U.S. Vice President Mike Pence called Sunday for the anonymous senior official carrying out inside resistance to the Trump administration to “do the honorable thing and resign.”

Pence told Fox News Sunday that the official, who wrote an op-ed opinion article in The New York Times last week that called Trump amoral, was “literally violating an oath, not to the president, but to the Constitution” by seeking to undermine Trump’s presidency.

Pence reiterated that he did not write the article even though it contained an unusual word — “lodestar,” meaning one who serves as an inspiration — that he has used in numerous speeches. The vice president said he would agree to take a lie detector test “in a heartbeat,” but said it was up to Trump to decide whether other White House officials should do the same to try to identify who wrote the article.

Pence said he does not know who wrote it. The official said he or she was part of an internal resistance “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality,” the official said, denouncing Trump’s “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” leadership style.

Trump has railed against the writer, telling a political rally in Montana last week, “Nobody knows who the hell he is, or she. Unidentified deep state operatives who defy voters to push their secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself.”

The article in the newspaper came a day after the first details were revealed from veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” depicting chaotic White House operations under Trump, with his own key administration officials attacking him as dangerously ignorant of world affairs.

Woodward said Trump aides at times have plucked documents off the president’s Oval Office desk to keep him from signing documents the officials considered to be detrimental to U.S. national security interests. Woodward, a longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, quoted Trump chief of staff John Kelly as saying that the White House under Trump was “crazytown” and that the president was an “idiot,” remarks Kelly denied uttering.

Trump and other White House officials have attacked Woodward’s book as fiction. But the author told CBS on Sunday that the president’s claim he does not speak the way Woodward quoted him is “wrong,” saying his reporting was “meticulous and careful,” backed up by hundreds of hours of interviews with current and past Trump aides.

Woodward said he has no idea who was the writer of the New York Times article, but said its vague description of White House events did not meet his own standard reporting life behind the scenes in Trump’s administration.

Pence defended Trump’s performance, saying the president promotes “a vigorous debate” within the White House over public policy issues, and then “he makes the decision. He’s in command.” Pence called him “a president of almost boundless energy.”

In a Twitter remark last week, Trump assailed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for bringing criminal charges against “two very popular Republican congressmen,” Chris Collins in New York and Duncan Hunter in California, just as they face re-election contests in November. Trump said, “two easy wins now in doubt…. Good job Jeff.”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike criticized Trump for saying that the charges should not have been brought because of the political ramifications affecting Republicans.

Pence said the serious charges against the two lawmakers “ought to be pursued,” but defended Trump’s criticism, saying it was aimed at not bringing charges too close to an election, so as to not impact the outcomes.

 
…

Former U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday told attendees at a Democratic rally that the United States government “is a government for everybody. It’s not for sale.”

Obama has maintained a low public profile since leaving office, but with midterm elections coming in November, he spoke Saturday at an Anaheim, California, rally in support of Democratic candidates in districts won by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“We are bound by the notion that this is a government of and by and for the people,” he said. “We don’t have a situation where some are more equal than others.”

“The stakes are high in this election,” Obama warned, referring to the congressional elections that will be seen as a referendum on the presidential administration of Donald Trump and Republican rule in Washington. “This is a consequential moment in our history. And the fact is that if we don’t step up, things can get worse. … But the good news is, in two months we have a chance to restore some sanity in our politics.”

Obama also said the biggest threat to U.S. democracy is not one individual, nor is it wealthy political supporters. 

“It’s apathy,” he said. “It’s indifference. It’s us not doing what we’re supposed to do.”

On Friday, Obama made his first appearance in the midterm election battle, in a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he accepted an ethics in government award. He told the students in the audience: “You need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”

The former president said the current state of Washington politics “did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years — a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but is also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.”

Trump was dismissive of Obama’s speech. At a fundraiser in North Dakota, the U.S. president told a crowd of supporters: “I watched it, but I fell asleep.”
…

President Donald Trump concedes that some Apple Inc. products may become more expensive if his administration imposes “massive” additional tariffs on Chinese-made goods, but he says the tech company can fix the problem by moving production to the U.S.

