The NYT traitor may have been a student essay at USC

twitter ^ | 6 sept. 18 | Mighty Cassandra

[Mechanicos]

Or duped by a USC student, which is my theory. I ran the “essay” through http://Turnitin.com . It popped as a 100% match to a USC student essay, turned in w/out citation-making it an original essay-sept 5-overachiever! Archived & submitted to the repository w/in minutes of NYT

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

It is just possible that it was peddled to one of their reporters as the work of a senior official.

I am even more skeptical of this report than I am of the NYT editorial.

[StormEye]

"All they care about is their daily smear. When it’s
proven false, it’s already in the bloodstream.
They move on to the next one."

It's just as Rush Limbaugh always says:
"It's the Drive-By Media."

[Texas Eagle]

All the evidence I needed to know that the op-ed wasn't written by a member of the Trump administration was the fact that the NYT didn't identify the author.

The Slimes loves to "out" any member of the Trump administration who says something even remotely derogatory about President Trump.

[Thumper1960]

Whether or not every single word in that “Op-Ed” is true or a complete fantasy, as far as I am concerned, and as far as every single person I come into daily contact with, mostly blue collar working stiffs like myself, the bottom line is this: We don’t care. We simply don’t give a damn. Truth or fiction or a combination-we just don’t care. The sense of how things are going is overwhelmingly positive. Domestically, economically, internationally. We’re too busy working and living to play into the little mind games of those scratchers and grubbers, vying for power and influence.

[Yardstick]

This would be a big deal if the student essay had been submitted BEFORE it was published in the NYT. But it wasn’t, which makes it a non-story.

What probably happened is this: NYT publishes piece; student sees piece and cuts/pastes it into the USC archive; someone then claims either maliciously or mistakenly that the NYT piece is derived from the student piece.

The timeline undermines the student essay theory. Several comments at Twitchy make this point.

[Yardstick]

Yes, that’s obviously what’s going on here. This conspiracy theory is so lame that I suspect it was created as sucker bait.

[libstripper]

I've finally gotten around to reading the whole thing. It reads well and smoothly, like a document that's been edited and re-edited to the point where stylistic analysis will probably not reveal its real author(s). It contains only one vague anecdote from which its author might be identified:

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

However, the more one looks at that quote, the harder it is to see what the alleged author is writing about, since it gives no date, doesn't identify the "top official," and doesn't identify the alleged "major policy decision." IOW, anybody who's reasonably familiar with Woodward's book and the general trend of NeverTrumper criticisms of PRESIDENT Trump could have concocted it out of whole cloth.

The rest of the op ed is even worse, not referring to any single event or set of events that would give it any genuine credibility. Indeed, it reads like something any well informed NeverTrumper could create just by reading and cutting and pasting from any set of George Will, Jonah Goldberg, or Bill Kristol columns.

All of the above leads me to conclude the op ed is a blatant fabrication, just like the whole "Russia hacked the DNC and colluded with Trump to steal the election" fraud.

For anyone who's not read the op ed, here it is:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html

[WayneLusvardi]

People who commit revenge crimes and are uncaught, often leave traces of who committed the crime so that their revenge fantasy is vindicated and who did it is subtly or covertly indicated. I don’t see any tinge or trace of who did it other than some vague statement that he/she is a Trump administration official. So the borrowed student paper hypothesis sounds more plausible.

[Texas Fossil]

My prediction is it will be a gruesome massacre.” And why? Because, he said, “one side in this conflict has 8 Trillion bullets & the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

[WayneLusvardi]

It is interesting that Michael Cohen, former attorney for Trump, is reported to have visited USC campus with his son on August 29 (of what year is vague, 2017?). So did Cohen’s son write the student essay from conversations with his father? Or did his father write the essay for his son?

LINK

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/michael-cohen-it-is-fake-news-meant-to-malign-mr-trump/512762/

[Fido969]

Ahhh... so you have identified the author as Jennifer Rubin!

A perfect match!

[grey_whiskers]

Remember the Rathergate memos?

Kinkos and all that?

[Retvet]

Fake news again?

[Dilbert San Diego]

Well said.

Then there’s also the omnipresent Stormy Daniels and her attorney, which CNN keeps pushing. Thye expect us to be as enthralled with the latest Stormy news. When many of us know, it is all trumped up, it’s all a sideshow, so we just don’t care abith all the ins and outs of Stormy and her lawyer.

[poconopundit]

Good analysis, libstripper.

I just read it, thanks to your link. And what you say is true — it reads like it could come from any number of sources.

The difference is how Trump treated the piece. Woodward’s book came out at the same time, so Trump may have figured that it was better to go after the NYTimes and parade all his Cabinet to make public denials making NYTimes look corrupt as usual.

In the meantime, nobody had a chance to talk about Woodward’s book.

So it turns out to be another successful counter-journo-propaganda story.