Obviously I can’t know this with 100% certainty, but I’m very very sure that the identity of the Op-Ed’s author will come out eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.
That being said, it’s probably not Pence. It would be career suicide if it was him.
Lawrence O’Donnell thinks that it’s Dan Coats, and he makes a fairly reasonable argument for his guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcVTiC4gasA
Dan Coats has already denied that it’s him.
It was an over-simplified conversation, of course. As for why Clark Kent would contact JJS if not to make his identify public, it’s simple. Clark Kent also wants sources to write his articles. JJS is potentially a valuable source that he could turn to when he’s writing his own articles about the administration. Outing JJS would torpedo that opportunity for him and any other journalists out there.
Supposedly they are trying to turn to linguistic analysis to determine who the author is.
It’s also not Pence. Pence is in bed with everything going on here pretty much from the get-go. He was pretty much hand-picked by Manafort to be the VP. He’s already in hot enough water and he’s not going to do jack to get fired (can the VP be fired?) or otherwise annoy Trump as he knows where the bodies are buried and vice versa.
If Clark Kent contacted JJS about anything other than trying to discover the identity of the Op-Ed author, he wouldn’t include JJS’s identify in his article or even his notes. No one would know that JJS was the author because Clark Kent wouldn’t tell them. Maybe, at some point in the future, when Clark Kent was writing an entirely different article and used JJS as a source, maybe then he might tell his editors, but I find it highly improbably that (1) Clark Kent would just tell his editors who JJS was if it was unrelated to what he was working on, and (2) that Kent’s Editors would completely undermine him by publishing an article “outing” JJS, because that would probably violate journalistic ethic.
This I agree with 100%. Also, if it was Pence, it would torpedo his chances of becoming president after Trump because while the GOP might not like Trump, and might be trying to rehabilitate their image, the Republican base LOVES him. If Pence turned on Trump, the Republican base would destroy him electorally.
Very timely piece from Margaret Sullivan, the former Public Editor of the New York Times, and now a columnist for the Washington Post:
"But what happens at that moment when Maggie Haberman or one of her colleagues nails down the name? Now that’s a story that, in the newsroom vernacular, has to be “lawyered.”
And I don’t believe for a minute that it would be held back or spiked. It would run — and again, heads would explode.
Jonathan Peters of the University of Georgia School of Law (and the press-freedom correspondent of the Columbia Journalism Review) predicted that “this would be a messy case” if one of the parties (the writer, presumably) decided to sue the paper for breaching confidentiality.
The First Amendment, he said, doesn’t bar legal action against a media company whose journalists make and break a promise of confidentiality. Whether the wall between opinion and news would be legally recognized in such a case, though, isn’t well-established.
That sort of suit seems unlikely, but we are fully in the weirdness zone, so you never know…
As for the knotty journalistic dilemma in reporting on the author, I can only hope — for the sake of the New York Times, of course — that The Washington Post breaks the story."
It’s from someone in the White House, who is totally fine with mainstream conservative brutality (ICE immigration policy, etc) but at the same time isn’t on board with the lunacy of Canadian trade wars, Also it’s from someone who is expecting to have a political career Post-Trump.
If it is Pence, he’s expecting not to get caught.
Not to nitpick, but it doesn’t have to be someone inside the White House. Senior Administration Official can apply to a wide range of people, which is exactly why it was used.
Actually, the article was pretty fuzzy as to which of Trump’s policies he’s okay with vs. not okay with. We don’t know how he feels about ICE brutality. For a lot of conservatives, while they support the idea of a deportation force, the specifics of ICE’s tactics were well beyond acceptable. About the only ones we know for sure are the tax cuts, deregulation, and increased military spending, which are all admittedly pretty universal among conservatives.
I’m hesitant to call it a professional opinion, since I’m not confident I know all the relevant details, so let’s just say in my regular-ass opinion, JJS should have stuck to the company line, denied all knowledge, and told him to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.
Your assessment of negotiating being on or off the record is also a good idea, but assuming JJS either has some expertise in or has been coached in basic source protection, he keeps his mouth shut no matter how off the record it appears to be - Clark Kent might be an upstanding, moral, and honorable individual, but when it comes to protecting sources, you don’t trust anyone that you don’t absolutely have to, no matter how upstanding they are. It’s not like there’s a rule that says you gotta give yourself up if someone asks - for all JJS knows, Mr Kent has been ringing around every office on the hill hoping to catch people off guard. You don’t know what he’s got on you, or doesn’t, so you don’t say shit.
If you are an anonymous source, you keep your fucking mouth shut. You don’t tell anyone you don’t absolutely have to, you don’t tell your parents, your friends, your workmates, your priest, your favorite sex worker, your bartender, nobody. If you’re telling anyone, what’s the goddamned point of being anonymous?
So yeah, Trump apparently didn’t want Braille signs installed in the Trump Tower elevators. Here’s the original article by the former head of construction for the Trump Organization:
Apparently the shit that people are supposedly doing in the admin as described in Fear and the NYT op-ed is old hat for how he does business.
And the plot thickens…
yay rhode island. that man gets my vote every time.
This is the one billionth way in which Donald Trump has committed an impeachable Obstruction of Justice act by releasing documents part of an on-going investigation that likely would’ve been released eventually anyways but are still being dealt with by law enforcement due to the investigation against him. That investigation has not stalled or wasted time, it has gotten guilty pleas from many of his staff and people close to him, and yet he is going to say that the investigation is illegitimate and that this somehow proves out.
Republicans will do nothing, and we will all move on.