“Start building new plants now. Exciting!” Trump said Saturday in a tweet aimed at the Cupertino, California, company.

This week, Apple said that a proposed additional round of tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports would raise prices on some of its products, including the Apple Watch and the Mac mini.

The company is highly exposed to a trade war between the U.S. and China. It makes many of its products for the U.S. market in China, and it also sells gadgets including the iPhone in China, making them a potential target for Chinese retaliation against the Trump tariffs.

Trump tweeted Saturday that “Apple prices may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China — but there is an easy solution where there would be ZERO tax, and indeed a tax incentive,” if the company made its products in the U.S. instead of China.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has not announced plans to move manufacturing from China to the U.S.

‘Tax on U.S. consumers’

In its letter this week to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Apple said that “because all tariffs ultimately show up as a tax on U.S. consumers, they will increase the cost of Apple products that our customers have come to rely on in their daily lives.”

The company said tariffs would hit “a wide range of Apple products,” including computers, watches, adapters, chargers and tools used in its U.S. manufacturing, repair and data centers. Apple said the tariffs would raise the cost of its U.S. operations and put it at a disadvantage to foreign rivals.

The White House has accused China of stealing U.S. intellectual property and forcing American companies to share their technology with Chinese companies. The tariffs would pressure China to stop that behavior, the administration has said. Apple said “it is difficult to see” how tariffs would advance the government’s goal.

The presidential tweet was the latest salvo in a dispute between the Trump administration and companies that fear tariffs will hurt their business.

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of imports from China, mostly equipment and material used by manufacturers. CEO Tim Cook said in July that those measures had no effect on Apple. The company is concerned, however, about the Trump administration’s proposal to add 25 percent duties on another $200 billion in Chinese goods, including a wider assortment of consumer-related items.
…

North Carolina’s elections board agreed Friday to fight federal subpoenas seeking millions of voting documents and ballots, even after prosecutors delayed a quick deadline to fulfill their demands until early next year.

The State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement voted unanimously to direct state attorneys to work to block the subpoenas issued last week to the state board and local boards in 44 eastern counties.

U.S. Attorney Bobby Higdon in Raleigh, whose office issued the subpoenas, hasn’t said specifically why immigration enforcement investigators working with a grand jury empaneled in Wilmington are seeking the information. Two weeks ago, Higdon announced charges against 19 non-U.S. citizens for illegal voting, of which more than half were indicted through a Wilmington grand jury.

The subpoenas ordered the documents, which the state board estimated would exceed 20 million pages, be provided by September 25 at a time when election administrators prepped for the midterm elections. Requested documents included voted ballots, voter registration and absentee ballot forms and poll books, some going back to early 2010.

The action by the panel — comprised of four Democrats, four Republicans and one unaffiliated voter — came a day after an assistant prosecutor wrote the board backing off the deadline because of the election and expressing willingness to narrow the scope of the subpoenas.

After close to an hour of meeting privately, board members decided to try to quash the subpoenas altogether.

“The subpoena we’ve received was and remains overly broad, unreasonable, vague, and clearly impacts significant interests of our voters, despite the correspondence received from the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” board member Joshua Malcolm said during an open portion of the meeting. “The fact is the subpoena has not been withdrawn, despite such correspondence.”

Board Chairman Andy Penry expressed frustration with the timing of the subpoenas, received by the state board office just as the Labor Day weekend began and without advance notice. He said officials in some counties believed their faxed subpoenas were actually bogus attempts to obtain information fraudulently.

While some of the documents and information are public records easily accessible, state law prevents access to voted ballots unless by court order. And Penry said the data sought included very confidential information about voters.

“We have not been given a reason as to why ICE wants that information and candidly I can’t think of any reason for it,” he said.

Voting rights activists and Democrats blasted federal investigators for the massive request, accusing them of trying to interfere in the fall elections and taint the sanctity of the secret ballot to look for what critics consider exaggerated occurrences of voter fraud. Absentee ballots can be traced to the individual voter casting one.

