Former Trump administration Homeland Security aide Miles Taylor registered amusement as the Trump administration mounted a secret new attack on freedom of the press to try to uncover who is leaking from within his administration — and his plan ended up getting leaked.
Taylor, who served in the first Trump administration and famously authored an anonymous op-ed informing the public of widespread “resistance” from within by himself and like-minded peers, has since become one of the strongest voices in the national security space against Trump and his policies.
Per Taylor’s Defiance blog, all of this comes as The New York Times broke a bombshell story that Trump’s new Qatar-gifted luxury Air Force One has substantial security weaknesses.
In response to this, wrote Taylor, “the president did what wannabe strongmen do,” and summoned FBI Director Kash Patel — at the time preparing to fly to Chicago on the taxpayer dime to see his girlfriend perform at a music festival. Patel then “oversaw the opening rounds of a leak probe into the New York Times journalists and whoever their sources were,” giving orders to agents for eight hours from the White House rather than FBI headquarters — and teased what he was doing in the vaguest terms on social media, posting, “the fake news will find out why soon.”
The problem for the administration is that within a day, The Times published a detailed account of the entire operation. Sources were sharing details with them about Trump’s rage, Patel’s summons, the White House’s hands-on direction of the investigation, and the unusual nature of it all. The details were attributed to ‘people with knowledge of the situation’” — likely sources in the FBI, Taylor said.
In short, the White House tried to undertake a clandestine investigation to catch how journalists were getting leaks — and it leaked to the very paper that triggered the investigation.
Taylor concluded with a warning for the Trump administration: every time you try to do this, the leaks will just intensify.
“When this is all over, I can assure you we will investigate every last piece of it. Thoroughly,” Taylor wrote. “Every retaliatory subpoena, every raid, and every abuse of the FBI’s powers to protect one man’s corruption will be probed and exposed.” If need be, he concluded, “We’ll leak the truth ourselves.”
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