miles taylor anon resist

primary 10 26 EZ but also freq critic

jan 6 hearing #7 proud boys msnbc commenter

SEE IMPEACH 3 OVERSITE

shocked shocked that ppl talking civil war?!

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Todd Blanche warned: A presidential pardon can’t save you from state prison

Former chief of staff to Homeland Security, Miles Taylor wants to see state governments go after President Donald Trump and his allies for their attempt to steal the 2020 election, particularly now that Trump is trying to change the election again.

In his Monday column, Taylor argued that the Trump administration is preparing to challenge unfavorable midterm election results through lawsuits filed with the Justice Department. He thinks the DOJ will pressure election officials and possibly interfere with certification.

But Taylor also warned that loyalty to Trump will not necessarily protect them from prosecution or professional consequences.

A new Justice Department lawsuit filed last week seeks to block Alaska from certifying its Senate election if Republican Dan Sullivan loses, citing potential confusion with another candidate with the same name. The differences between the Dan Sullivans is obvious on the ballot.

"The brazenness is remarkable," wrote Taylor. "On October 22, DOJ sued Alaska to bar the state from certifying its Senate race if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses to Mary Peltola, on the theory that a second man named Dan Sullivan on the ballot might confuse voters. The election hasn’t even happened. Yet Trump told reporters he personally directed it, and even Senator Sullivan’s campaign said it never asked for DOJ's intervention."

Another federal effort tried to segregate California ballots linked to suspected noncitizens, arguing that inaccuracies in the underlying data undermine those efforts. The district attorney ultimately admitted he may not have accurate information on the voters. Former federal prosecutors chatting about it couldn't help but laugh.

All of these actions pair with Trump's demands for voter rolls, prosecution threats and federal monitoring, as an intimidation campaign rather than routine election oversight. Taylor interpreted officials’ refusal to rule out blocking certification as evidence that the administration may contest results it dislikes.

"DOJ has fired off letters to all 50 states threatening election officials with prosecution. The Department has already brought thirty lawsuits seeking the voter rolls of various states," Taylor cited. "They’re deploying a thousand federal 'monitors' to the polls, and armed agents were literally knocking on voters’ doors in nine states until a judge blocked it last week as voter intimidation. A DOJ official tells NBC that more states could be sued before or after Election Day, leaving open the possibility of ballots being frozen right through certification. And Todd Blanche says that blocking certification is a 'doomsday scenario' he won’t rule out."

But if the administration thinks it can pardon its way through election interference, Taylor said it should exercise caution.

Taylor explained that presidential pardons cover federal offenses, not state crimes, and argued that presidential immunity does not automatically shield advisers, lawyers or prosecutors. In fact, he argued, officials who unlawfully pressure state election administrators could face investigations under state laws addressing threats, conspiracy, forgery or election interference.

"So to Trump’s henchmen, let me offer a friendly reminder before you move to decertify election results or prevent the peaceful transfer of power: the man you’re doing this for is putting you at risk… he doesn’t care about you… and even if he did, he cannot save you from accountability," Taylor closed.

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AN 10 26

When President Donald Trump came into office, he was quick to demand that anyone who touched investigations into him be purged from the U.S. government. That has included Justice Department lawyers and FBI investigators. Even lower-level researchers didn't escape punishment.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor has an idea: Make them the new investigators of the coming Trump probes.

Taylor was previously the infamous leaker who revealed bombshell developments in the first Trump administration that made him fear for the country's future.

If angry voters turn out for the Nov. 3 election, Democrats are expected to take back the House. That could trigger investigations spanning government and corporate America's relationship with the Trump administration.

Over the weekend, Rolling Stone reported that Democrats are already preparing.

"Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-La.) even told a gathering of conservatives earlier this year that “impeachment isn’t even the real concern.” Instead, he warned that "half of them in the room would be targeted. Accordingly, Johnson pledged he’d take care of his GOP colleagues, and his office is reportedly running oversight briefings for nervous Republicans, PowerPoint included."

"I’m glad they’re running scared. They should be," Taylor teased.

One of the biggest concerns, he pointed out, is that a subpoena is only as useful as the person who knows how to use it. Currently, no investigators can handle such sprawling probes. That's why Taylor thinks the place to start is hiring dozens of long-time investigators with experience in high-profile cases and the personal scrutiny that can come with them.

"The old adage that 'no one is above the law' assumes that there’s always someone looking," Taylor said. "But if you blindfold the people whose job it is to keep their eyes peeled, then the adage becomes a cruel joke, right?"

Taylor has been at work on a documentary he's calling "Corruptionland," which will be released online next week. Among those he's spoken with are many of these former prosecutors and agents who specifically worked with the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ and FBI investigators with experience in Washington corruption cases.

"They were pushed out for doing their jobs, and almost every one of them told me some version of the same thing: if there were a serious, well-run effort to hold this administration accountable, they’d step back into the fight tomorrow," said Taylor. "Congress should take them up on it. If the opposition wins the House or the Senate, the new committee chairs should hire these investigators and put them to work. Right away."

Taylor thinks Trump's effort to block anyone from investigating him is about to "backfire," and it should start with those who know about it from the inside.

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MILES T DIESEL STAR LINK?

AN 10 26

On Thursday, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first administration laid out the pattern of Russian collusion that has extended across both terms. According to Miles Taylor – who served as the Deputy Chief of Staff in Homeland Security and leaked White House secrets – Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine amount to “treason” worthy of impeachment.

As Taylor notes, this week has brought a flurry of controversy prompted by Trump’s actions regarding Russia and Ukraine. It began on Tuesday, when Russian ballistic missiles struck Ukraine without warnings that would usually come via U.S. satellites, killing and injuring dozens of Ukrainians. While American officials claimed the detection failed due to “bad weather,” Ukrainian officials said someone in the U.S. was “playing” with the system.

Then the next day, Starshield – the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, which Ukrainian troops use to fly drones and intercept Russian attacks — was suddenly throttled without warning. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was furious and warned that “people will die.” Musk surprised everyone by putting the blame on the White House, posting, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately POTUS.” The White House has not denied his claims.

“Are we to believe this was a coincidence?” asks Taylor. “Missile warnings and battlefield communications all coming down at the same time? Was it all ‘the weather’? Not even a fool would accept that conclusion. Look at last week, and you can surmise exactly what happened. And it may well be criminal.”

Days before, explains Taylor, Trump held a “suspicious” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, after which he announced a deal to buy millions of tons of Russian diesel, breaking sanctions he himself signed into law mere weeks earlier. Even Republican Senators have warned that he broke the law by giving a financial gift to the U.S. adversary. On the same day, Trump’s envoys told Ukraine that if Kyiv didn’t stop striking Russian oil refineries, Washington would cut off intelligence.

Then on Saturday, after Russian glide bombs killed 20 people in Ukraine, Trump said something that Putin “has been dreaming of, declaring, “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” Finally, late Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel responded to reports that he’s planning to visit Moscow to meet with the FSB, the successor to the KGB, with the taunt, “From Russia, with Love…”

According to Taylor, “There are very serious questions here, with very serious implications for the Trump presidency. What did the president know, and when? What did Putin ask of Trump in that phone call? Did Donald Trump agree to give Putin a financial boost and buy his oil? Did Putin suggest it might help Trump in the midterms by lowering gas prices? Did Trump offer to weaken Ukraine’s defenses for Putin? Did Trump then personally order the Pentagon to restrict Ukraine’s satellite communications while Ukrainian cities were under attack? Did he order American agencies to sit on intelligence about incoming strikes? What, exactly, did the two men say to each other on Friday?”

As Taylor notes, Trump has actually already been impeached previously, in 2019, over this exact issue: withholding military support for Ukraine in order to extract a political benefit for himself in a “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian leader. At the time, he froze foreign aid that was supposed to go to Ukraine in order to get leverage over them to help his re-election. Now he’s doing it again, though Taylor asserts the matter is “more serious” this time. “After a very suspicious phone call with Vladimir Putin,” writes Taylor, “Trump may have shut down early warning systems and battlefield communications — by literally switching them off while civilians slept in their apartments in Ukraine, in the crosshairs of Russia — in order to pressure Ukraine into a bogus ‘energy ceasefire’ in order to herald lower gas prices before the U.S. midterm elections.”

While this situation doesn’t precisely fit the Constitutional definition of treason, in Taylor’s estimation, “a president who puts his allies in mortal danger with favors to an enemy and for personal benefit has essentially done what treason describes. And impeachment doesn’t require a statute. Indeed, the words ‘high crimes and misdemeanors' were written to allow Congress to impeach a president for abuses of the public trust, and there’s no clearer abuse than a commander in chief using American intelligence as leverage against the people it was built to protect, on behalf of the dictator trying to kill them.” Trump has been impeached over such actions before. Now, writes Taylor, “The question our country must confront is whether the leader of the United States lowered the shield so that Putin could carry out murder and so that he could secure some political wins. In 2017, it took a special counsel to find out what Trump and Russia were doing together. In 2026, it might get blown open over an alleged lie about a weather report. The collusion is real.”