The North Carolina elections include races for Congress and all of the seats in the legislature as well as several constitutional amendments.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice praised the board Friday “for taking steps to defend the privacy interests of North Carolina voters and to prevent likely unlawful fishing expeditions by the federal government that tends to fuel voter suppression and intimidation efforts,” said Allison Riggs, a coalition attorney.

North Carolina’s three Democratic members of Congress and ranking Democrats on four House committees on Friday asked for the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments to investigate the reason for the requests and their legality.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sebastian Kielmanovich wrote in a letter Friday to board attorney Josh Lawson that his office is “confident in the appropriateness of the subpoenas.”

Kielmanovich wrote Thursday that the original subpoena timeline was designed only to ensure documents wouldn’t be destroyed following state records procedures. But prosecutors want to “avoid any interference with the ongoing election cycle” and “do nothing to impede those preparations or to affect participation in or the outcome of those elections,” he wrote.

In offering a January deadline to comply, Kielmanovich also asked that vote information be redacted from ballots.

 
…

The White House has been rocked by scandal after scandal, and President Donald Trump’s approval ratings have been falling. Yet there are a group of supporters who remain deeply committed and loyal to Trump, believing his agenda is good for them and for the country. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara talked to some of them and has this report.
…

George Papadopoulos, the former Trump campaign adviser whose actions triggered the Russia investigation, was sentenced to 14 days in prison Friday by a judge who said he had placed his own interests above those of the country.

The punishment was far less than the maximum six-month sentence sought by the government but also more than the probation that Papadopoulos and his lawyers had asked for. However, defense lawyer Thomas Breen said the sentence was fair.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss said that Papadopoulos’ deception was “not a noble lie” and that he had lied because he wanted a job in the Trump administration and did not want to jeopardize that possibility by being tied to the Russia investigation.

Papadopoulos, the first Trump campaign aide sentenced in special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, said he was “deeply embarrassed and ashamed’” for having lied to FBI agents during an interview last year and acknowledged that his actions could have hindered their work.

In an interview aired Friday on the CNN Papadopoulos said he does not remember informing Trump campaign officials that Russia had damaging emails about former U.S. Secretary of State and Trump presidential opponent Hillary Clinton. But he added he “can’t guarantee” he kept the information from campaign officials.

Foreknowledge of Russia’s offer to share damaging information about Clinton is at the heart of the Mueller investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign, has been a central figure in the Russia investigation dating back before Mueller’s May 2017 appointment. He was the first to plead guilty in Mueller’s probe and is now the first Trump campaign adviser to be sentenced. His case was also the first to detail a member of the Trump campaign having knowledge of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election while it was ongoing.

 
…

President Donald Trump declared Friday that the U.S. Justice Department should work to identify the writer of a New York Times opinion piece purportedly submitted by a member of an administration “resistance” movement straining to thwart his most dangerous impulses.

Trump cited “national security” as the reason for such a probe, and in comments to reporters he called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to open the investigation. He also said he was exploring bringing legal action against the newspaper over Wednesday’s publication of the essay.

“Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it’s national security,” Trump said. If the person has a high-level security clearance, he said, “I don’t want him in those meetings.”

It’s all but unthinkable that the Justice Department could open an investigation into the op-ed article. Though it was strongly critical of Trump, no classified information appears to have been revealed by the author or leaked to the newspaper, which would be one crucial bar to clear before a leak investigation could be contemplated.

Still Trump’s call was the latest test of the independence of his Justice Department, which is supposed to make investigative and charging decisions without political interference from the White House.

A day earlier, Trump’s top lieutenants stepped forward to repudiate the op-ed in a show of support for their incensed boss, who has ordered aides to unmask the writer.

Cabinet responses

By email, by tweet and on camera, the denials paraded in from Cabinet-level officials, and even Vice President Mike Pence. Senior officials in key national security and economic policy roles charged the article’s writer with cowardice, disloyalty and action against America’s interests in harsh terms that mimicked the president’s own words.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News, Trump said the author “may not be a Republican, it may not be a conservative, it may be a ‘deep state’ person who has been there for a long time.”

There is a long list of officials who could have been the author. Many have privately shared some of the article’s same concerns about Trump with colleagues, friends and reporters.

