.cms-textAlign-left{text-align:left;}.cms-textAlign-center{text-align:center;}.cms-textAlign-right{text-align:right;}.cms-magazineStyles-smallCaps{font-variant:small-caps;}“It’s shocking to realize senior administration officials were so easily duped by this garbage,” Coates said in a statement. “President Trump was not well served.”
Former President Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro penned a 15-page dossier falsely accusing his colleague Victoria Coates of being Anonymous, according to a copy of the document that was obtained by POLITICO and captures the backbiting that was rife in the Trump White House.
was transferred out of the White House to the Department of Energy in February, just weeks after Navarro wrote and circulated the document.

The Dec. 2, 2019, memo, entitled “Identity of Anonymous” and which has never been published publicly, seems to reverse-engineer the search for Anonymous and cherry-pick clues to pin the blame on Coates.
The dossier lists fifteen bullet points as the likely profile of the author, and several of them turned out to be wrong, including that the person was a “Female With Several Children,” a “Middle East Expert, Pro-Israel, Iran Hawk,” an “Experienced Writer” who had ties to former national security adviser John Bolton and who worked at the National Security Council and not at a Cabinet agency.he said: “Suspects are everywhere.” He also called hunting for the author a “vocation.”

The report lists six points that Navarro offered as “major corroborating evidence” that Coates was Anonymous, including that she had written under an anonymous pen name before on a blog and had two “indirect” links to the word “lodestar” and the Flight 93 metaphor used in the book’s epilogue.
The only “conclusions” listed in the memo appeared to reflect the possibility that Coates wasn’t actually anonymous.Latimer said in a statement last February. “She does not know who Anonymous is. We have never discussed Anonymous or the book, A WARNING, with her prior to its publication. She did not write it, edit it, see it in advance, know anything about it, or as far we know ever read it.”

she was eventually moved to the Department of Energy as the senior policy adviser in late February. (Her boss at the time, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, said in a statement that she had “served the president loyally since the earliest days of the administration” but did not publicly say at the time she wasn’t Anonymous.)

“While there is a reasonable probability that our POI may be Anonymous, our POI may also be innocent,” Navarro wrote. “Extreme care must be taken in any investigation of this matter, and one should presume innocence until actually proven guilty.”
The December 2019 memo goes into great detail to make the case that Coates — who was then a deputy national security adviser — was the author of both the New York Times op-ed and a tell-all book that described a resistance force within the administration aiming to undermine President Donald Trump.