Trump wants attorney general to investigate source of anonymous times Op-Ed

Prosecutors said it would be inappropriate for the Justice Department to conduct such an investigation, since it was likely that no laws were broken, while The Times said it would be an abuse of power.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One as he traveled to Fargo, North Dakota, Trump said, “I would say Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it’s national security.”

The president has raged against the essay since The Times published it Wednesday afternoon, setting off a frenzy of speculation in the capital about the identity of the author and prompting a parade of denials from Cabinet members and other prominent officials in the Trump administration.

Trump’s latest remarks indicate he wants to use the machinery of the government to root out the source of the op-ed, which described some administration officials as being in a state of near mutiny against a president they view as dangerous and untethered from reality. “We’re going to take a look at what he had, what he gave, what he’s talking about, also where he is right now,” he said.

While the president suggested that the anonymous writer was not a senior official, he said the person might nonetheless have a security clearance that allows him or her to attend sensitive national security meetings involving China, Russia or North Korea. “I don’t want him in those meetings,” Trump said.

To set an investigation into motion, the White House counsel’s office would normally contact the Justice Department. It is not clear whether the White House has done that. A spokeswoman for the department said it does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

“For the Justice Department to investigate, you need a good-faith belief that a federal statute has been violated, and I can’t think of a law that would be violated by sharing information — that is not classified — in an op-ed,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

“If you believe the author had a duty of loyalty to the president,” McQuade said, “there may have been an ethical violation, but that does not violate the law.”

In a statement, The Times said, “We’re confident that the Department of Justice understands that the First Amendment protects all American citizens and that it would not participate in such a blatant abuse of government power.

“The president’s threats both underscore why we must safeguard the identity of the writer of this op-ed and serve as a reminder of the importance of a free and independent press to American democracy,” the statement said.

Lawyers said it would be difficult for the White House to sue the author even if that person had signed a nondisclosure agreement. These agreements are difficult to enforce, even more so when the speech at issue could be interpreted as in the public interest.

“An NDA between private individuals is very different from an NDA with a government organization because the First Amendment protects citizens from the government silencing their speech,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School.

None of that deterred Trump, who also escalated his attack on a new book by Bob Woodward. He described it as a “total fraud” and argued that libel laws should be stiffened to go after Woodward for what Trump claimed was a litany of falsehoods. “Our libel laws are pathetic,” he said. “Our libel laws should be toughened up so that if somebody writes things that are fraudulent and false, they get sued and they lose.”

Trump singled out an episode in which Woodward reported that Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser at the time, removed a sheet of paper from his desk that would have directed the United States to withdraw from a trade agreement with South Korea.

“Gary Cohn, if he ever took a memo off my desk, I would have fired him in two seconds,” the president said. “He would have been fired so fast.”

Trump confirmed the gist of another part of Woodward’s account: that the president often tells aides that the United States is no longer willing to pay to be the world’s protector. But he disputed the quotes attributed to him, saying, “I don’t talk that way.”

Despite his criticism of the op-ed, Trump was caught up in the guessing game over its source. He speculated that the author could not be very high-ranking because a long list of Cabinet members and other ranking officials had denied writing it.

Friday, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, wrote in her own op-ed in The Washington Post that the writer had done a “serious disservice” to the country by not taking his or her complaints directly to the president.

The Times’s editorial page department identified the writer as a “senior official in the Trump administration” — a classification that could apply to hundreds of government employees.

Trump said he was open to the idea of administering lie detector tests to members of his staff to determine the identity of the source. But he added, “Eventually the name of this sick person will come out.”

After a week of damning disclosures, Trump has struggled to contain the sense that he sits atop an out-of-control administration. He insisted that the White House was a well-oiled machine and blamed a vengeful, corrupt news media for the appearance of disarray.

At a rally Thursday night with supporters in Billings, Montana, he complained that the cloak of anonymity made it difficult to discredit the author. “It may not be a Republican, it may not be a conservative,” he said. “It may be a deep state person that’s been there a long time.”

“It’s very unfair to our country and to the millions of people that voted really for us,” Trump said.

The essay described an organized internal resistance throughout the bureaucracy, composed of Republicans who support many of the president’s policies but regard him as a threat to the nation’s security.

“Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails,” the article said. “He engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”

The official also said Trump “shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.”

Trump has cited his meetings with Putin and Kim as evidence of his competence. On Friday, he said Kim had sent him a personal letter, which he expected would be “positive” and could jump-start nuclear negotiations with the North.

“He says, ‘I have respect for President Trump,'” the president said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Trump wants attorney general to investigate source of anonymous times Op-Ed

Trump said he was also considering action against The Times, though he did not elaborate.

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