Here is everything rotten about the New York Times’s ‘anonymous’ op-ed

Sleaze.

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The true story behind the New York Times’s 2018 anonymous opinion article is exceptionally sleazy.

Every bit of it.

Indeed, based on what we know now, everyone involved in this sad episode comes across as remarkably unethical, most especially the op-ed’s author, former Department of Homeland Security employee Miles Taylor.

For starters, Taylor and the New York Times grossly exaggerated his credentials as a “senior” member of the Trump administration. Taylor served as a “Deputy Chief of Staff” at the time he submitted his op-ed to the paper. He did not hold the position of chief of staff until later. Yet, the New York Times billed him anyway as a “senior official in the Trump administration,” an overblown descriptor that Taylor himself made no effort to correct.

New York Times Deputy Editorial Page Editor James Dao at the time defended the paper's characterization of Taylor’s role in the Trump administration, saying [emphasis added]:

I understand readers’ frustration that we didn’t provide a more precise description of the official. But we felt strongly that a broader categorization was necessary to protect the author from reprisal, and that concern has been borne out by the president’s reaction to the essay. The term we chose, senior administration official, is used in Washington by both journalists and government officials to describe positions in the upper echelon of an administration, such as the one held by this writer.

The New York Times knew what it was doing when it presented the author of the essay as a "senior official.” It willfully misled readers into believing a White House official with hard power and influence was acting as a double agent.

This poses a separate problem that is unique to the New York Times. Knowing now how it chose to mischaracterize Taylor’s role in the Trump administration, what reason do we have to trust the say-so of any of its anonymous sources? If the paper is willing to misrepresent the importance of some obscure, middling bureaucrat, providing him with a platform to level serious allegations against a sitting president and all from behind the cloak of anonymity, who is to say that the paper’s next big “scoop” will not be sourced entirely to, say, the White House cook?

And Taylor himself is complicit in misleading the public. He surely lied in his op-ed when he alleged he was “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump's] agenda and his worst inclinations.” Now that he no longer needs to worry about anonymity, it is incumbent on Taylor to explain what, exactly, it was that he did in his position at the time as deputy chief of staff to “frustrate parts” of the president’s agenda.

Next, in the long litany of everything that is rotten about this episode, is the fact that Taylor silently stood by as former National Security Council official Victoria Coates took all the heat for his op-ed, including her eventual demotion and reassignment to the Department of Energy.

Even more sociopathic than allowing Coates to suffer the consequences for his op-ed is the fact that Taylor, who continued to draw a paycheck from the federal government throughout this entire episode, actually accepted a promotion to chief of staff at DHS after the New York Times published his article.

Then, there is the moment that Taylor made fools of his alleged friends at Republican Voters Against Trump, including when he said nothing when the group’s co-founder, Sarah Longwell, declared on social media, “People should stop paying attention to ‘Anonymous’ and focus on the Trump officials who are willing to put themselves out there publicly with [Republican Voters Against Trump]. Like [Miles Taylor].”

Taylor, who serves now as a CNN contributor, even lied on Aug. 21 when host Anderson Cooper asked directly if he is the New York Times’s “anonymous” author.

If it is any consolation to the people wronged by Taylor, the anti-Trump “resistance” is not at all interested in embracing him as their own. Quite the contrary. Taylor’s big reveal on Wednesday immediately inspired loud boos and hissing from the people he clearly thought would cheer his arrival. Is there anything in the world more on-brand than a former Bush staffer and professional anti-Trump guy displaying himself before a hostile political faction with the total confidence that he will be accepted as a liberator?

But really, from allowing innocent parties to take the blame for his handiwork to abusing his own allies, this is straight-up sociopathic behavior from Taylor — and all with the blessing and sponsorship of the New York Times.