In recent weeks, people in and outside the White House had suggested to reporters at multiple news outlets — including POLITICO — that the official, deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates, was Anonymous. Coates had begun to fear for job, according to several people close to her, even though she was recently promoted by national security adviser Robert O’Brien…

Coates, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is a Middle East specialist with a nontraditional background for a top foreign policy hand. She’s an art historian and the author of a 2016 book on the Western canon, David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art. In a review, the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada called it “an unusual book, enjoyable in its visuals and prose, even if not fully persuasive in its arguments.” Coates, who once taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has a doctorate in Italian Renaissance art. She declined to comment…

“This ‘investigation’ is based on innuendo, the irrelevant fact that she once worked with this agency on an art history book, and otherwise unprovable allegations — which are unprovable because they are not true,” Latimer will say. “The fact that there is no real evidence has not stopped a whisper campaign against her to members of the press in the hope that someone would write a story. Nor has it stopped uninformed idiots from trying to out her on Twitter on Pavlovian command. As a result, her career is now at risk.”