With such a wide circle of potential suspicion, Trump’s men and women felt they had no choice but to speak out. The denials and condemnations came in from far and wide: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis denied authorship on a visit to India; Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke chimed in from American Samoa. In Washington, the claims of “not me” echoed from Pence’s office, from Energy Secretary Rick Perry, from Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, from Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, and other Cabinet members.

The author professed to be a member of that same inner circle. So could the denials be trusted? There was no way to know, and that only deepened the president’s frustrations.

A White House official said Trump’s call for the Justice Department investigation was an expression of his frustration with the op-ed, rather than an order for federal prosecutors.

“The department does not confirm or deny investigations,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman.

Confirmation of concerns

Some people who agreed with the writer’s points suggested the president’s reaction actually confirmed the author’s concerns, and Democrats were quick to condemn the president’s call for a federal investigation.

Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “President Trump continues to show a troubling trend in which he views the Department of Justice as the private legal department of the Trump organization rather than an entity that is focused on respecting the Constitution and enforcing our laws.”

But Rudy Giuliani, the president’s attorney, suggested that it “would be appropriate” for Trump to ask for a formal investigation into the identity of the op-ed author.

“Let’s assume it’s a person with a security clearance. If they feel writing this is appropriate, maybe they feel it would be appropriate to disclose national security secrets, too. That person should be found out and stopped,” Giuliani said.

And Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a key ally of Trump’s, called for the president to order those suspected of being the author to undergo lie-detector tests.

“People are suggesting it,” Trump said Friday, steering clear of explicitly endorsing the proposal. “Eventually the name of this sick person will come out.”

As the initial scramble to unmask the writer proved fruitless, attention turned to the questions the article raised, which have been whispered in Washington for more than a year: Is Trump truly in charge, and could a divided executive branch pose a danger to the country?

Former CIA Director John Brennan, a fierce Trump critic, told NBC, “This is not sustainable, to have an executive branch where individuals are not following the orders of the chief executive. … A wounded lion is a very dangerous animal, and I think Donald Trump is wounded.”

Diligence ‘from within’

The anonymous author, claiming to be part of the resistance “working diligently from within” the administration, said, “Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”

“It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room,” the author continued. “We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”

First lady Melania Trump issued a statement backing her husband. She praised the free press as “important to our democracy” but assailed the writer, saying, “You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions.”

Down Pennsylvania Avenue, House Speaker Paul Ryan said he did not know of any role Congress would have to investigate, though Republican Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Trump ally, said the legislative body could take part.
…

President Donald Trump is vowing to root out the aides, officials or others who contributed to a pair of accounts that contend some on his team question his judgment, competence and even rationality.

A book by journalist Bob Woodward and an anonymous New York Times opinion piece, Trump has said, are fiction and lies. But the president nonetheless finds them compelling enough to seek out the leakers of behind-the-scenes stories and quotes. On Friday, Trump said the U.S. Justice Department should investigate the identity of the op-ed writer. 

“Eventually, the name of this sick person will come out,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

Some things to know about leak investigations:

The nature of a leak

Telling embarrassing stories about a president’s behavior is not the same thing as revealing classified information.

The first could be a political risk, which is why administration members from Vice President Mike Pence on down denied being the op-ed writer this week. Still, writing unflattering things about the president isn’t a crime.

But the Espionage Act and other federal laws do criminalize unauthorized disclosures about certain national security information, such as surveillance methods. Any leak investigations of classified information tend to go through a complex process at the Justice Department that includes determining whether the information was sensitive and known to few people.

No classified information appears to have been revealed by the anonymous op-ed author. And it’s far from clear that the vivid portraits of erratic presidential behavior described by Woodward and the op-ed writer would breach national security.

Speaking of national security …  

Trump told reporters Friday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should pursue the identity of the Times essay writer.

“Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it’s national security,” the president said. If the person has a high-level security clearance, Trump said, “I don’t want him in those meetings.”

The FBI and Justice Department are responsible for investigating federal crimes, but there is no indication of anything illegal having been done in the publication of a newspaper opinion piece critical of the president. It is also extraordinary for a president to demand an investigation by the Justice Department, which is supposed to make investigative and charging decisions without White House interference.

