President Trump on Friday said that he wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate who wrote an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times critical of his administration, as a matter of national security.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One, the President also mentioned possibility of legal action against the Times, which published the Op-Ed claiming to be from "part of the resistance inside the Trump administration."

During a Thursday night campaign rally event in Billings, Trump called on the Times to publish the name of the author "at once."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The so-called resistance is angry because their horrible ideas have been rejected by the American people, and it's driving them crazy. Crazy. They're the ones, honestly, that have been driven crazy. The latest act of resistance is the op-ed published in the failing New York Times by an anonymous -- really an anonymous, gutless coward. You just look. He was -- nobody knows who the hell he is, or she, although they put he, but probably that's a little disguise. That means it's she. But for the sake of our national security, the New York Times should publish his name at once. I think their reporters should go and investigate who it is. That would actually be a good scoop. (APPLAUSE) That would be a good scoop. Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself. And I was so heartened when I looked

Trump added: "I think it's backfired. Seriously. People that don't exactly dig us and they don't exactly like me, they're fighting for us. It's an incredible -- it's actually a beautiful thing. We picked up a lot of support, because at some point this whole thing is going to be exposed. And it's really bad, and it's really dangerous, and it's really sad for the media and the mainstream media. It really is sad."

To that end, Pulitzer Prize winning co-founder of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, called the author of the op-ed a "coward" whose ideological issues "voters didn't ratify."

Greenwald continues; "The irony in the op-ed from the NYT's anonymous WH coward is glaring and massive: s/he accuses Trump of being "anti-democratic" while boasting of membership in an unelected cabal that covertly imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency."