff to Obama, said the official seemed to be trying to shed the guilt of complicity with an objectionable president and should instead come out publicly.

“This op-ed reads like the writings of someone who eventually wants to come out, reveal themselves and be canonized,” she said. “Sneaking papers off a president’s desk or having rogue conversations about the 25th Amendment doesn’t mean you are putting yourself between this president and an existential threat to our democracy. Speaking out would do that.”

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