The Times opted to publish the unsigned column, which alleges that a “quiet resistance” of senior administration officials is “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Trump earlier dared the Times to do what journalists scrupulously avoid: “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!” he tweeted.

Asked if he would take any action against the Times, Trump said, “We’re going to see, I’m looking at that right now.”

The fallout from these leaks

Trump was asked if, in light of the book and column, he trusted the people around him.

“I do, I do,” he said. “But what I do is, now I look around the room and I say, ‘Hey, I don’t know somebody.’ ”

Truth-telling tests

Nothing would stop Trump from directing his aides to hunt for leakers among senior officials.

Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who describes himself as a libertarian, said Trump would be justified using lie detectors to find the anonymous essay writer. 

Trump wasn’t saying Friday whether he’d take the suggestion.

Lie detectors wouldn’t be reliable enough to unearth the column author or other sources for sure, studies and a massive federal report have indicated. And polygraphs aren’t acceptable as evidence in court.

“At best they are unreliable. The question is how unreliable?” said Indiana University brain sciences professor Richard Shiffrin.

‘You’d be shunned’

Meanwhile, Trump is said to be examining the language of the denials issued this week by the highest members of his administration or their spokespeople.

“Everybody very high up has already said it wasn’t me. It would be very hard if it was, if they got caught,” Trump said. “You’d be shunned for the rest of your life.”

Leak probes of the past

Trump would be far from the first president to hunt for leakers. 

During his eight years in office, Barack Obama’s Justice Department prosecuted nine cases against whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with three by all other previous administrations. In one of those investigations, the government secretly seized records for telephone lines and switchboards that more than 100 reporters for The Associated Press used in their Washington bureau and elsewhere.

In June under the Trump administration, Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty to a single count of transmitting national security information. The former Air Force translator had worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency office in Augusta, Georgia, when she printed a classified report and left the building with it hidden in her pantyhose. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet.

Deep Throat

Former FBI No. 2 W. Mark Felt first denied, then decades later admitted, being the famous source for Washington Post reporters Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate coverage that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Nixon and polygraphs

Prior to the Watergate scandal, Nixon in 1971 considered lie detector tests for an estimated 300,000 federal employees with security clearances, according to a taped presidential conversation played for the House Judiciary Committee looking at the administration’s domestic surveillance programs.

Advised the tests would result in mass resignations, he ordered the tests for about 1,000 employees of the State and Defense departments, the CIA and the National Security Council.

A June 1974 Associated Press report quoted Nixon as saying, “I don’t know much about these things, but it scares the (expletive deleted) out of them.”
…

Former U.S. president Barack Obama, who has maintained a low public profile since leaving office, entered the midterm election battle Friday with a simple message: “You need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”

“A glance at recent headlines should tell you that this moment really is different. The stakes really are higher. The consequences of any of us sitting on the sidelines are more dire,” Obama told students at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, where he accepted an ethics in government award.

In keeping with tradition, Obama has been reluctant to publicly comment on his successor, U.S. President Donald Trump, despite the fact Trump was a frequent critic of Obama.

The former president said the current state of Washington politics “did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but is also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.”

Obama implored the students “to show up” at the polls in November, noting that only one in five young eligible voters cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election.

“This whole project of self-government only works if everybody’s doing their part. Don’t tell me your vote doesn’t matter,” he declared.

Obama’s appearance at the central Illinois university campus was the first of several campaign events in the coming weeks at which he will urge Democratic voters to cast ballots in November’s midterm elections to take control of Congress from Donald Trump’s Republican Party. 

The former president also will attend a Southern California event for seven Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in Republican-controlled districts that supported Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump two years ago.

Obama will campaign in Ohio next week for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray, a former Obama administration official.

He will return to Illinois later this month and then appear in Pennsylvania, a key state that Democrats hope will help deliver the 23 seats needed to regain control of the House and stop the advancement of Trump’s agenda.