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AN 10 26

On Thursday, an insider from President Donald Trump’s first administration laid bare the true level of danger posed by the Reflecting Pool renovation debacle. While it became something of a joke, according to Miles Taylor – who served as Homeland Security’s Deputy Chief of Staff, leaked White House secrets, and himself became targeted for revenge – the affair proves how far Trump and his collaborators in the Department of Justice are willing to go to use prosecution as a means of “retaliation.”

“As you may remember,” writes Taylor, “former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was detained by National Guardsmen at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, indicted on a felony carrying ten years in prison, and publicly branded a vandal by the Secretary of the Interior. The pool liner he touched was already peeling (as Interior’s own engineers had flagged eight days earlier), a consequence of Trump’s rushed and botched makeover of the National Mall ahead of America’s 250th celebrations. Prosecutors already knew about the renovation errors. Yet they indicted Hearn anyway.”

Ultimately, the case blew up in humiliating fashion when U.S. Attorney and longtime Trump ally Jeanine Pirro was forced to admit the whole thing was baseless. Trump raged that she “choked” and pushed for the DOJ to keep up the prosecution, but finally, the charade ended last week when a federal judge dismissed the charges “with prejudice,” meaning the government could never try again. Now, Hearn’s lawyers have asked watchdog groups at the DOJ and Interior to investigate how the case came about.

Trump’s efforts to weaponize the DOJ have forced Taylor to do the same, who writes, “After Trump signed an executive order falsely accusing me of stealing classified information and committing treason, he stripped my security clearance and ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Attorney General to investigate me. The order identified no wrongdoing. It didn’t need to.

The offense was that I had publicly revealed the depths of his incompetence and corruption. That June, my lawyer Abbe Lowell filed a formal complaint with the inspectors general of DOJ and DHS. We asked a simple question: are your departments being used to punish dissent, and are your employees aware they’ve been directed to violate the constitutional rights of an American citizen in the process? The answer was already visible. People I went to high school with were getting calls from federal agents. Multiple U.S. government employees whom I was friends with were fired for mere association. I was told they were already digging through my emails. Sixteen months later, I’m still waiting for a serious answer.”

As Taylor notes, he and Hearn are far from the only targets of Trump’s prosecutorial revenge. In cases regarding former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and more, career lawyers working for the government “were pushed out for refusing to sign onto bogus cases, and the ones who stayed came under grave pressure to bring charges against the president’s enemies, whether or not they had evidence.” Those who collaborated with the administration’s schemes did so knowing they were using bad evidence, asserts Taylor, writing, “The officials who executed the order against me knew that a president isn’t allowed to declare someone guilty of a crime and then have them investigated in order to find some kind of evidence. These were all lawyers who swore an oath to the Constitution and were bound by professional rules that forbid exactly this. They made a choice, and they made it knowing the law was on the other side.”

With all this in mind, Taylor argues that the country should look to the slogan Trump used in 2019 during the probe into his possible collusion with Russia: “Investigate the investigators.” As Taylor concludes, “The process of accountability starts with the inspectors general, even the ones Trump installed after firing seventeen of their predecessors in his first week. These letters create a real-time record of misconduct — opening lines in eventual investigations into how Trump’s prosecutors were directed to bring fake charges against people as a means of retaliation. But it can’t end there. Every prosecutor who signed an indictment they knew they couldn’t prove should face disbarment or prosecution. Every official who retaliated against a citizen for protected speech should end up in a courtroom. And the next Justice Department should reopen every one of these cases… and turn the focus on the investigators themselves."

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AN 9 26

Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm against a piece of tech he thinks his ex-boss is trying to use to block voters from the polls.

According a column on his Substack for the group DEFIANCE.org, Taylor said that an immigration-verification tool called SAVE would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections, which are traditionally run by states and local governments. SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.

One of the key reasons that the American elections are so difficult to hack is how decentralized they are. Each state has its own election rules, and each county has its own process. So there are thousands of different variables. A foreign adversary that breaches one system can only impact that specific jurisdiction. But if Trump creates a centralized federal database, it would be a massive change that could be hacked all in one place. Taylor called it a kind of "Master Switch" that a foreign adversary could flip to decide that millions of people are suddenly ineligible to vote.

"Former homeland security officials like myself have watched in slow-motion horror as the administration moves to hand control of American elections to a tiny DHS office (partially run by contractors) that receives the least congressional oversight and scrutiny of almost any corner of the department," wrote Taylor.

What makes SAVE different is that it's already a program being implemented under DHS for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). That office operates independently of Congress because it is funded by immigration application fees rather than congressional appropriations.

"In my experience, offices like that behaved like fiefdoms, because functionally they were, i.e. they were self-funding, self-directing, and accustomed to minimal scrutiny. That also means they’re places where it’s especially tough to shine a light," Taylor warned.

SAVE wasn't built to handle elections, though. The aim was to stop benefits fraud.

An example he cited comes from Missouri, which used SAVE's database to make allegations about "noncitizen voters" before it ever actually verified them. Local clerks were told to flag them as temporarily unable to vote.

"In hundreds of cases the tool was simply wrong, and in one county more than half of those flagged as noncitizens proved to be U.S. citizens. In another case, Texas flagged 2,724 voters as suspicious based on SAVE data and began demanding proof of citizenship, only to discover some of those removed already had proof on file with the state, which ordered them reinstated," Taylor revealed.

He said that it's clearly disenfranchising voters. Already seven states have run roughly 35 million voters through the system and flagged 4,200 people. That's 0.01 percent of voters. Those haven't even been verified for accuracy. Now Trump wants to deploy it across the U.S. to decide whether people get to vote.

He recalled during his time at DHS that they had been doing a deep dive into what Russia did to the U.S. during the 2016 election and noted that experts are still trying to map out everything ten years later.

"In its comprehensive review, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russian actors targeted election systems in all fifty states; in one, Illinois, they evidently penetrated the voter database and were 'in a position to delete or change voter data.' So why weren’t they able to manipulate the election outcome? Well, one reason is that there wasn’t some central nervous system for them to attack. Our elections are scattered across those all of those fifty states and thousands of counties, on different systems built by different vendors. So breaking into Illinois only got them as far as Illinois," he said.

Under Trump's new system, "a savvy hacker" or a group of hacktivists like "Anonymous" could easily access whether an entire party or demographic could be blocked from the polls.

Finally, he warns that centralizing voter eligibility would also give whoever controls the White House a lot of influence at a time when Americans already don't trust the executive branch.

He championed the states refusing to turn over voter-roll data, noting that they are protecting election security, not undermining it.

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an 8 26

With the midterms right around the corner and President Donald Trump relentlessly pressing his conspiracies about voter fraud, an insider and whistleblower from his first term has revealed that his “tin-foil hat” plan to “interfere in the democratic process” is underway. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration and exposed a number of its secrets. On Wednesday, he sounded the alarm that a plot Trump began nearly a decade ago is coming to its most dangerous phase.

Over the course of the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are “no plans” to do so without ruling it out. But “evidently,” writes Taylor, “all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”

Taylor is referencing new bombshell reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday, writes Taylor, “that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.” Despite the fact that they are being intentionally obscure about this, says Taylor, “the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for ‘illegal’ registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.”

It’s all part of a wider effort, asserts Taylor, to convert “the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build ‘approved’ lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.”

All of this began under Trump’s first term, according to Taylor, who writes, “I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.”

He notes that thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president “seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot.” For example, “the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of ‘noncitizen voters.’ But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185, then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.”

According to Taylor, “Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”

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an 8 26

Before Miles Taylor became an outspoken Never Trump conservative, he was a high-ranking official in President Donald Trump's first administration — where he served as chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Taylor, in an article for the UK-based i Paper, remembers Trump describing his core philosophy on dealing with others. And that mindset, Taylor warns, is leading to "one catastrophe after another" during Trump's second presidency.

"One spring afternoon in 2019," Taylor recalls in his i Paper article, "I sat on a couch in the Oval Office as Donald Trump raged about the southern border and demanded we seal it entirely. His son-in-law Jared Kushner gently explained that closing a port of entry wouldn't stop migrant crossings — people would simply go around it — and that the only real casualties would be American businesses. 'Jared, I don't care,' the U.S. president snapped. 'That's not the point! The point is, it will make Mexico hurt.'"

The ex-Trump official continues, "Trump has a theory about leverage. His leadership philosophy — in a nutshell — is that threats are worthless and that you must damage someone else first if you want to get them to come to the negotiating table. Whether the damage accomplishes anything is irrelevant. Whether the target is an enemy or a neighbor is irrelevant. The pain is the point."

