(CNN) By the time you read this, practically every person who works in the Trump administration -- or even considered working in the Trump administration -- will have denied writing The New York Times op-ed alleging that there is a coordinated effort to end-run President Donald Trump from within his own government.

Which, of course.

If you are going to write an op-ed in the Times without your name on it, the chances of deciding to admit you wrote it less than 24 hours after it posted are, um, not high. The truth is all the denials bring us no closer to finding out who actually wrote the piece. ( I speculated about 13 possible culprits here .)

But if you are a newspaper/sourcing nerd -- and I am! -- there is something that can be gained by a) digging into the way that the Times described the writer and b) understanding the Times' calculus in publishing the piece at all.

The writer was described by the Times as a "senior official in the Trump administration," which is, obviously, very, very broad. There are thousands of people within the federal bureaucracy and God knows everyone thinks they are a senior official, too. (If there is anyone below you on the totem pole, they would be a junior administration official, so you could tell yourself you are a senior administration official.)

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