By Steve Neavling
Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security chief of staff, revealed himself as the anonymous author of a New York Times op-ed and a book that was heavily critical of President Trump.
“To be clear, writing those works was not about eminence (they were published without attribution), not about money (I declined a hefty monetary advance and pledged to donate the bulk of the proceeds), and not about crafting a score-settling ‘tell all’ (my focus was on the President himself and his character, not denigrating former colleagues),” Taylor wrote in a Medium post.
Taylor, who denied being “Anonymous” as recently as August, said he struggled with the decision to attack the president and said he “wanted this President to succeed” when he first joined the administration with John Kelly, Trump’s first Homeland Security secretary and later the White House chief of staff.
But, he wrote, someone had to hold Trump accountable.
“Too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives,” Taylor wrote. “I witnessed Trump’s inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years.”
Taylor also was the chief of staff to Secretary Kirstjen, serving at DHS from 2017 to 2019.