Trump, Taylor warns, "has brought all of the aggression of a hothead negotiator onto the world stage, secured nothing, and put the costs onto billions of innocent people while doing irreparable damage to his own side."

Trump's "philosophy" of "leverage," according to Taylor, is creating problems worldwide — from threatening longtime ally Canada with steep tariffs to going to war against Iran.

"Trump's settlement logic assumes his opponents have no alternatives," the former DHS chief of staff explains. "Once again, perhaps that was the case when he was building casinos. But countries do have alternatives…. Trump once explained to me and several other aides sitting in the Oval Office the lesson that he said had made him rich. In fact, he said it was the most important lesson he'd learned in business. 'When you threaten to sue somebody, they don't do anything,' he told us. 'They say: Pshhhh!' He waved a hand in the air, dismissively. 'And they keep doing what they want. But when you sue them, they go Ooooh, and they settle. It's as easy as that.'"

Taylor continues, "Maybe it worked in the real estate business. But right now, in U.S. foreign policy, the approach is leading to one catastrophe after another."

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an 8 26

While President Donald Trump claims he’s been waging a war against fraud, one of his former officials asserts that the White House-led anti-fraud task force is really a “ruse to prosecute political foes.” This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and at the time penned an anonymous article exposing the dysfunctional inner workings of the administration.

As Taylor wrote on Thursday, according to reports from the New York Times and other outlets, the Trump administration has been leveling claims of fraud against targets ranging from immigrant-owned ice cream trucks to Democratic governors. “The goal was not to take down serious criminals,” argues Taylor. “It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he’s reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they’re governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.”

YES I AM CROOKED BUT SO ARE THEY THEM ENEMY

Taylor says there is a clear giveaway to the president’s intentions, writing, “As DOJ is building these types of cases, it’s simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump’s own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations. So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply.”

Trump’s actions in Minnesota, says Taylor, offer a clear example. As he writes, “Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024. Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn’t need gun-toting agents. While Trump was forced into retreat, his team first tried to coerce state leaders to forfeit their voter rolls, which critics pointed out had precisely nothing to do with the original fraud claims. Of course it didn’t; from the start, the whole exercise was about political leverage.”

“To understand what Trump’s task force is actually meant for,” says Taylor, “just look at how it’s being managed. The DOJ’s new fraud division doesn’t report to some expert in criminal investigations. It reports directly to Vice President JD Vance, an arrangement without precedent, especially since it effectively circumvents the Attorney General himself…In June, he personally made the criminal referral against Walz. Asked where the ‘war on fraud’ goes next, Vance answered: California. (Surely it’s just a coincidence that they’re going after the blue state led by the man Trump most fears will try to succeed him.)”

Taylor notes other examples, such as charges of mortgage fraud leveled against New York Attorney General Letitia James — who had previously won a nine-figure civil fraud case against Trump — Senator Adam Schiff (D-NY), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. According to Taylor, “‘Fraud’ has become the administration’s codeword for ‘revenge.’ The term is a respectable-sounding wrapper for criminalizing the political opposition. And now that Trump’s team has systematized the plan with a task force — making the issue a top priority for all U.S. attorneys in the country — we will see more and more cases brought, like the recent cases against left-leaning nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The reality, asserts Taylor, is that Trump’s White House is rampant with fraud, the scale of which will be exposed by a future Democratic administration. While Trump and his allies will attempt to conceal their crimes, “They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens. That’s when the real fraud trials will begin.”

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AN 8 26

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly upended U.S. foreign policy over the course of his second term, a whistleblower from his first administration warns that over the past few days, the commander-in-chief may have “sold us out to our enemies” once and for all. This is according to Miles Taylor, who during Trump’s first term served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and famously revealed the existence of a resistance group within the administration. “The president,” wrote Taylor on Monday, “is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.”

“Start with Korea,” said Taylor. “On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is ‘inappropriate and hostile’ to our friends in North Korea, which he called ‘unthreatening and respectful.’ Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so ‘unthreatening’ that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so ‘respectful.’ By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.”

“Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific,” wrote Taylor. “This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a ‘grand bargain.'"

Instead of opposing China, warns Taylor, “his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire.”

“Finally,” says Taylor, “take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack.”

“Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening,” Taylor predicts. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.”

With all this in mind, Taylor arrives at a grim conclusion, writing, “Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.”

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an 8 26

Trump has already said that he is considering seizing ballot boxes during the 2026 midterm elections, most recently during a radio appearance with far right host Wayne Allyn Root. Even though his attempts to gain access to state voter rolls have overwhelmingly lost in court, there are still concerns that his efforts could spread chaos and sow doubt as to the legitimacy of the results if Democrats win key races.

Now a former Trump official is getting into specifics about exactly what Trump plans on doing — and who should be worried.

“If you overlay the refusers (the states that declined to hand over their voter rolls to Trump’s DOJ) with this fall’s top battleground races, then thirteen light up as high risk: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin,” wrote former Trump Homeland Security adviser Miles Taylor on Tuesday. “These states are home to some of the most important House and Senate toss-up races. Depending on how the results look after Election Day, the Fulton scheme could hypothetically be carried out in any of them.”

He added, “These thirteen are the likeliest targets, but they aren’t the only states at risk. There are battleground states that actually cooperated with the DOJ’s voter roll demands — including Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Nebraska, and North Carolina — that could be hit, too. Here the pretext would simply be flipped around: We ran the voter lists they gave us, and we found anomalies. So we have to go investigate.”

Even though Trump’s ballot box seizures are unlikely to hold up in court, Taylor added, he could still tamper with the results. Similarly, all it takes is a single magistrate judge to grant Trump access to the boxes in the first place, which is enough to create distrust in the result.

“In the end, Trump’s team doesn’t care about losing in court,” Taylor wrote. “All they care about is fighting the battle in the court of public opinion for two months — between the election on November 3, 2026, and January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is supposed to be seated. That’s long enough to diminish confidence in the results and to create enough justification for Speaker Mike Johnson to secure support from his caucus not to hand over power. Indeed, under the law, the House majority has the final say over who gets seated in the chamber.”

Taylor offered specific suggestions as to what advocates of democracy can do to stop this from happening.

“Attorneys general should consider sending public letters to the chief judges of every federal district in their states putting them on alert,” Taylor said. “The letters should ask that any warrant application having to do with ballots or election equipment be heavily scrutinized and challenged, or elevated to a district judge. These frontline judges are the last check before the FBI trucks roll in, and after what happened in Fulton County, all of them need to know that they might be served bogus claims from the FBI for seizing America’s votes.”

He added, “In the meantime, every at-risk state must have their emergency motions pre-drafted and ready to file within hours (fortunately, many already do). Secretaries of state should harden the chain of custody for ballots so an FBI seizure can’t feed on ambiguity. Local prosecutors must know their election-interference statutes front and back and be ready to prosecute lawbreaking feds (at DEFIANCE.org, we’ve helped many of them gear up to do precisely that). Finally, states should keep coordinating as a bloc, pre-bunking the ‘uncertainty’ narrative before the Trump administration decides which races it wants to contest.”

Speaking to AlterNet about this issue, Rutgers University political scientist Saladin Ambar — who specializes in the history of race in America — elucidated how the president is likely to play on racist sentiments to validate his actions with the public.

“Without any involvement of, or connection to race, Trump, I think, because of his ego, his obsessive will to power, is more than capable of finding other rationales and/or building blocks to make a ‘case for a national emergency’ to call off or delay the midterm,” Ambar told AlterNet.

He added, “What I will say is that going back, frankly, to our Declaration of Independence, which accused King George of fomenting insurrection and by that [Thomas] Jefferson was alluding to British support for some African Americans who were obviously enslaved to join the rebellion and to take up arms against the colonies at the time, going all the way back to the Declaration, presidents have and/or statesmen in America have used the fear of black uprisings, racial uprisings, riots and so forth as a pretext for declaring states of emergency for engaging in all kinds of unconstitutional acts, perhaps the greatest in the last 100 years being [Franklin Roosevelt's] removal of Japanese Americans to imprisonment camps.”

Speaking to AlterNet in June, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the nonprofit Common Cause Dan Vicuña provided more detail about the various ways Trump could steal the midterms.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña explained to AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

AN 8 26

A prominent former official is sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump's increasingly tyrannical tendencies, writing for The i Paper that he has now succeeded in corrupting the two offices above all that are tasked with telling him "no."

Miles Taylor previously worked as a staffer in Trump's first administration, eventually rising to the office of chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security. His tenure was most notable, however, for an anonymous op-ed he published in the New York Times, exposing the abuses and excesses that he was witnessing behind the scenes. Since departing in 2029, he has emerged as a vocal conservative critic of Trump and his MAGA agenda.

