“The sentence structure and the word usage should give away the source of the letter. Then his phone records should give his contacts and, hopefully, a call to the New York Times.”
That’s not the way it is done.
No direct contact with the NYT by phone.
Sentence structure and use of certain words can be masked by a decent editor.
Let’s us hope that this Bob Woodward wannabe is careless and stupid. The Left is always stupid.