The Trump administration launched an unprecedented effort Tuesday to bar federal workers from sharing “non-public” information, and on Wednesday, former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor warned that the move bore all the hallmarks of a tactic Trump employed in the private sector, one Taylor described as “creepier than you think.”
“Federal workers would be forbidden from talking about almost anything they see or do on the job, including things Trump or his subordinates order them to do,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published Wednesday on his Substack.
“If ever there was a sign that the Trump administration knows it’s engaging in illegal conduct – and wants to ensure no witness can ever testify to what really happened – it’s this.”
That tactic, as Taylor described, is often referred to as “catch and kill” – a technique in which media outlets pay individuals for exclusive rights to a story with the intention of burying the underlying allegations.
In the lead up to the 2016 election, Trump – through his friendship with David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer – employed the “catch and kill” several times, burying stories that may have damaged his reputation.
One such story was buried in 2016 after the Enquirer bought the rights to a story from Karen McDougal, who alleged to have had a year-long affair with Trump from 2006 to 2007. Another occurred in 2015 after a former doorman for Trump World Tower, who claimed to have knowledge of an alleged affair Trump had that “resulted in a child” was paid $30,000 for rights to his story.
That technique, Taylor argued, was now being used on the entire federal workforce in what he described as the “most systematic presidential effort in American history to punish dissent.”
“The catch-and-kill arrangement Trump perfected with David Pecker (in which a powerful man coerces witnesses into signing a contract in order to make the ‘seeing’ of misconduct into a liability) is being reconstructed at federal scale,” Taylor wrote. “The powerful man is the same, of course. But now the witnesses are two million civil servants.”
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