Trump wanted to ‘exploit the DHS for his own political purposes,’ he says.
President Donald Trump calls it ‘unfocused and undisciplined’, a former Chief of Staff of the Homeland Security Department has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency.
“Given what I’ve experienced in the administration, I need to support Joe Biden for president,” former Trump official Miles Taylor said in a video posted and produced by the group of Republican voters against Trump. “And while I’m not a Democrat, although I do not agree on major issues, I’m sure Joe Biden will protect the country, and I’m sure he’s not making the same mistakes as this president.
Taylor is a lifelong Republican who served as former Chief of Staff to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He said what he saw in the Trump administration today as ‘scared’ of him, and accused President Trump of repeatedly using the department to serve his own political agenda.
He also detailed what the president said were “magical authorities”, even when top supporters would say a particular policy was illegal.
“[Trump] was one of the most un-focused and undisciplined senior managers I have ever encountered, “Taylor said in the video.
“He was not interested in those things,” Taylor said of trying to talk to the president about issues such as a cyberattack or a terrorist threat. “The president wanted to use the Homeland Security department for his own political purposes and to thank his own agenda.”
The new accusations about holding and carrying the president also describe accusations that Trump tried to cut funding to deal with burns in California because the state is run by Democrats.
“He told us to stop giving money to people whose homes were burnt down by a wildfire because he was so angry that people in the state of California did not support him, and that politics was not a basis for him,” he said. Taylor said in the video.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement that Taylor “is another creature of the DC swamp who never understood the importance of the president’s agenda or why the American people chose him and clearly just wanting to be appreciated. “
Taylor said he was “confident that Biden will protect the country” and not make the same mistakes that President Trump has made.
Asked to respond to remarks by a White House official why the question of why Taylor continued to serve when he had such a problem with the Trump administration, Taylor told ABC News that is exactly the reason.
“If I thought the president was incompetent, why did I continue to serve? For exactly that reason. Most of the people who were members of the administration clearly saw that the president was ill-prepared for his job and people needed him.” t knew what they were doing, “Taylor said in a statement. “We were foolish to hope that he would come up on occasion (he did not), that he could be fixed (he could not), and that his presidency would not be so bad (it was worse).”
In a subsequent op-ed in the Washington Post, Taylor says the president once demanded a DHS briefing to determine the color of the boundary wall in February 2019 amid a potential second government loophole.
“He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be covered. Episodes like this happened almost weekly,” Taylor wrote.
White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner told CNN on Monday that Taylor was “a nice kid” who was “not up to the task.”
“Look, Miles was a nice kid,” Kushner said. “He has worked here for a few years. But I will say that it makes a lot of sense to me that he supports Joe Biden.”
John Cohen, a former acting under secretary at the Homeland Security Department, told ABC News that Taylor “confirms what many of us who have worked at DHS have seen from the outside.”
“Under this administration, the department was created to protect the nation from foreign and domestic threats used by this White House as nothing more than a partisan political instrument,” said Cohen, an ABC News staffer. “It also confirms why there have been so many operational burglaries involving the department over the last 3.5 years.”
A source in the Homeland Security department told ABC News that people in the department were surprised, shocked and angry to learn of Taylor’s reactions.
A spokesman for the Homeland Security department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
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