In his latest piece for The i Paper, published on Tuesday, Taylor sounded the alarm about two recent Trump appointments, which he said represented the corruption of the two offices "more than any others — whose jobs are to tell the president of the United States 'no,'" filling them with yes-men sure to follow his every order.

"The attorney general and the White House counsel," Taylor wrote. "Those jobs exist to keep the president on the right side of the law. This weekend, two men were elevated into America’s top legal jobs after working to build literal monuments to their boss."

He continued: "On Sunday, the President announced that Will Scharf, Trump’s staff secretary and perhaps the chief 'monument man,' will become White House counsel on September 1. Americans know him, if at all, as the man standing over Trump’s shoulder in the Oval Office, narrating executive orders as the President signs them. He also chairs the National Capital Planning Commission, which oversees federal construction in the capital, a role in which he has become Trump’s personal builder. He fast-tracked the White House ballroom. He expedited review of the President’s planned triumphal arch — a 250ft 'Arc de Trump' — and personally argued it should be exempt from the century-old law capping Washington’s buildings at 130ft. Approve the arch, and the leader makes you his lawyer."

The other concerning development was the appointment of Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal attorney, as Attorney General, replacing "the last attorney general was fired for not weaponizing the Justice Department fast enough."

"Blanche is a 'monument man,' too, which is evidently a requirement for elevation," Taylor added. "When preservationists sued over Trump’s demolition of the East Wing (which he tore down to construct a 90,000 sq ft ballroom dedicated to himself), Blanche took on the case. He argued in court filings that construction must resume, portraying the President’s party palace as a matter of national security urgency."

He concluded later: "I can tell you how important these two legal jobs actually are. When I served in the first term, the lawyers willing to say 'no' were the last line of defense. The president would demand something illegal... It was a wall that held — barely — a hundred times over. Trump remembers that wall as vividly as I do. He spent his four years out of power studying where it stood and who manned it. This weekend, he finished solving the problem. The next time he goes hunting for a lawyer with an answer he likes, he won’t have to look very far. The two men who should’ve been whispering 'no' into the President’s ear got his attention by whispering 'yes, sir.' Now they’re seated at his right hand."

--=-=-=

OMFG

AN 7 26

Over the course of his war with Iran, President Donald Trump has made inflammatory remarks that many have suggested implied his intention to use nuclear weapons. Now a whistleblower from his first term warns that he “watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys,” and that “he may be closer to playing with them than you think.”

This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of National Security during Trump’s first administration, at the time famously penning an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance movement working within the White House. On Monday, he published a new piece explaining why Trump has a “fixation” with using nuclear weapons.

“Last week,” writes Taylor, “the president told Axios he was ‘close’ to ordering a ‘massive attack’ on Iran … The threat had the same ominous feel of his April comments that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight.’ It was an insinuation that he possessed super powers — and might break the world’s nuclear taboo to end the stalemate.” The pause didn’t mean the war was off, however, and Trump told Axios why he thought the war had to continue: “They haven’t received enough pain yet.”

“Not enough pain,” notes Taylor. “I’ve heard rhetoric like that from him before. And it wasn’t about Iran.”

“Back in 2017,” Taylor explains, “Trump judged that the only way to bring North Korea to heel was to make it suffer. He tweeted furiously at ‘Rocketman’ Kim Jong-un and promised ‘fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before’ if the hermit kingdom didn’t meet his demands. That was Trump’s first wink-nod to the fact that he possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs and was ready to use them. Kim answered by threatening to fire missiles at Guam and testing a nuclear-capable missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.”

Taylor says the situation escalated so rapidly that Defense Secretary James Mattis began preparing DHS officials for an all-out nuclear war. “For the first time in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, we ran exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil, because frankly, we couldn’t rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation.”

According to Taylor, the president’s motivation was simple: “Trump wanted to see something blow up, and the rest of us built contingency plans around that desire. Thankfully, he didn’t launch nukes at North Korea. But General Mattis also isn’t at the Pentagon anymore. ‘Pistol Pete’ Hegseth is.”

Taylor asserts that “Trump’s nuclear fantasies go way back. When he was a candidate in 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said a foreign policy adviser had come away from a briefing with Trump rattled, because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’ Candidate Trump also told The New York Times he wasn’t sure it ‘would be a bad thing for us’ if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea, and he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nukes, too, ‘absolutely.’” And “since then, Trump has toyed with nuclear weapons more openly and more recklessly than any American president ever entrusted with the stewardship of the bomb.”

Now, amid an “unresolved war with Iran,” warns Taylor, “you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.”

Taylor says that Trump’s motivation is not difficult to grasp, writing, “Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list. To say that he’s ‘toying’ with extreme powers is probably the wrong phraseology. He’s addicted to power. Very much like it’s an intoxicant. When his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic that her boss had an ‘alcoholic’s personality,’ it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue. That’s how everyone who’s served the man has come to see him … He has an uncontrollable, pathological, junkie-like urge to power.”

“If deploying troops to seize foreign leaders and raining missiles on other nations isn’t cutting it anymore,” Taylor concludes. “I worry about where the quest leads next. I’ve written before about how close Trump got to using the bomb the first time. Let’s not forget what Trump reportedly absconded with after he left the presidency: U.S. nuclear secrets. Back in office, the fixation has returned.”

X-X-X-

THOM 3 RUBIO NSPM CONF

AN 7 26

Last week, the Trump administration quietly revealed the scheme it will use to label its opponents as domestic terrorists and target the power of government against them. So blatant is the undemocratic nature of their plan that one of President Donald Trump’s closest aides declared that when it is put into action, appeals to civil liberties “must fall on deaf ears.”

This is according to security expert Miles Taylor, who served in the Department of National Security during Trump’s first term and acted as a whistleblower when he shared the existence of a resistance movement within the White House. Taylor asserts that the Trump administration has developed a “workaround to use terror powers against his foes.”

As Taylor explains, “Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered representatives from 66 countries at the State Department for something called the ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.’ Stephen Miller was there to help rally the world against ‘far-left political terrorism.’ The actual purpose was something else. Trump’s team was road-testing its blueprint for using America’s counterterrorism machine against the president’s enemies. And buried in the speeches was the legal trick they’re planning to use.”

To understand the plot, Taylor notes, it is important to keep in mind that “there is no such thing as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ under U.S. law. The government can only designate foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah. When I helped run the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration, those labels allowed us to take powerful action against global adversaries, including asset seizures, sweeping surveillance and prosecutions that could put a group’s supporters away for decades.”

But because there is no legal domestic equivalent, Trump is unable to use these powers against his political opponents at home, so he’s taking steps to circumvent the law. According to Taylor, Trump started by issuing an executive order declaring antifa a “major terrorist organization,” despite the fact that there is no such thing as an antifa organization.

“It’s a fake label,” writes Taylor. “They’re using it to open investigations into groups that don’t like the president. Even still, they cannot use the government’s most sweeping anti-terror powers against these folks. They must find other crimes if they want to bring a prosecution, like money laundering or fraud. Which brings us to the workaround.”

Here Taylor explains the three-step plan Rubio quietly laid out last week:

“ONE, they’ll designate foreign groups and call them ‘antifa.’ Last November, the State Department added four obscure European far-left groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, labeling all of them ‘antifa.’ Almost nobody reported this tiny detail: only one of the four — a German outfit called Antifa Ost — even identifies with the antifa movement. There’s no clear evidence linking any of them to activists in the United States. That didn’t matter. The point wasn’t the groups. The point was getting the word ‘antifa’ onto the FTO list. And Rubio promised this past Thursday that ‘more designations’ are coming.”

“TWO, they’ll declare it one big transnational network. This is what the ministerial was really for. Rubio told the assembled diplomats that today’s far-left militants ‘coordinate,’ ‘communicate,’ and ‘act together’ across borders and that they can ‘raise money in one country,’ train in another and strike in a third. Miller claimed antifa factions worldwide draw from ‘common networks of funding, organization and information sharing.’ Notice what’s happening. They’re constructing a factual predicate that American activists are connected to the foreign groups they just designated.”

“THREE, they’ll use ‘material support’ as the bridge to go after American citizens. Under federal law, knowingly providing ‘material support’ to a designated FTO is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. And material support is defined in breathtakingly broad terms. It can be money, ‘services,’ ‘training,’ ‘advice or assistance' or ‘personnel.’ Critics of the statute have warned that even sharing a Wikipedia link with a designated group could qualify.”

According to Taylor, “once the government claims a left-wing nonprofit or a protest network is somehow providing ‘material support’ to a foreign terror movement, the entire post-9/11 arsenal unlocks. That means it’s easier for them to activate spy powers meant to monitor al-Qaeda; freeze bank accounts; seize assets; add individuals to terror watchlists; track financial transactions and more. They don’t have to commit violence. They just have to be linked (by the government’s own say-so) to a network the government itself defined. That’s the workaround.”

AN 7 26

President Donald Trump is preparing to release classified intelligence documents he claims will reveal “irregularities” in American elections address during the election he lost in 2020. But Trump’s former intelligence analyst Miles Taylor says it’s all going to be bunk. And Taylor should know — he helped scoop it.

“I know what’s in that well of information [Trump’s] drawing from, because I helped dig it. During Donald Trump’s first term, I worked on election protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), helping to stand up the administration’s response to historic Russian interference in 2016. We built an entire, government-wide response system — intelligence analysts, cyber defenders, and law enforcement agents — who were full-time focused on stopping any such attack from happening again,” Taylor said on his Defiance website. “And I can tell you now, before Trump says a single word, he’s full of s——.”

“Pardon my language. But I’m virtually certain that whatever he presents on Thursday, it will be twice-warmed leftovers of information, cherry-picked and recast to tell a story our intelligence agencies never told because it was never true,” added Taylor. “

What actually happened in 2020 when it came to foreign interference, said Taylor was that America’s adversaries did try to meddle in U.S. elections during Trump’s first term and his his re-election. This included Russia, Iran, and China. Taylor says “we knew it, we tracked it, and the U.S. government declassified much of that information years ago.” But Trump’s agencies were unanimous on the crucial point that none of that tampering changed votes in either 2018 or 2020.

Trump’s own cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history,” putting him in the way of Trump’s Big Lie that someone stole victory from Trump. For that, Taylor said Trump fired him by tweet.

“Trump never wanted election security,” said Taylor. “He wanted selective election security.”

In 2018, ahead of the midterms, Taylor and his co-workers briefed Trump on the fact that multiple countries were planned to interfere, but Trump was only uninterested in exposing any country that wanted to interfere in ways that would help Democrats, specifically China.

“And wouldn’t you know it — that September, Trump stood before the UN General Assembly and delivered sweeping warnings about Chinese interference. Yet he said next to nothing about Russia, the country that had actually run a sophisticated operation to help him in 2016 and was gearing up to do it again,” said Taylor.

“We were gobsmacked. So were Members of Congress briefed on the same intelligence. … Inside the national security community, the conclusion was as obvious as it was appalling. Trump welcomed foreign interference when it helped him and opposed it when the threat actors seemed eager to hurt his chances.”

So when Trump resurrects old news about Chinese meddling Thursday and “inflates them into proof” that 2020 was stolen from him, Taylor said remember that he’s only recycling intelligence he cherry-picked for political convenience eight years ago.

“If this evidence were real, Trump himself had the power to declassify all of it before leaving office in January 2021,” said Taylor. “He didn’t … because it doesn’t say what he’ll claim it says … and proof doesn’t exist.”

Meanwhile, Taylor said Trump has installed loyalists over the DNI, DOJ, and FBI, and his crew is mounting a “whole-of-government campaign to sow doubt about the vote that it fears it will lose.”

NOTE SLIDE TO PRESS SUPPRESS LEAK BS

AN 5 26

In 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for a federal investigation of a conservative who served in his first administration: former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chief of Staff Miles Taylor. Taylor discusses Trump's actions against him in an article for the UK-based i Paper, emphasizing that the president's executive order became a blueprint for his efforts to use the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) against political foes.

Trump accused Taylor of "treason" — a claim that many legal experts and constitutional scholars attacked as ludicrous. Taylor was still serving in the first Trump Administration when, on September 5, 2018, the New York Times published his anonymous op-ed, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." Trump was furious when Taylor later came out as the op-ed's author.

"A year ago," Taylor explains in the i Paper, "Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to investigate me for 'treason.' It was the first time in 250 years of American history that a president had signed such an order to open a specific inquiry into a specific critic. The crime? I quit his first administration and exposed the misconduct I witnessed. And I haven't shut up about it since. He came back into office determined to make an example. But it didn’t stop there."

Taylor continues, "As I later found out, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi used Trump's order against me as the flimsy justification to strip away longstanding protections for reporters."

Taylor argues that the "treason" probe of him has broad implications for U.S. democracy and free speech in general.

"Of course, the Trump Administration has made it sound like this is about stopping leaks of classified information," Taylor writes. "Unfortunately for Trump, criticism of a president is not 'classified,' no matter how badly he wants it to be. Trump's logic is obvious. He doesn't want dissent amplified, and certainly not the most damaging kind — from insiders who have seen his impulsiveness and corruption up close."

The former DHS official continues, "So, they're using mob-like tactics to scare news outlets and the sources who they rely on to expose what's really happening around the president…. Last year, the president's aides told Rolling Stone he was coming after me to 'send a message.' He certainly has, though it's gone far beyond me. He's out to make an example of people everywhere who say what he doesn't want them to say. If the U.S. president wants to conflate free speech with 'treason,' then we should proudly wear the label of traitors."

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an 2 26

President Donald Trump, in what appeared to be an attempt to pressure two major cable news networks, warned against booking two prominent former officials from his first administration.

Trump targeted CNN and MS NOW — formerly MSNBC, which he called “MSDNC” — while denouncing attorney Ty Cobb, a former member of the White House legal team who reported directly to the president, and former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor.

The president called Cobb “one of the Worst Lawyers in Washington, D.C.,” and a “WHACKJOB, who I hardly knew,” and said Taylor is “another major Loser … who I have no idea who he is.”

He charged that both “make livings talking about me like they know me well.”

“So, when you watch these two guys on Television, which, fortunately, doesn’t happen often because there’s very little audience at either CNN or MSDNC,” he wrote, “remember, they know nothing about me — Just two DOPES trying to make a ‘buck’ by pretending to know something about someone who turned out to be very famous.”

Trump already was the president when they served in his administration.

“These two Networks are forewarned not to put them on the air again, because they have no knowledge or credibility with respect to anything have [sic] to do with DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Discover moreDiversity inclusion trainingRepublican Party newsLGBTQ rights updates

Last month, Cobb “claimed President Trump is experiencing a ‘significant decline’ in his mental faculties,” according to The Hill.

“I think the dementia and the cognitive decline are, you know, palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians,” Cobb said.

Trump’s social media post came just about the same time that he or someone with access to his social media account deleted what many, including several prominent Republicans, denounced as a racist meme that depicted former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

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an 1 26

Former Trump Department of Homeland Security he is furious that ‘wannabe school shooters’ in high positions in the administration of President Donald Trump are hijacking government social media and demeaning “decent” employees who work for the federal government.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that high-ranking Trump officials have posted on social media references to “neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies.” They’ve also “mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys,” according to the Times.

“I'm sitting here kind of on the edge of my seat because just hearing you go through that really pisses me off, because there's a lot of good people that work in [government] and want to do the right thing, and they have been by these people who sound a lot more like wannabe school shooters than they do public servants.”

“You look at the rhetoric out of people who [President] Donald Trump has appointed in his second term,” Taylor told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace. “You see folks who'veoffered praise for Adolf Hitler. You've seen folks who've said they're ‘a little bit of a nazi’ and who've been kept inside this administration, people who have been kept in jobs carrying out the work of the American people. I don't think as taxpayers, we want to fund wannabe nazis to run these agencies.”

Davis said this was no longer a matter of one or two embarrassing individuals fouling the water for the rest of employees.

“This isn't some coincidence,” said Davis. “You cannot possibly be a Republican and say, ‘this is just a couple of bad apples.’ This is a whole tree. The whole tree is rotten from the core, all the way out to every single one of those branches. And that tone is being set by the top. It starts with Donald Trump saying Somalis are garbage and then sending 3,000 troops into that state.”

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AN 5 25

During President Donald Trump’s first three months in office, his administration has targeted dozens of former officials who criticized him or opposed his agenda.

In April 2025, Trump directed the Department of Justice to investigate two men who served in his first administration, Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, because they spoke out against his policies and corrected his false claims about the 2020 election that he lost.

Further, Trump revoked the security clearances for advisers and retired generals who publicly criticized him during the 2024 election campaign.

On their face, such moves appear to be a coordinated campaign of personal retribution. But as political science scholars who study the origins of elected strongmen, we believe Trump’s use of the Justice Department to attack former officials who stood up to him isn’t just about revenge. It also deters current officials from defying Trump.

More than revenge

Like all presidents, Trump needs allies who will faithfully implement his policy agenda. For most presidents, this means surrounding themselves with longtime friends.

For example, Don Evans, George W. Bush’s commerce secretary and close confidant, worked with Bush for decades before becoming a fixture in his White House.

But to carry out a power grab, incumbent leaders also need allies who will stay silent or, better yet, endorse their attempts to consolidate control.

In El Salvador, for example, President Nayib Bukele’s legislative allies gave him free rein in 2023 to run for president a second time despite constitutional provisions banning reelection.

