Wednesday’s long-anticipated unmasking of Anonymous, the heretofore unnamed Trump administration defector who first scorched the president in a blockbuster 2018 New York Times op-ed—“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”—and again in A Warning, published by Hachette’s Twelve imprint last year, was met with a collective shrug of disappointment. Media insiders had long speculated about the identity of the current or former “senior official in the Trump administration,” and while many were realistic about the fact that it could very well be some obscure career bureaucrat they’d never heard of, it was impossible not to fantasize about the enormous list of potential suspects. Could it be Mike Pence? Kellyanne Conway? James Mattis? John Kelly? Maybe a top cabinet-level figure like Elaine Chao? A deputy of any one of these notable officials?
Sadly it was none of the above: Anonymous is Miles Taylor. The reveal, first teased by George Conway on Twitter and then splashed across the internet in a Times story by Michael D. Shear, turned out to be far more underwhelming than the theories. That was not just because Taylor, who outed himself in a 1,500-plus-word statement, is no Pence or Kelly. It was mostly because we’d already gotten to know Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff and later chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, over the summer, when he came out against the administration and dished dirt in a series of high-profile interviews. He even lied to Anderson Cooper about not being Anonymous during an interview on CNN, where Taylor is now a contributor. Taylor defended lying on Wednesday night, telling host Chris Cuomo that he had to “strenuously deny” being the author. (To his credit, Anonymous had pledged to reveal themselves before the election, and Taylor made good on that promise.)
In response to Taylor going public, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attacked him as a “low-level, disgruntled former staffer.” In a rare sign of symbiosis with the administration’s signature bluster, there appears to be a fair amount of agreement with that assessment, or at least the low-level part of it, in journalism circles. I heard from a number of people in Timesworld on Wednesday night who expressed consternation that the Opinion section, then led by James Bennet and Jim Dao, determined that Taylor cleared the exceedingly high bar for publishing an op-ed in the Times without a name attached. According to someone familiar with the vetting of the anonymous op-ed, Dao asked colleagues about the precedent and was told it had only ever been done in cases where the writer or the writer’s loved ones were in potential danger—say, an asylum seeker or a civilian living under Islamic State rule in Raqqa, Syria. (The paper explained at the time, “The Times is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous op-ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.”)
“Everyone was asking if this was Mattis, Kelly,” this same person said. “The op-ed overstated his role.” Another source told me, “People are bewildered. Deputy chief of staff at DHS is not a senior administration official. A senior DHS official, maybe. It raises some questions. When you say ‘senior administration,’ you are implying a broad seniority. Cabinet. Deputies. Top people at the White House. It’s a head fake.”
Some journalists expressed such sentiments publicly. “The revelation of the identity of ‘Anonymous’ calls into question whether the NYT had ample grounds to allow him to write without identifying him,” tweeted Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty. “I figured it had to be someone at cabinet level, at least.” ABC’s Jonathan Karl told Tumulty’s Post colleagues he doubted that “anybody when they read the anonymous op-ed thought it was someone who was an adviser to a cabinet secretary who had very little contact with the president himself.” “Turns out the NYT oped page gave an enormous ‘Resistance’ platform to a staffer whose agency green-lit the Trump administration’s most hardline immigration moves, including family separation, during his tenure,” tweeted Axios’s Jonathan Swan, adding: “I also didn’t realize the definition of ‘senior administration official’ could be *this* expansive.”
Indeed, Taylor did have a front-row seat to high-profile and highly controversial Trump initiatives like the border wall and the family-separation policy, and the Post also reported that he sometimes briefed members of the press as a “senior administration official.” Other journalists were more sympathetic to the Times’ handling of Taylor’s attribution. “I think most journalists would consider a chief of staff to a Cabinet secretary a senior administration official, but the public probably assumed otherwise,” tweeted Politico’s Blake Hounshell, to which Talking Points Memo boss Josh Marshall replied, “I agree. And I think that on its own it was legit. But the build up over a year and after so many others have spoken it’s just very hard to live up to expectation. Also the phrases only have meaning to the extent the public understands them.”
As for the view from the Times’ Opinion department, someone who works there told me, “A number of people are grumpy about it, but it’s weird because the person who made the decisions isn’t running the place anymore. I think the biggest concern is that it has the potential to become ammunition for people who want to undermine anonymous sourcing at the New York Times writ large.”
Bennet left the Times in June amid an uproar over Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send in the Troops” op-ed, another mega-controversy that rocked the section. He didn’t respond to a text message, but on the night the anonymous op-ed was published in September of 2018, he told me, “There will be a lot of criticism, and I understand it. The question for us was, does making this unusual grant, is it merited by the significance of the piece? We feel that it was. Our job isn’t to publish op-eds to further one political argument or another. Our job is to publish op-eds that further the public’s understanding of what the hell is going on, and I think this piece makes a significant contribution.”