It’s pretty pathetic when the one of the last people Trump trusts is Stephen Miller, because Trump seems to be still upset by the anonymous author of an Op-Ed.
More interesting will be when Trump tries to buy (or extort) his way to the identity of the anonymous NY Times Op-Ed.
The reality is that the piece was more likely a group product and that someone who he least expects wrote it (Jarvanka?), because it seems much clearer that it was designed as a disinformation stunt to offset the debut of the Woodward book.
Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.
It’s more likely that there is greater coordination between Manafort’s lawyers and Trump, which explains the relatively calm Trump in terms of his public statements on Manafort.
According to Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, Manafort and Trump are part of a joint-defense agreement that allows them to share confidential information about the Russia investigation under the protection of attorney-client privilege. “All during the investigation we have an open communication with them,” Giuliani recently told Politico. “Defense lawyers talk to each other all the time, where, as long as our clients authorize it, therefore we have a better idea of what’s going to happen. That’s very common.”