The number of White House officials denying they wrote an anonymous New York Times opinion piece that slammed the Trump administration and claimed that there is an internal “resistance” to the president, is growing.
WATCH: Vice President Mike Pence criticized the publication of an op-ed by a White House “senior official.”
Amid intense speculation on who the mystery author is, on Thursday four top White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said they were not the author and slammed the Times for publishing it.
“It’s not mine,” Pompeo said during a trip to New Delhi.
Pompeo criticized Times for publishing the piece, saying it “shouldn’t surprise anyone” that the “liberal” newspaper chose to print it.
The column, released Wednesday, was said to be written by an anonymous senior administration official working from “within” the White House in order to “thwart” U.S. President Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations.”
WATCH: Pompeo denies writing New York Times op-ed slamming Trump administration.
The column has set off a wild guessing game on the author’s identity. Some of the language in the article, including the use of the unusual word “lodestar,” was the subject of wide online speculation and language searches.
Pompeo said if the piece is true, the Times should not have chosen to, “take a disgruntled, deceptive, bad actors’ word for anything and put it in their newspaper.”
WATCH: Trump criticizes damning New York Times op-ed as ‘gutless’
Vice President Mike Pence’s office also denied on Thursday that he is the senior administration official behind the opinion essay.
The Pentagon said Defense Secretary James Mattis did not write the piece. “It was not his op-ed,” Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a statement: “Speculation that The New York Times op-ed was written by me or my principal deputy is patently false. We did not.”
After the piece was published, Trump took to Twitter saying, “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
Trump also fired off a one-word message on Twitter: “TREASON?”
The Times took what it called the rare step of publishing an opinion column by the official under an agreement to keep the author’s name secret. It said the senior administration official’s job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.
— With files from Reuters
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