Former President Bill Clinton’s speechwriter David Kusnet has a theory about who the author of A Warning by “Anonymous” could be based on “a striking resemblance” in writing samples, and the person isn’t denying it.
He accused former Pentagon aide Guy Snodgrass of being the unnamed author in a Monday piece for the New Republic.
“Reading Snodgrass’s Pentagon memoir, Holding the Line, makes the clues to the Anonymous writer’s identity apparent. As in A Warning, the sentences and paragraphs are pithy and punchy,” Kusnet wrote.
Kusnet added, “Compared to other widely rumored suspects whose backgrounds I researched, Snodgrass checks three boxes: He can write. He knows and cares about national security — a major theme of A Warning. And, to borrow from his description of Mattis, he is ‘a badass’ who eventually offended his hero and won a prepublication battle with the Pentagon over the release of Holding the Line.”
Snodgrass, who was the chief speechwriter for former Defense Secretary James Mattis, responded to the article about him with a cryptic message, simply tweeting, “The swirl continues…”
[Related: Former FBI agent lays out case that Kirstjen Nielsen behind anonymous book]
The swirl continues…https://t.co/BCth6lqnLM
— Guy Snodgrass (@GuySnodgrass) November 25, 2019
Kusnet admitted there are a few flaws in his theory, namely that Snodgrass would not have been present for many White House meetings, and he resigned from his position before some of the events in the Anonymous book.
Kusnet, 68, was the chief speechwriter for Clinton from 1992 to 1994. He also was a speechwriter for Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale.
A Warning was released last week and features many sensational claims about the Trump White House, including details about a plan for a “midnight self-massacre” and the president saying, “Let’s get rid of the f—ing judges.”
Snodgrass subsequently went on Fox News Monday to promote his book Holding the Line, but he refused to “outright” deny that he also wrote A Warning.
“I have a book out with my name on it called Holding the Line,” he said. “I do appreciate that the New Republic said that the writing was excellent across both books.”
He called the suspicion around him “the latest in a long series of D.C. parlor games” and insisted that he “went ahead and retweeted out the story because it caught [his] eye and someone put it on [his] radar.”
