By Paul Sperry, April 15, 2020

Ever since a “senior official in the Trump administration” penned an anonymous 2018 New York Times column attacking President Trump as unfit for office, Washington has been engrossed in a high-stakes whodunit. After an exhaustive investigation, the White House believes it’s cracked the case, identifying Trump's turncoat as his former deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates, according to people familiar with the internal probe.

Rather than fire Coates, the White House has quietly transferred her to the Department of Energy, where she awaits special assignment in Saudi Arabia -- far from the president.

Trump effectively demoted Coates just four months after promoting her last fall to the No. 2 spot on his National Security Council. The move was made amid a whisper campaign, started in January, that identified Coates as “Anonymous,” the person who wrote the Times Op-Ed and a subsequent book, “A Warning,” claiming to be part of a cabal of “fellow Republicans" resisting Trump and his policies from inside the administration.

The Washington press corps has for the most part been uninterested in learning the author’s identity. But the sources said the identification of Coates was based on circumstantial evidence generated from a months-long White House investigation led by sleuths within the NSC. Top White House adviser Peter Navarro, who works with the NSC on trade and other issues, also was heavily involved in the probe of Coates.

She declined to discuss the matter on the record with RealClearInvestigations and has retained an attorney, friends say, although several colleagues have rushed to her defense, insisting the White House has the wrong person. But a source involved in the NSC probe who asked not to be identified said there was little doubt. “It’s her,” the source said of Coates. “That’s why she was shown the door.”

Illustrating the sensitivity of the internecine GOP affair is the insistence of some ex-Trump White House officials that Coates is wrongly accused. “The suggestion that Victoria is ‘Anonymous’ is preposterous,” said K.T. McFarland, Trump’s first deputy national security adviser, who helped recruit Coates to the NSC and then supervised her for much of 2017. She said Coates was a committed member of the Trump team.

McFarland added that Coates denied being the author not only to her, but also to White House security officials, who include FBI agents.

“Victoria herself has denied being ‘Anonymous' during her routine security clearance review,” she told RCI. “Anyone familiar with the security clearance process knows that it would have been a criminal offense, punishable by jail time, for her to lie about this.”

Although “A Warning” opens with a preemptive denial that it discloses any classified information, the Justice Department has been looking into a potential violation of a federal regulation requiring officials with access to classified information to get prior approval before publishing books about their roles in the government. Coates signed a federal non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, when she joined the White House in 2017.

Related: How 'Anonymous' in the West Wing Meant Cruz Control
Related: Coates' 'Linguistic Fingerprints’ Appear to Match 'Anonymous’
The probe has exposed a less prominent faction secretly undermining Trump inside the White House, sources say: not just Democratic holdovers from the Obama White House, but disloyal “Never-Trump” Republicans, who, as Anonymous complained in the book, don’t believe the president can be trusted to uphold "conservative principles.” The author admitted conspiring with several other “like-minded” officials to obstruct Trump and his policies and directives from the inside.

White House investigators say they are looking into at least four other White House staffers whom they suspect were part of the “resistance" with Coates. The behind-the-scenes story of how the White House fixed on Coates as the anti-Trump mole is told here for the first time.

The Hunt for ‘Anonymous’
In September 2018, the New York Times agreed to hide the identity of a senior administration official bashing Trump in an opinion piece headlined “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The author claimed to be one of several “like-minded” officials “thwarting" the president’s agenda and even plotting to try to remove him from office.

Incensed, Trump declared the screed an act of “treason” and ordered an investigation to unmask the “gutless” official. The White House drew up a short list of suspects, but the search soon fizzled out for lack of leads. The mystery went unsolved for more than a year, as the White House continued to spring leaks compromising the president, mostly from within the NSC, including some that led to his impeachment.

The major break came in November 2019, when the same anonymous official doubled down on anti-Trump grievances with the release of “A Warning.” The best-selling expose leaked details of the president’s private conversations and trashed him as "unjust” and a "nasty man,” as well as a “misogynist” and "grifter in chief.”

