*By Carlo Versano*
It's the guessing game upending Washington: who is the "senior official" who authored the [unsigned op-ed] (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html) published Wednesday in The New York Times and claims to be "part of the resistance inside the Trump administration"?
Whoever it was should come out of the shadows and resign, Marc Lotter, former press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence, said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar.
Lotter, who also served as a special assistant to Trump during the president's first months in office, said that he questioned what "senior official" even means.
"There's so many issues of credibility with this," he said. "I don't take too much from it."
The essay caused shock waves in political and journalistic circles when it hit the Times' website. By Wednesday evening, social media was ablaze with theories about who was behind such a jarring public critique of a sitting president ー who also happens to be the writer's boss.
In the piece, the author said there is a cohort of senior advisers in the West Wing and the Cabinet who have actively worked to circumvent the president's "misguided impulses." Trump, as a leader, is "impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective."
"If you're going to have these kinds of disagreements then you should not be in that position," Lotter said.
According to the former adviser, Trump's unorthodox management style makes many uncomfortable.
But as Lotter explained, "He wants to hear both sides of each story," which sometimes causes friction among the ranks.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement in response to the op-ed, saying: "This coward should do the right thing and resign.”
The essay was published days after excerpts from renowned journalist Bob Woodward's new tell-all book about Trump began to circulate. That book also chronicles a chaotic West Wing, full of advisers who have tried to thwart the president without his knowledge.
Trump reacted angrily verbally and on Twitter late Wednesday. He called the essay ["gutless"(]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1037485664433070080), wondered aloud whether the Times should unveil the source for ["National Security purposes"](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1037485664433070080), and tweeted, simply, ["TREASON?"] (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1037464177269514240)
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/marc-lotter-shares-his-remarks-on-ny-times-op-ed).
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
Megyn Kelly is not a morning person ー at least, not anymore. Reports on Thursday morning indicated that the anchor's days as an NBC host are numbered, following her controversial on-air comments earlier this week that defended wearing blackface on Halloween.
China is responding to a revelatory report in The New York Times ー that said Chinese spies are allegedly eavesdropping on President Donald Trump during calls he makes on an unsecured iPhone ー by suggesting that the president use the device of a Chinese competitor instead.
Two more suspicious devices were intercepted on Thursday ー one in Delaware en route to former VP Joe Biden and the other at the restaurant and office of actor Robert De Niro in Lower Manhattan ー the eighth and ninth to be sent to high-profile critics of President Trump in a period of three days.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
Investors overseas are losing their appetite for U.S. debt. Foreign buyers now hold 41 percent of outstanding Treasury debt, marking their lowest share in 15 years. If the trend continues, the U.S. dollar may weaken and interest rates might climb. While it may be easy to blame the trade war for the drop, Daniel Kruger, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said a stronger dollar is the culprit.
An apparent attempted mail bombing of several prominent Democrats and members of the news media used techniques that have grown more common among terrorists in recent years, said Jarrod Bernstein, a former counter-terrorism official in the Obama administration.
A record number of women are running for political office, and one congresswoman thinks America has one man to thank. "The best recruiter we've had, his name is President Donald Trump," Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) said Wednesday in an interview on Cheddar.
Tesla shares are surging as investors prepare for the company to release quarterly earnings Wednesday after the markets close. President Trump criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell (again) in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And Kerry Bishé and Corey Stoll join Cheddar to talk about their roles on Amazon's new series 'The Romanoffs.'
Apple CEO Tim Cook made his most forceful comments yet on the privacy concerns plaguing the tech industry, telling a conference in Brussels, Belgium that a "data-industrial complex" has led to eroding privacy rights around the world. Cook then called on the U.S. to adopt a landmark federal privacy law like the GDPR that went into effect earlier this year in the EU.