The Democratic and Republican parties have traditionally experienced sharp declines in voter turnout in non-presidential elections. But the November 6 election is widely perceived as a referendum on Trump, who regularly touts his accomplishments such as tax cuts and deregulation. However, a widening investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election that Trump won and more frequent questions about his fitness for office have cast a pall over his presidency.
…

Top officials within the Trump administration, from Vice President Mike Pence to several key Cabinet members, have denied that they authored an anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times critical of President Donald Trump’s leadership. Publication of the column has set off a furious debate in Washington about the Trump presidency and a high-stakes guessing game as to who the mysterious dissident voice may be. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
…

The coup of publishing a column by an anonymous Trump administration official bashing the boss could backfire on The New York Times if the author is unmasked and turns out to be a little-known person, or if the newspaper’s own reporters solve the puzzle.

Within hours of the essay’s appearance on the paper’s website, the mystery of the writer’s identity began to rival the Watergate-era hunt for “Deep Throat” in Washington, and a parade of Trump team members issued statements Thursday saying, in effect, “It’s not me.”

The Times’ only clue was calling the author a “senior administration official.” James Dao, the newspaper’s op-ed editor, said in the Times’ daily podcast that while an intermediary brought him together with the author, he conducted a background check and spoke to the person to the point that he was “totally confident” in the identity.

How large the pool of “senior administration officials” is in Washington is a matter of interpretation.

It’s a term used loosely around the White House. Press offices often release statements or offer background briefings and ask that the information be attributed to a senior administration official.

The Partnership for Public Services tracks approximately 700 senior positions in government, ones that require Senate confirmation. Paul Light, a New York University professor and expert on the federal bureaucracy, said about 50 people could have legitimately written the column — probably someone in a political position appointed by Trump.

He suspects the author is in either a Cabinet-level or deputy secretary position who frequently visits the White House or someone who works in the maze of offices in the West Wing.

Perhaps not

Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, tweeted that, based on her experience with the Times and sourcing, “this person could easily be someone most of us have never heard of and more junior than you’d expect.”

That would be a problem for the Times, partly through no fault of its own, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The column attracted so much attention — as much for its existence as for what it actually said — that it raised the expectation that the author is someone powerful, she said.

If the person is not among the 20 top people in the administration, “the Times just gets creamed,” said Tom Bettag, a veteran news producer and now a University of Maryland journalism instructor. “And I think it gets held against them in the biggest possible way. I have enough respect for the Times to believe that they wouldn’t hold themselves up to that.”

It would look like the Times was trying to stir the pot if it were not a high-level person, said Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press.

Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post, told Todd on MSNBC that if the author had come to the Post it would provoke a serious discussion, because the newspaper has not in the past run anonymous op-ed columns. She said no one approached the Post to hawk the column.

“When you give someone anonymity on this, you are putting your credibility on the line,” Marcus said.

News organizations have different standards for using information from unnamed sources. Frequently, they try to give some indication of why the person would be in a position to know something — the senior administration official, for example — and why anonymity was granted. In this case, the newspaper considered that the person’s job would clearly be at risk and that the person could even be physically threatened, Dao said.

He did not see much difference in the use of anonymity in news and opinion pages.

Longtime Trump target

The Times has long been a target of President Donald Trump’s vitriol. He criticized the newspaper for printing the column and said the Times should reveal its source for reasons of national security.

“There’s nothing in the piece that strikes me as being relevant to or undermining the national security,” Dao said.

The newspaper maintains a strict policy of separation between its news and opinion side, and the decision to publish the column without identifying the author was made by Dao and his boss, editorial page editor James Bennet, in consultation with publisher A.G. Sulzberger. The paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, is responsible for the news side and was not part of the decision.

Few people at the paper know the writer’s identity, Dao said, and he could not see any circumstances under which it would be divulged.

The Times’ own news story about the column said the author’s identity was “known to the Times’ editorial page department but not to the reporters who cover the White House.”

Like hundreds of other reporters in Washington, the Times’ news staff is trying to find out the writer’s name. If the Times learns the identity, it could raise serious questions about the newspaper’s ability to protect a confidential source among people who don’t know — or don’t believe — that one part of the newspaper will keep important information away from another.

