In a rally in Goodyear, Arizona, President Donald Trump reacted to the revelation that Mike Taylor, a former employee of the Department of Homeland Security, had written the 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, which severely criticized him.
Trump dismissed Mike Taylor, calling him a low-level staffer and a sleazebag. Trump also called for Taylor’s prosecution, The Hill reports.
Speaking to a jeering crowd, Trump said Taylor was just a disgruntled employee who was removed from his position because he was incompetent. He said he had no idea who Taylor was in his administration just before he made the revelation. Trump also used the opportunity to attack media outlets that have not been friendly with his administration.
“He worked with the – listen to this – the fake news New York Times, and he is an employee of Google, he works for Google,” Trump said. “The whole thing is just one giant hoax from the Washington swamp and a corrupt special interest group. I’ll tell you what. This guy, in my opinion, he should be prosecuted.”
Taylor was a staff of the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019. He served as the chief of staff to former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
Taylor, writing in a Medium post on Wednesday, finally revealed himself as the writer of the piece that shook the White House back in 2018. Trump had reacted angrily to the publication back then, asking the then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the anonymous writer.
Taylor subsequently left his position in Trump’s administration. He wrote a book that revealed how things played out during his time within the administration. He explained that Trump was against any form of criticism and was wont to threaten with punishment any of his senior officials who spoke up against him.
He said he wrote his book, “A Warning,” to alert voters that although things might look bad from outside the administration, it was worse for those of them that were insiders.
Taylor, who now works for CNN, revealed to the news outlet that he wrote the op-ed as part of the people who formed a sort of resistance within the administration.
When asked during the interview on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, why he chose to remain anonymous at that time, Taylor said he wanted the president to respond to the charges he laid out without attacking the author of the op-ed. He said that although people criticized his move to attack a sitting president under the guise of anonymity, it was the right thing to do at that point in time and that he stood by his decision.
“Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer to them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling,” Taylor said.
The White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany reacted to the revelation of Taylor’s identity. She said Taylor was a coward who chose the cloak of anonymity to achieve his nefarious aims. She said he was only doing the bidding of detractors of the president.
Source: thehill.com
