A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staffer who was promoted in the agency by former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has cut a campaign ad trashing President Trump, vowing his support for Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Miles Taylor, who previously worked at DHS under John Kelly, Elaine Duke, and Nielsen, has released an ad for Biden with the group “Republican Voters Against Trump” in which he accuses the president of attempting to break the law and ignoring security risks.
The group is backed by failed Never Trump leaders like consultants Sarah Longwell, Bill Kristol, and Tim Miller, who previously worked for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
“What we saw week in and week out, and for me after two and a half years in that administration, was terrifying,” Taylor says in the ad. “We would go in and try to talk to him about pressing national security issues, cyber attacks, terrorism threats … he wasn’t interested in those things. To him, they weren’t priorities.”
Taylor continues:
The policies at the border, he wanted to restart Zero Tolerance and separate families. He said he wanted to go further and have a deliberate policy of ripping children away from their parents to show those parents that they shouldn’t come to the border in the first place. A lot of the time, the things he wanted to do not only were impossible but in many cases, illegal. He didn’t want us to tell him it was illegal anymore because he knew that there were, and these were his words, he knew that he had ‘magical authorities.’ He was one of the most unfocused and undisciplined senior executives I’ve ever encountered.
I came away completely convinced based on first-hand experience that the president was ill-equipped and wouldn’t become equipt to do his job effectively.
Taylor says his experience working for Trump has led him to support Biden.
“And even though I’m not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I know that Joe Biden will protect the country,” Taylor says. “And I’m confident he won’t make the same mistakes as this president.”
Taylor also published an op-ed in the Washington Post wherein he calls Trump “dangerous” for the nation and accuses him of undermining U.S. security abroad:
Trump has also damaged the country in countless ways that don’t directly involve national security but, by stoking hatred and division, make Americans profoundly less safe.
The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 Americans have died.
It is more than a little ironic that Trump is campaigning for a second term as a law-and-order president. His first term has been dangerously chaotic. Four more years of this are unthinkable.
In a statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere said Taylor is “another creature of the D.C. Swamp who never understood the importance of the president’s agenda or why the American people elected him and clearly just wants to cash-in.”
“President Trump has an unprecedented number of accomplishments in spite of government bureaucrats who are only out for themselves, not the forgotten men and women of this country,” Deere said.
One White House official who was in meetings with Taylor told Breitbart News he never spoke up against the president’s immigration policies.
“I mean I remember being in meetings at the White House with him during child separation, and he wasn’t so outspoken then,” the White House official said. “He never spoke up during his two and a half years at DHS. Now he’s a hero?”
Taylor previously worked as Kelly’s deputy chief of staff. When Nielsen — a former staffer with President George W. Bush’s administration — took over the agency in December 2017, Taylor was promoted as her chief of staff.
Following Nielsen’s resignation in April 2019, Taylor left DHS and eventually took a job at Google in September 2019 as a government affairs and public policy executive.
A month after Nielsen’s resignation, when Kevin McAleenan became Acting DHS Secretary, Breitbart News named Taylor as a prominent and outspoken Never Trump staffer in an exclusive report detailing a number of the agency’s hires.
In that report, sources close to DHS told Breitbart News that Taylor, and about seven other staffers elevated or hired by Nielsen and McAleenan, worked at the agency as unaccountable bureaucrats who sought to subvert the president’s agenda, specifically as it related to immigration.
After Trump ordered the United States National Guard to protect the public and property from rioters associated with the groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter, Taylor signed a letter disavowing the move. Former Bush DHS Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, both friends of Nielsen, signed the letter as well.
“We reject a militarized response to protests to deny citizens their constitutional rights,” the letter stated.
Taylor’s rebuke of Trump comes as McAleenan defied the president in an interview with the Washington Post and on multiple occasions nearly a year ago before leaving the top job at DHS. Likewise, former Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke recently boasted about her sabotaging immigration policy while at her post.
Days before resigning, McAleenan gave an interview where he attacked Trump’s policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. McAleenan claimed the president’s Zero Tolerance policy “went too far” and repudiated the term “illegal alien.”
McAleenan had also been accused of leaking the details of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to the establishment media in order to stop the operation. About a month after his announced resignation, a report alleged that McAleenan had led a quiet front inside DHS to stoke opposition to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
In July, Duke admitted to the New York Times that she purposefully weakened the White House’s memo to end President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to ensure the effort would fail under judicial scrutiny.
“Ms. Duke said she did not include policy reasons in the memo because she did not agree with the ideas being pushed by Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions: that DACA amounted to an undeserved amnesty and that it would encourage new waves of illegal immigration,” the Times reported.
Duke’s refusal to include specific policy reasons for ending DACA was vital to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that demanded the Trump administration refile paperwork to end the program.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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