The president is said to be enraged over the essay that appeared in the paper.
In what is the biggest secret since Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” many are questioning who inside the White House wrote the scathing op-ed published by the New York Times.
The story ran Wednesday and was written by an anonymous individual who claims to be working for the president.
“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” was the title of the story.
The article was met with mixed reaction.
“You are not protecting the country. You are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions,” first lady Melania Trump said in a statement directed at the anonymous writer Thursday.
There are tantalizing clues throughout the piece as to who its author might be.
One clue is the use of the obscure word lodestar, as in the line "we may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example -- a lodestar for restoring honor to public life.” The obscure word is frequently used by Vice President Mike Pence.
Pence’s Secret Service codename is actually “Lodestar,” but he emphatically denied he was behind the article.
There are other clues, such as saying President Trump is “off the rails,” which is a phrase that has been supposedly used in private by Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Omarosa Manigault- Newman, who recently released the White House memoir "Unhinged," tweeted the names of her four “suspects,” including John DeStefano, Bill Stepien, Andrew Bremberg and Nick Ayers.
“I don't believe Mike Pence did this but because of the way it is written it is very similar to a lot of the documents that came out of his office during my time in the White House,” she told Inside Edition.
New York Times editor Jim Dao said the author was carefully vetted.
"I did then have direct communication with the writer," Dao said on the paper’s podcast, “The Newser,” Thursday. “Based on those conversations, [I] came away feeling totally confident that this was the official in the Trump administration that they claimed they were.”
President Trump is said to be in a volcanic rage over the story.
“If the failing New York Times has an anonymous anonymous can you believe it, meaning gutless! A gutless editorial,” he told reporters Wednesday when asked about the article.
He also took to Twitter Wednesday and tweeted the word “Treason?” after the article broke.
Trump also called the publication “gutless” on Twitter.
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