Recall that Trump only left office in January 2021 because key Republican officials defied his attempts to overturn an election he lost.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, facing violent threats from a Trump-fueled mob, refused Trump’s request to overturn the election he lost. And Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused Trump’s entreaties to stuff the ballot boxes in Georgia with another 11,000 votes for Trump.Images

Notably, both men first won political office on their own, without an endorsement from Trump. This means they were less reliant on Trump for access to political power. Therefore, they were more likely to prioritize their loyalty to the Constitution over their loyalty to Trump.

Attacks enforce loyalty

In authoritarian contexts, loyalty is not an intrinsic quality. Authoritarian leaders do not necessarily select those with whom they have long work experience that leads to mutual trust.

For instance, during Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, the head of intelligence, Johnny Abbes, was plucked from obscurity in Mexico and in 1958 began to lead the dictator’s repression machine.

Instead, the challenge for authoritarian leaders is finding people to do their bidding. And the best people for this job are those who never would have earned their position in politics without the leader’s influence.

Unqualified appointees who can’t ascend to political power based on their merits have little choice but to stick with the leader. These people appear loyal, but only because their careers are tied to the leader staying in power.

A litany of failed politicians

This logic, where people with few career prospects outside of the leader express the most loyalty, explains why Trump has appointed a number of political candidates who have lost elections.

The head of the Small Business Administration, Kelly Loeffler, though briefly appointed as a U.S. senator from Georgia, lost her first Senate election to Raphael Warnock in 2021.

Doug Collins, Trump’s secretary of Veterans Affairs, lost to Loeffler in a Georgia Senate primary during the same election cycle.

Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, lost a 2016 primary contest for a congressional seat in a heavily Republican district in Florida.

And don’t forget Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s nominee to head a politically crucial federal judicial office. Her political career derailed 20 years ago when she came under federal investigation for “scheming to catch a cheating spouse in the act.” She lost an attorney general race in New York in 2006 to Andrew Cuomo.

Trump also picked two politicians who had failed presidential runs as Democrats – Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – to act as director of national intelligence and secretary of Health and Human Services.

For appointees who can’t win elections, the only shot at power is steadfast alignment with the leader. This dynamic, in turn, provides a strong incentive for these officials to remain loyal, even when the leader breaks the law or orders them to do the same.

When leaders place loyalists in charge of federal law enforcement, attempts to conjure votes for the president out of thin air or to seize ballot boxes in opposition districts are more likely to succeed.

The Trump administration’s attacks on former Republican officials who criticized him, such as Taylor and Krebs, reinforces this dynamic. It sends a signal of future punishment to current Justice Department officials should they speak out against Trump or refuse to carry out illegal orders.

Attacks also target opposition power

Of course, the Trump administration’s political attacks haven’t stopped with officials in his previous administration who have fallen out of favor.

They have expanded to include independent institutions such as universities, not-for-profit media and law firms.

As research on authoritarian regimes shows, the goal of attacking independent institutions this way is to sap their capacity to resist the incumbent government’s attempts to cheat in future elections.

After Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, had rewritten his country’s Constitution and reined in the courts, he changed the electoral rules to ensure he won reelection in 2022. Along the way, Orban forced an entire university into exile after failing to subdue it.

In these ways, incumbents’ acts of retribution toward people and organizations that oppose their agenda reinforce loyalty among their allies. They also undermine and weaken their opponents and ultimately facilitate incumbents’ efforts to consolidate power.

Joe Wright, Professor of Political Science, Penn State and Erica Frantz, Associate Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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no lnx

Is this the moment American democracy finally broke?

Thom Hartmann April 11, 2025

The highest form of freedom in a democracy isn’t just the right to vote or protest — it’s the right to speak truth to power. To call out corruption. To challenge lies. To stand firm when the powerful demand silence. This is the freedom that sustains all others.

And it’s the one Donald Trump tried to crush yesterday with the stroke of a pen.

When he signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor — two public servants whose only crime was telling the truth — Trump didn’t just abuse his office. He weaponized the government against honesty itself.

This wasn’t law enforcement: It was political vengeance. This wasn’t democracy: It was a warning shot from the edge of autocracy.

And if we let this slide — if we treat it as just another Trump headline — we are inviting the next strongman to do the same, only worse.

The freedom to speak truth to power is either sacred, or it’s gone.

Thus, Donald Trump just moved America miles down the road toward our becoming a police state. There’s no other way to describe it.

His Executive Order (EO) signed yesterday demanding criminal investigations into Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor — and his public statement that Taylor is a “traitor” guilty of “treason” — are nothing short of a blatant assault on the rule of law and a perilous step toward turning America into a dictatorship.

This isn't just about settling personal scores; it's a calculated move to instill fear, silence dissent, and dismantle the very foundations of our democratic institutions.

Can you imagine yourself being called a traitor by the president of the United States and thus facing prison? Having to hire expensive attorneys that may well force you to sell your home to pay for, just to defend yourself? Not to mention having to protect yourself and your family from the rightwing enforcers who are probably at this moment doxxing and threatening Krebs and Taylor?

This echoes tactics used by autocrats throughout history: Stalin’s purges, Nixon’s enemies list (though less successfully executed), and more recently, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, or Putin in Russia. If normalized, it risks further turning the U.S. into an illiberal democracy or autocracy, where elections occur but power is retained through fear, manipulation, and coercion. Or worse, a violent kleptocracy like Russia.

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), had the audacity to do his job by ensuring the integrity of our elections and debunking Trump’s baseless lies of fraud in the 2020 election. Miles Taylor, who served as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, dared to speak out against the administration's reckless policies and wrote a book.

Their “crime”? Upholding their oaths to the Constitution and telling the truth.

By weaponizing the Department of Justice to pursue these individuals, Trump is not only abusing presidential power but also sending a chilling message to current and future whistleblowers: “Cross me, and you’ll pay.” This is the hallmark of a despot, not a democratically elected leader.

But Trump isn’t stopping there. He’s extending his vendetta to the very institutions that safeguard our legal system and might defend Taylor and Krebs.

Law firms like Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block are being targeted with punitive measures — revoked security clearances, terminated federal contracts, and restricted access to federal buildings including courthouses — all because they’ve had the courage to represent clients like these two who have challenged Trump’s overreaches.

In addition to signing an executive order targeting two former employees yesterday, Trump also signed one attacking yet another law firm, this time Susman Godfrey, which helped Dominion Voting Systems get millions from Fox for their 2020 election lies.

This is a direct attack on the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to legal representation. When the government intimidates law firms into submission, it erodes the adversarial system that is essential for justice.

The implications are dire. If attorneys fear retribution for taking on cases that oppose the administration, who will hold the government accountable? Who will defend people like Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor?

This orchestrated campaign of intimidation is designed to create a chilling effect, deterring legal professionals from defending those who dare to speak truth to power.

This EO is a tactic ripped straight from the playbook of violent, authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, Erdoğan’s, and Orbán’s, where the law becomes a tool of oppression rather than justice.

Moreover, this politicization of the Department of Justice undermines its very mission. The DOJ is meant to operate independently, free from political influence, to uphold the law impartially.

Yet, under Trump’s directive, it is being transformed before our eyes into his personal enforcer, pursuing baseless investigations to settle political scores in ways Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. This perversion of justice not only delegitimizes the department but also erodes public trust in our legal institutions.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t just about Krebs, Taylor, or the targeted law firms: It’s about the survival of our democracy. When a president can wield power to punish dissent and dismantle checks and balances without consequence, we are treading dangerous waters.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Trump’s actions are a direct assault on these freedoms, aiming to silence opposition and consolidate power.

The legal community is beginning to push back. Over 500 law firms have united to challenge these types of executive orders, recognizing them as a grave threat to our constitutional governance. Former top lawyers from major corporations have also voiced their opposition, understanding that this isn’t just a legal issue but a fundamental attack on the principles that underpin our society.

However, resistance must extend beyond the legal profession: we all must speak out. Every American who values democracy, justice, and freedom should be alarmed by these developments.

This is a moment that demands vigilance and action. We cannot afford to be complacent as the pillars of our democracy are systematically dismantled. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121, and another set of demonstrations are scheduled for a week from this coming Saturday, April 19th.

If there was ever any doubt, Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are now laid bare. His actions are not those of a leader who respects the Constitution or the people he serves: They are the actions of a man desperate to exploit and cling to power by any means necessary, even if it means destroying the very fabric of our nation.

This executive order is more than just a scandal — it’s a frontal assault on democracy. It shows Trump’s willingness to use the machinery of state as a weapon against truth and accountability, and underscores the urgent need to safeguard democratic institutions, enforce accountability, and reaffirm the independence of the rule of law in America.

If we fail to hold Trump accountable for turning the justice system into a tool of revenge, we are not just rewriting the rules — we're erasing them.

