New York Times Under Fire for Overstating Clout of ‘Anonymous’ Op-Ed Author

During the Trump administration’s first term in the White House, much has been said about anonymous sources and anonymous leaks, namely because the White House has been fairly heavy on both.

This is an administration unlike any in modern history, and Trump’s “drain the swamp” ethos has career bureaucrats unsure of how they could possibly make it out of this thing with their jobs, let alone their reputations.

Now, the author of an “anonymous” op-ed in the New York Times has come forward to reveal his identity, and it’s raising questions about how his resumé was represented at the time of publication.

Miles Taylor, chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Kirstjen Nielsen, revealed Wednesday that he was the anonymous “senior” white house official who authored a critical op-ed of President Donald Trump.

The 2018 op-ed published by the New York Times described President Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” and said that he was just one of many officials in the administration working against the president.

Taylor had previously denied that he was the author, and his position within DHS doesn’t seem to line up with how he was portrayed by the Times.

Taylor had very little access to the president, but the Times described him as a “senior” official at the time of the op-ed’s publishing.

The Times defended running the anonymous op-ed, noting that it “adds significant value to the public’s understanding of what is going on in the Trump administration from someone who is in a position to know.”

The op-ed fueled weeks of cable news speculation about the identity of the Trump official and raised concerns of the “deep state” working against the president.

The fallout from Taylor’s admission is only beginning as of this writing, with social media users lamenting how seriously they took the original article when it was first published.