“You could write a novel about this,” said Jamieson, author of the upcoming Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President. “If they engage in successful journalism, at some level they discredit themselves.” 
…

The Trump administration on Thursday lifted a roadblock to copper-nickel mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northeastern Minnesota, reversing a decision made in the final days of the Obama administration.

The Obama administration in late 2016 withdrew around 234,000 acres of the Rainy River watershed near Ely from eligibility for mineral leasing pending a two-year study, citing the potential threat from acid mine drainage to the nearby Boundary Waters, the country’s most-visited wilderness area. The move could have led to a 20-year ban on mining and prospecting on the land.

The most immediate beneficiary is Twin Metals Minnesota, which hopes to build a copper-nickel-precious metals mine south of Ely. It plans to submit its first formal mining plan to regulators in the next 18 months.

The land is part of the Superior National Forest, which is controlled by the U.S. Forest Service, an agency under the Department of Agriculture. The USDA canceled the withdrawal Thursday, saying its review revealed no new scientific information and that interested companies may soon be able to sign mineral leases in the area.

“It’s our duty as responsible stewards of our environment to maintain and protect our natural resources. At the same time, we must put our national forests to work for the taxpayers to support local economies and create jobs,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement.

The decision had been expected. President Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in Duluth in June that his administration would soon rescind the withdrawal.

The Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, The Wilderness Society and allied groups denounced the decision as a sellout to foreign corporate interests. They blasted the agency for failing to complete the study, despite Perdue’s assurances to a congressional committee in May 2017 that it would and that no decision would be made until it was finished.

“The Trump Administration broke its word to us, to Congress, and to the American people when it said it would finish the environmental assessment and base decisions on facts and science,” Alex Falconer, executive director of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, said in a statement.

Forest Service spokesman Brady Smith said the agency determined that there was no need to complete the assessment, based on what it had learned over the last 15 months. But he said the Forest Service met its obligations to conduct a scientific analysis that included multiple opportunities for public feedback.

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, the lead Democrat on a subcommittee that funds the Forest Service, issued a statement accusing Perdue of breaking his promise to her panel, “bending to political pressure from a foreign mining company and abandoning sound science.” She said Perdue’s word “cannot be trusted.”

But Twin Metals, which is owned by the Chilean mining company Antofagasta, welcomed the decision, which will also give a freer hand to other companies that have conducted exploratory drilling in the area.

“This important action ensures that federal lands that have been open to responsible mining activity for decades will remain open, offering the Iron Range region the potential for thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in economic growth,” Twin Metals CEO Kelly Osborne said in a statement.

The Trump administration in May reinstated two key mineral leases for Twin Metals that the Obama administration had declined to renew. Environmental groups are challenging that decision in court.

The Twin Metals project is not as advanced as the planned PolyMet mine, which would become Minnesota’s first copper-nickel mine if it gets final approval of its permits. PolyMet sits several miles away in a different watershed.
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Twitter has permanently banned far-right media personality Alex Jones for violating its policy against “abusive behavior.”

Jones, who is known as a conspiracy theorist, has about 900,000 followers on Twitter. His Infowars website has hundreds of thousands of followers, as well.

Twitter accused Jones of violating its policy after he was seen on television berating and insulting a CNN reporter waiting to enter congressional hearings on social media policies.

Jones called the reporter a smiling “possum caught doing some really nasty stuff” and also made fun of his clothes.

Twitter had previously suspended Jones’ account, but now he is banned from posting on the social media site.

Jones has yet to comment.

Jones is one of the country’s most controversial media figures, known for saying the President George W. Bush White House was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He also called the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre a fake. Some of the parents of the murdered children are suing Jones.

The congressional hearings were focused on whether such social media sites as Google and Facebook are prepared against fake foreign accounts that may be aimed at influencing U.S. elections.

The hearings came just after President Donald Trump accused Google’s search engine of being biased against him.
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Facebook and Twitter executives defended their efforts to prevent Russian meddling in U.S. midterm elections before congressional panels Wednesday. The social media companies’ efforts to provide assurances to lawmakers come amid warnings from internet researchers that Moscow still has active social media accounts aimed at influencing U.S. political discourse. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
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