Democracy doesn’t “die in darkness.” It dies when truth becomes a crime and silence becomes survival. The time to speak up is now—while we still can.

NOW READ: The sickening secret sauce to Trump's political success

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an 4 25

Attorney General Pam Bondi just made a significant escalation in the feud between President Donald Trump's administration and the federal judiciary — and she's hoping to enlist the Supreme Court to the White House's side.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Bondi made it clear she didn't appreciate having to abide by a lower court order in a memorandum sent to various heads of federal agencies. The memo was written as part of an order from U.S. District Judge John D. Bates (an appointee of former President George W. Bush) instructing Bondi and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to tell agencies they were prohibited from implementing parts of an executive order Trump handed down targeting the law firm Jenner & Block.

In Trump's initial executive order, he prohibited the firm's attorneys from entering government buildings (a virtual impossibility for lawyers who practice in Washington D.C.), stripped attorneys of security clearances and imposed various other sanctions. The Janner & Block executive order is part of a pattern of other related orders explicitly targeting law firms that worked for Trump's political opponents.

READ MORE:'The gun was at his head': Here's why Trump really 'capitulated' to market pressure

The attorney general didn't mince words for the "unelected" judge who authored the decision, which she said "invaded the policy-making and free speech prerogatives of the executive branch." She also notably expressed hope that the Supreme Court would step in and explicitly allow the administration to sidestep lower courts.

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"Local district judges lack this authority, and the Supreme Court should swiftly constrain these judges’ blatant overstepping of the judicial power," Bondi wrote.

While some law firms cut deals with the administration in order to roll back his orders, other firms — like Janner & Block — sued to prevent the orders from going into effect. Janner & Block was one of three firms that found success in their litigation against the White House. WilmerHale and Perkins Coie were also targeted and successfully fought back in the courts.

Bondi's memo comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to ignore orders from federal judges striking down Trump's policies and enlist the High Court in its fight. When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the return of an immigrant the administration admitted was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, the administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The 6-3 conservative supermajority halted the deadline imposed by Boasberg to bring the man back to the United States, and allowed the administration to continue deporting immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

NOW READ:Donald Trump's new policies are 'stupid' — according to stupidity researchers

Click here to read the Post's report in full (subscription required).

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4 25 politico

by Adam Cancryn, Maggie Miller, James Romoser and Kyle Cheney

04/09/2025

President Donald Trump is targeting two former first-term appointees over their criticism of his actions, stripping their security clearances and opening federal probes of their tenures.

The directives that Trump signed on Wednesday order the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.

The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him.

A president ordering investigations of specific individuals whom he considers to be his political enemies is a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Under that norm of separation, criminal investigations are supposed to be insulated from political pressure, but Trump has repeatedly scorned the notion of DOJ independence. Making Wednesday’s action even more remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Trump used the formal power of executive orders to effectively brand two individuals as subjects of criminal investigations.

Krebs, who was the administration’s top cybersecurity official responsible for election security, wasfired by Trump via tweet after he had asserted shortly after President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 that “in every case of which we are aware, these claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” He had also authorized a joint statementby CISA and other stakeholder groups that said the election was secure and that there was no indication of votes being changed or stolen, which angered Trump.

He was also akey witness for the Jan. 6 select committee, describing his efforts to secure the 2020 election and rebut conspiracy theories about the election and shore up voters’ confidence in the results. In his interview, he lamented that Republican leaders had catered to the false notion that the election was stolen, creating a “self-reinforcing cycle” of doubt. “Republican officials, senior officials, including the former President, lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election,” he told the panel.

The order signed by Trump labeled Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.” As he signed the order on Wednesday stripping Krebs’ security clearance and opening an investigation into his activities, Trump repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

“It was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out about this guy too, because this guy is a wise guy.”

Krebs is currently the chief intelligence and public policy officer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne. The order signed by Trump also takes aim at his current colleagues, suspending any security clearances held by individuals at SentinelOne who work with Krebs.

A spokesperson for the company did not immediately respond to request for comment.

In another move stemming from Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election, the president on Wednesday signed a separate order imposing new limits on the law firm Susman Godfrey. The firm represented voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani and other Trump associates who falsely claimed the election was rigged.

Taylor authored a high-profile anonymous op-ed in 2018 that criticized Trump and offered a scathing firsthand account of his decision-making. He later authored a book portraying the chaos inside the Trump White House, before revealing his identity and endorsing then-candidate Biden in the days before the 2020 election.

Trump on Wednesday called Taylor a “traitor,” even as he insisted that the former DHS chief of staff played a minimal role in his first administration.

“I barely remember him. Somebody that went out and wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things that were all lies,” Trump said in the Oval Office Wednesday. “I think he’s guilty of treason.”

Taylor left the Trump administration in 2019. On Wednesday, Taylor said Trump’s decision to target him was a sign the country was headed down “a dark path.”

“I said this would happen,”he posted on X. “Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

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Miles Taylor (born 1986/1987)^[1] is an American government official who served in the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. In the administration of the latter, he was an appointee who served in the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff of the DHS during the tenure of Secretary Kirstjen Nielsenand Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan.^[2][3] He was first recruited into the department by former DHS Secretary and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, serving as his senior advisor.

After being appointed DHS deputy chief of staff, Taylor wrote The New York Times op-ed in 2018 under the pen-name "Anonymous" that was entitled, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" that drew widespread attention for its criticism of Trump. In September 2019, he left the administration and went to work for Google. In November 2019, again under the pen name "Anonymous" he published a book entitled, A Warning.^[1] In October 2020, he revealed that he was "Anonymous" while campaigning against Trump's reelection.^[4][5]

In August 2020, while on a leave of absence from his work at Google, Taylor produced an advertisement for Republican Voters Against Trump, denouncing Trump and endorsing Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election. He was the first former Trump administration official to endorse Biden.^[6] He later co-founded the Renew America Movement, alongside former Republican governors, members of Congress, and cabinet officials, with the objective to break Trump's hold on the Republican Party.^[7] In May 2022 he announced that he was leaving the party.

• 1 Early life and education
• 2 Career
  • 2.1 Department of Homeland Security
    • 2.1.1 "Anonymous"

• • 2.2 Google
  • 2.3 Public opposition to the Trump administration
  • 2.4 Renew America Movement

• 3 Havana syndrome incidents
• 4 Political affiliations
• 5 See also
• 6 Writings
• 7 References

Early life and education

Taylor grew up in La Porte, Indiana, where he was an Indiana state debate champion, and the valedictorian at the graduation of his class La Porte High School in 2006.^[8][9] While in high school, he served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.^[10] He received a bachelor of arts degree in international security studies from Indiana University Bloomington, which he attended as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and Herman B. Wells Scholar.^[11] As a senior, he received IU's inaugural Presidential Student Internship ^[12]^ and was a recipient of the Elvis J. Stahr Award awarded to the university's top few graduating seniors.^[13]

Taylor received anMPhil in International Relations from New College, Oxford, which he attended as a 2012 Marshall Scholar.^[11][14]

Career

Taylor's decision to have a career in government was largely motivated by the September 11 attacks in 2001. He later said that he "wanted to focus my entire professional life on making sure a day like that wouldn't happen again, and dedicating my career to, what I thought, was the mission of this country, and that's the advancement of human freedom."^[15]

In 2007, while in college, Taylor interned in the office of the Secretary of Defense and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.^[12] In 2008, he worked as the briefing book coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security for Secretary Michael Chertoff and Deputy Secretary Paul A. Schneider.^[12] In 2009, he served as a regional policy intern for the Defense Department.^[12]

Taylor was a political appointee in the administration of George W. Bush.^[11] He was a staffer for the House Appropriations Committee and then the Committee on Homeland Security, where he served on Chairman Michael McCaul's staff.^[11] Taylor was McCaul's chief speechwriter and national security advisor on counterterrorism and foreign policy. He also served as the majority staff lead for the congressional Task Force on Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel.^[11] In 2015, he was named a Penn Kemble Fellow by the National Endowment for DemocracyTaylor (right) with then-Secretary Nielsen in 2018

Taylor joined the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in February 2017,^[17] when John Kelly, later White House Chief of Staff, was Secretary of Homeland Security.^[18] Taylor served as DHS deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to Kelly.^[19] He later served as chief of staff of DHS toward the end of the tenure of Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and the beginning of Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan.^[20] Taylor described a version of the Trump administration's travel restrictions as "tough" but "tailored".^[21] He reportedly clashed with other officials to try to limit the number of countries affected by it.^[22] He was also involved in debates regarding Trump administration immigration policies. He laterdescribed the Trump administration family separation policy as a "sickening display of bad judgment".^[22]

"Anonymous"

