Miles Taylor, former DHS official and adviser to John Kelly, is ‘Anonymous’

“More than two years ago, I published an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times about Donald Trump’s perilous presidency, while I was serving under him. He responded with a short but telling tweet: ‘TREASON?’ Trump sees personal criticism as subversive. I take a different view,” he wrote.

“As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, ‘To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else,'” Taylor continued in the statement that was posted online. “We do not owe the President our silence. We owe him and the American people the truth.”

He added later: “Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling.”

Taylor was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He was also a counterterrorism adviser to then-White House chief of staff John Kelly. He worked at the DHS between the years 2017 and 2019 and endorsed Biden in August. On CNN, he has repeatedly denounced Trump and spoken about having other Trump administration officials come forward to do the same.

Taylor wrote the op-ed for the New York Times in September 2018 that spoke of an internal “resistance” group of officials working to stymie the president’s worst inclinations, with the outlet describing him as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” He wrote his tell-all book, A Warning, the next year with a similar message.

“I wrote A Warning, a character study of the current Commander in Chief and a caution to voters that it wasn’t as bad as it looked inside the Trump Administration — it was worse,” Taylor said on Wednesday. “While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government. In other words, Trump’s own lieutenants were alarmed by his instability.”

Anonymous promised to reveal his identity to the president before the election.

Taylor was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper in August if he was aware of who Anonymous was, and Taylor replied, “I’m not. Look, and that was a parlor game that happened in Washington D.C. with a lot of folks trying to think of who that might be, and I’ve got my own thoughts about who that might be.” Cooper then asked him directly if he was Anonymous, and Taylor lied.

“I wear a mask for two things, Anderson. Halloweens and pandemics,” Taylor replied. “So, no.”

When the news broke that Taylor is Anonymous, Tapper said on air that CNN did not know this until Wednesday.

Hogan Gidley, press secretary for the Trump campaign, issued a statement calling Taylor’s move, “the least impressive, lamest political ‘reveal’ of all time. I worked with DHS officials while I was in the White House, and even I had to research who Miles Taylor was. He’s just another standard-issue arrogant, Washington, DC swamp bro who loved President Trump until he figured out he could try to make money by attacking him.”

“To be clear,” he wrote, “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).”

James Dao, the op-ed editor for the New York Times, said a few days after publishing the Anonymous op-ed that the term “senior administration official” is “used in Washington by both journalists and government officials to describe positions in the upper echelon of an administration, such as the one held by this writer.”

But at the time the article was published, current acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf was listed as DHS chief of staff, not Taylor, who did not appear anywhere on DHS’s leadership page. Taylor does not appear on the DHS website at all until he was listed as chief of staff on Feb. 21, 2019, more than five months after the article describing him as a “senior official” was published.

Likely to complicate Taylor’s narrative, a DHS whistleblower complaint in September filed by Brian Murphy, the former principal deputy under secretary of DHS’s office of intelligence and analysis, included allegations claiming that Nielsen and Wolf attempted to retaliate against him for refusing to adjust intelligence assessments related to terrorism and election meddling. It also said Taylor himself had been involved in targeting him too. DHS has repeatedly denied that Wolf tried to improperly pressure Murphy, and Wolf testified during his confirmation hearing before the Senate last month that the complaint is “patently false” and “a fabrication.”

Murphy’s whistleblower complaint stated that “other relevant [Responsible Management Officials] who had peripheral roles in the underlying events and were involved in reprisal actions (whether threatened or actual) include former Deputy Chief of Staff Miles Taylor.” Specifically, Murphy claimed that David Glawe, the former Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence, told him that “Mr. Taylor had intended to seek Mr. Murphy’s termination as a result of his declination to provide intelligence assessments regarding [Known and Suspected Terrorists] that Mr. Murphy felt were inconsistent with the underlying intelligence data.” The whistleblower complaint stated that Murphy “reasonably believes in good faith” that Taylor and others “were not only aware of the details of Mr. Murphy’s refusal to engage in what he viewed as manipulation and improper administration of an intelligence program, but also that Mr. Murphy was the individual who had filed the first [Office of Inspector General] complaint alleging perjured testimony had been delivered by Secretary Nielsen.”

The DHS whistleblower complaint further stated that Murphy “made several protected disclosures between March 2018 and August 2020 regarding a repeated pattern of abuse of authority, attempted censorship of intelligence analysis, and improper administration of an intelligence program related to Russian efforts to influence and undermine United States interests.” The “relevant officials at issue” included Taylor, it noted.

Democratic congressional leaders sent a letter last November criticizing Google’s decision to hire Taylor to work on government affairs and national security issues.

“We are deeply troubled with Google’s decision to hire someone from the Trump Administration that has defended the very same cruel DHS policies Google senior leadership has previously denounced,” Democrats told Google CEO Sundar Pichai, adding, “During his time with DHS, Miles Taylor undoubtedly demonstrated his support for the Trump Administration’s immigration policies.”

Earlier on Wednesday, George Conway, an anti-Trump political operative who is the husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, shared that he had spoken with “Anonymous.” “I had an amazing conversation this morning with … Anonymous,” he said. “Anonymous is a true patriot. We’ll all be hearing a lot more from this person very, very soon.”

A litany of Trump administration officials denied being the author amid frenetic speculation, including Vice President Mike Pence, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump, who called the author “gutless” and questioned whether a “so-called ‘Senior Administration Official'” from the op-ed really existed, even pushed then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the source of the opinion piece.