“He should be fired,” wrote the disgruntled insider in the book’s final chapter. “The Trump administration is an unmitigated catastrophe.”

The book dared the president to try to unmask the nameless author, boasting the text had been “carefully written to prevent any inadvertent disclosure.” But to White House sleuths, the 260-page book offered a wealth of clues, and the author’s challenge only intensified the desire to track down and unmask the rogue aide.

At first, the 51-year-old Coates was not an obvious suspect because she was not known to clash with the president and seemed to go along with his policies, even though she was a longtime and loyal operative of Cruz, once a leading critic of Trump. Over the course of the months-long investigation, more than 30 other suspects were considered and abandoned before the focus settled on Coates. Unlike other widely rumored suspects who eventually were ruled out -- including former NSC official Fiona Hill and former Pentagon speechwriter Guy Snodgrass -- Coates checked virtually all the boxes.

After a careful deconstruction of details in the book, the White House investigators found that Coates’s profile, as well as her persona as a highly opinionated moralist, matched up with that of the clandestine Trump official.

Anonymous is a woman, the investigators deduced, noting the author’s disapproving remarks alleging a Trump habit of addressing accomplished female professionals as “sweetie” and “honey.” The official’s area of responsibility was, like Coates’, national security and foreign policy -- with expertise on Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel and other Mideast hot spots. The book’s author claims to have been present, as Coates was, at many White House meetings, including with the president. The author shows an insider's understanding of the workings of the NSC and, most telling, started work during Trump’s presidential transition, as Coates did.

“That gave her away,” another source involved in the investigation said. “She was in those early meetings and briefings. That put her high on the suspect list.”

By January, Coates was the prime suspect.

Authorship Recognition Tools
The sources said that to crack the identity of the rogue Trump official, investigators ran previously published works authored by Coates through forensic author identification programs, and they matched the prose style of Anonymous.

Investigators were able to profile the author of the op-ed and book by sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and syntax. They then compared that writing profile to Coates'. The stylistic traits synced up, sources said.

snip

‘Very Anti-Trump in Private’
While Coates’ supporters are adamant that she is not Anonymous, some co-workers said she was careful to hide her opposition to Trump and his agenda during meetings with principals.

“She was very anti-Trump in private,” said a former NSC official who worked with Coates on the Mideast desk. “She even defended Obama holdovers to me. They’re all fighting Trump."

If Coates supports Trump, she has not been vocal about it. There are no examples of her publicly praising the president, based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database of her speeches, articles and interviews, though she has expressed support for some of his policies.

A review of Coates’ Twitter feed going back to the November 2016 election turns up no tweets in which she supports Trump directly, though she remarked in a March 2017 tweet that she was “proud" to have joined the NSC team.

On the other hand, Coates reportedly was furious that Cruz decided several weeks before the election to throw his support behind Trump, after famously snubbing him at the GOP convention.

“She was livid when the Texas Republican endorsed Trump and cited national security as one of his reasons for supporting the Republican nominee,” according to a Politico.com article citing people familiar with her alleged meltdown over her boss’ about-face.

Supporters struggled, moreover, to explain why Coates would accept what effectively was a demotion -- just four months after being promoted to deputy national security -- if she were innocent of the accusations.

Fleitz, who says he has not read "A Warning," speculated that Coates was ready to move on from the NSC after serving three years there, and that her reassignment to the Energy Department had been in the works for a while. But her failure to appear at the Hudson Institute for a recent speech on the White House's “plan for peace in the Middle East” made it look more like a shake-up.

The event’s moderator was clearly taken off guard. “I feel a little bit like Clint Eastwood talking to the empty chair,” the moderator nervously quipped, motioning to a seat the think tank had reserved for Coates on the stage with an unopened bottle of water beside it.

Just two days before Coates was officially reassigned on Feb. 20, Trump told reporters he knew the identity of the anonymous official, but he would not divulge the person’s identity.

“Can’t tell you that, but I know who it is,” he said. “I know all about ‘Anonymous.’”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/...her_122684.html