Taylor authored a September 2018 The New York Times op-ed entitled, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" under the name "Anonymous".^[1][5] He said that, in April 2019, he had personally witnessed President Trump offer Homeland Security staff federal pardons for any criminal prosecution arising from their actions in stopping illegal immigration to the United States, and it was at that point that Taylor decided to resign from the department.^[23][24] He left DHS in June 2019,^[17][20] and anonymously released a follow-up book entitled, A Warning (November 2019), which included an account of the instability inside the Trump White House and administration.^[1][5] USA Today called the book "a scathing portrait of a president and administration in chaos,"^[25] and The Washington Post wrote that the book had "no modern historical parallel for a firsthand account of a sitting president written in book form by an anonymous author".^[26] It reached number one on *The New York Times* Best Seller list.^[27]

Taylor initially denied being "Anonymous" in a number of interviews. After he acknowledged that he was "Anonymous", he said he owed a mea culpa to those journalists, but noted that, as "Anonymous", he always had said that he "would ultimately come out under my own name".^[28] In an online discussion after the release of A Warning, he had answered questions anonymously and said he would reveal his identity in the coming months before the 2020 election.^[29] He also pledged to donate the bulk of the proceeds from the book to nonprofit organizations such as the White House Correspondents' Association.^[1] Of his decision not to reveal his identity, Taylor said in October 2020:  "Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling. I wanted the attention to be on the arguments themselves."^[5]

Google

In September 2019, Taylor was hired by Google as a government affairs and public policy manager with a title of head of national security policy engagement.^[30][2] He was later promoted to lead Google's advanced technology and security strategy.^[31] Around the same time, he also became a senior fellow at the Auburn University McCrary Center for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.^[32]

Public opposition to the Trump administration

In August 2020, Taylor took a leave of absence from Google to support Joe Biden's presidential campaign.^[33] He made an advertisement for Republican Voters Against Trump, denouncing Trump and endorsing Biden in the 2020 presidential election.^[33][34] That same month, Taylor also wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post.^[35] Columnist Jennifer Rubin said the op-ed added "detail to what we could have only surmised was the story behind chaotic policy rollouts" and that the advertisement he released "may be the most compelling of the 2020 election cycle".^[36] The next day, Taylor appeared on multiple news and analysis shows saying that other former members of the Trump administration were considering speaking out similarly.^[37] On August 24, Taylor confirmed to NBC News that he was co-founding, with two other unnamed Republican officials, the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR), a group that aimed to oppose reelection of Trump and to reform the Republican Party after the 2020 election.^[38]

Journalist Judy Woodruff asked Taylor in a PBS NewsHour interview why he had spoken out when he did rather than immediately after leaving the administration. Taylor responded,

If I had come out and talked about Donald Trump a year ago, when I left the administration, he's a master of distraction. He would have buried it within a day, and it wouldn't have mattered to voters. But, right now, American voters are reviewing the president's resume...so, I think there's no more important time for me or other ex-Trump officials to come out and actually talk about what the experience was inside the administration and what kind of man sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.^[39]

Taylor's attacks against Trump were extensive. Among other anecdotes, he revealed that Trump was too distracted to pay attention to intelligence briefings,^[40] that Trump refused internal recommendations to punish Moscow for interference in U.S. affairs,^[41] and that Trump wanted to "swap" Puerto Rico for Greenland because it was "dirty and the people were poor".^[42] Taylor also said that Trump tried to block emergency aid for California wildfire victims because it was a Democratic state,^[43] and that Trump told his homeland security secretary to take marching orders from cable talk-show host Lou Dobbs.^[44]^

In September 2020, Taylor revealed to The Lincoln Project that, before he resigned from the DHS, a senior presidential adviser told him about a list of executive orders that has been prepared in case President Trump would win a second term, which Taylor alleged were orders deemed unacceptable during a first term presidency because they could harm the president's chances of reelection.^[15] Later, BuzzFeed reporter Hamed Aleaziz concluded that Taylor was implying Stephen Miller was that senior presidential adviser, with The Guardian reiterating this claim and reporting that Miller's biographer Jean Guerrero warned about a "wishlist" of his relating to immigration policy under a Trump second term.^[45]

Taylor also told news organizations that Trump ordered officials to have American flags raised back up when they were lowered in honor of Senator John McCain,^[46] and that Trump deliberately ignored warnings about the rise of domestic terrorism for political reasons.^[47] Taylor was also among those who appeared on a special that aired on CNN in October 2020, entitled, "The Insiders: A Warning from Former Trump Officials".^[48][49] During the special, Taylor criticized Trump's singular focus on immigration, especially the border wall, saying that his "wall-or-nothing approach to governing meant the president ignored some of the most critical homeland security threats to our country, cybersecurity challenges, [NOTE NO DOMESTIC] counterterrorism, manmade and natural disasters, and foreign interference in our democracy."^[50]

In June 2021, Taylor tweeted that he would run in the 2024 United States presidential election as an independent if Trump were to win the Republican nomination. The plan is to split the conservative vote in order to deny Trump a victory, although he later indicated on Twitter that he was not seriously considering being the candidate.^[51] In an interview with MSNBC the same month, Taylor stated that "the number one national security threat I've ever seen in my life to this country's democracy is the party that I'm in — the Republican Party. It is the number one national security threat to the United States of America," ranking his party above "ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Russia". He also stated that if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (a Republican) became Speaker, it would represent "Trump's hand on that Speaker's gavel."^{[52][53][54][55}]

Renew America Movement

Taylor became a regular CNN contributor in August 2020.^[56] Following Trump's loss to Biden, Taylor stepped down from his role at Google, but continued appearing on CNN while working on other projects.^[22]

In the wake of the May 2021 decision by House Republicans to remove Representative Liz Cheney as conference chair because of her opposition to Trump, Taylor and Evan McMullin organized a group of more than 150 Republicans—including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders—to issue "A Call for American Renewal" threatening to form a third party if the Republican Party did not reform itself.^[57][58]

In June 2021, Taylor and McMullin launched a new organization, the Renew America Movement (RAM). The organization's stated goal is to recruit candidates in the 2022 elections to challenge candidates who continue to support Trump.^[59] In October 2021, Taylor and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman published an opinion piece in The New York Times announcing that RAM would be supporting "rational" Republicans and moderate Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, with the goal of steering power away from members of the GOP who are pro-Trump.^[60] Taylor's group subsequently released a statement that they planned to raise "tens of millions" of dollars to defend a designated slate of House and Senate candidates in order to counter Donald Trump's hold on the Republican Party.^[61]

Havana syndrome incidents

In a February 2022 60 Minutes interview, Taylor recounted that he had two experiences that matched the Havana syndrome symptoms. Taylor also indicated that he was aware of a cabinet-level official who had similar episodes.^[62]

Political affiliations

Although Taylor was a lifelong member of the Republican Party,^[39][63][64] he donated to the Barack Obama campaign in the 2008 presidential election. He has said that he was "gunning for John McCain... [but] wanted to be able to tell [his] kids that... [he] supported the first Black president of the United States."^[65]

In May 2022, Taylor announced he was leaving the Republican Party over what he claimed was its espousal of "great replacement theory" rhetoric, especially in the wake of the Buffalo shooting.^[66] He stated that “it’s become glaringly obvious that my party no longer represents conservative values but in fact poses a threat to them—and to America.”^[67]

See also

• List of former Trump administration officials who endorsed Joe Biden

Writings

• "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration". The New York Times. September 5, 2018.^[68]
• Anonymous (2019), A Warning. New York: Hachette ISBN 978-1-5387-1846-9^[69]
• "Why I'm no longer 'Anonymous'". Medium. October 28, 2020.^[4]

References

1.

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• Taylor, Miles; Whitman, Christine Todd (October 11, 2021). "Opinion | We Are Republicans. There's Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved October 15, 2021.
• Axelrod, Tal (October 14, 2021). "Anti-Trump Republicans endorsing vulnerable Democrats to prevent GOP takeover". TheHill. Retrieved October 15, 2021.
• Pelley, Scott (February 20, 2022). "Havana Syndrome: High-level national security officials stricken with unexplained illness on White House grounds". CBS News. 60 Minutes.
• "'Second term would be more dangerous:' Lifelong Republican Miles Taylor blasts Trump, endorses Biden". ABC7 Chicago. August 18, 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
• "Ex-Trump official shares his prediction if Trump loses 2020". CNN. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
• Jacobs, Ben (August 29, 2020). "Miles Taylor Is Sick of Hearing About the Deep State". Medium.
• Taylor, Miles (May 17, 2022). "After Buffalo, saving the GOP means leaving the GOP". NBC News. Retrieved May 17, 2022.
• Richardson, Heather Cox, Letters from an American, Substack, May 17, 2022
• "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration". The New York Times. September 5, 2018. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved November 6, 2020.

1. Anonymous (November 19, 2019). *A Warning*. Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5387-1847-6.

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