WASHINGTON — A forthcoming book by a former Trump administration adviser describes an episode in which officials worried that then-President Donald Trump was arrogant in his handling of classified information while speaking to reporters, according to a copy obtained. by NBC News.
Miles Taylor, who was a top adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, writes about the 2018 episode in a book to be published this month. As the sitting president at the time, Trump had broad powers to declassify information. However, the incident Taylor describes suggests that his aides still believed he needed to be more careful with state secrets, a problem that put him in legal jeopardy after he left office and took confidential records with him.
Taylor is a prominent critic of Trump. He wrote a anonymous opinion piece while working at the Department of Homeland Security, in which he said many top administration officials were trying to limit Trump’s impulses and thwart his agenda.
Also in the book, excerpts from which were first obtained by NBC News, Taylor describes hearing about Trump’s interest in “tapping” the phones of White House aides in an attempt to contain media leaks. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said in an interview with NBC News that Trump had wanted to go after the leakers by tapping phones, but Kelly resisted and never followed through.
Trump had long been angry about the press leaks, as had previous presidents of both parties. In his book, “The Briefing,” Sean Spicer wrote that he was “under relentless pressure to find leakers” as press secretary during Trump’s first year in office. Former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway wrote in her book “Here’s the Deal” that, in Trump’s view, “the leakers were treacherous and weaklings.”
Trump was still president when the episode Taylor described took place on October 18, 2018. Taylor writes that he was in a private meeting in the West Wing with John Bolton, who was then Trump’s national security adviser.
Then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders walked into Bolton’s office and described an interview Trump had given in the Oval Office, according to Taylor’s book, “Blowback.” (It’s common for White House press aides to sit when the president gives interviews.)
Trump had been speaking to reporters about Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and journalist who was killed that month by Saudi assassins in Turkey.
Sanders told Bolton that the president had collected classified documents related to intelligence on Khashoggi’s death and had shown them, Taylor writes, but that it was unlikely that reporters would have been able to read the text.
Bolton’s jaw dropped at first, but he “gave a sigh of relief” when Sanders told him there were no cameras in the room, according to the book.
Still, “we were all concerned about the lapse in protocol and the poor protection of classified information,” Taylor writes.
Bolton, in an interview with NBC News, said he did not remember the conversation with Sanders. He didn’t discuss what happened. A spokeswoman for Sanders, now the governor of Arkansas, declined to comment.
When asked about Taylor’s book, a Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said: “Miles Taylor is a loser and a lying sack of shit—His book belongs in the discount bin of the newspaper section.” fiction or should be reused as toilet paper. ”
During his time in office, some top advisers became concerned about Trump’s treatment of state secrets. In an interview, Bolton said that when Trump received briefings, attendees “would show him charts, and that’s where the danger came that he would grab something and keep it.”
Asking Trump to return the material he had been given was not so easy, Bolton said.
“He is the president of the United States,” Bolton said. “Are you supposed to say, ‘Mr. President, let’s be clear. We don’t trust you. Return the document to us. ”
Trump now faces criminal charges for his handling of classified documents after leaving office. An indictment filed in a Florida court last month included a redacted transcript of a conversation Trump had in 2021 with a writer, an editor and two of his assistants at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump appeared to discuss a sensitive military document that he describes as an “attack plan” against Iran that had been given to him by a US military official. In an audio recording of that discussion that was obtained separately by NBC News, he says the document includes “secret information.”
“I have a big stack of papers,” Trump says amid sounds of rustling papers. “They introduced me to this. This is off the record. But they introduced me to this.”
The indictment states that none of the people who met with Trump that day had security clearances or a “need to know” about the attack plans.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in the case. Last month, he told a Fox News host that he did not have a classified document and was referring to “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.” He told the media traffic light that he had been holding papers and making “bravado” but “had no papers.”
As the sitting president, Trump, of course, had the right to see classified information and had the power to declassify material. A process is in place to declassify information prior to release. Kelly, the second of four White House chiefs of staff, said in an interview that he has procedures in place to safeguard classified material.
Kelly, a retired four-star general, said he had warned Trump “that you should never, ever share classified information with anyone who does not have the proper security clearance, because the national security and the lives of the United States. they are in danger”.
Explaining some of the practices he adopted from his military career, Kelly said that after showing classified material as part of a briefing, White House aides were supposed to “collect it to properly secure it.”
“We did not leave classified material with him, and the same procedures were applied to me and the rest of the staff,” Kelly added.
Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel and attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview: “I would certainly advise [any] president to not even discuss classified information in front of reporters or someone who doesn’t have a security clearance. You can argue, ‘I have the authority as President of the United States to declassify it,’ but you classify the information to protect the nation’s secrets.”
Taylor’s book does not specify which news outlet interviewed Trump when he spoke about the Khashoggi murder, but he did say in an interview that it was on October 18, 2018. New York Times article published that same day describes an interview Trump had with the paper in the Oval Office. The lead paragraph said that Trump expressed “reliance on intelligence reports from multiple sources that strongly suggest a high-level Saudi role in the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi.”
The New York Times declined to comment.
Taylor has become one of the most outspoken Trump administration alumni to turn on the former president. His opinion piece appeared in The New York Times in September 2018 under the headline “I am part of the resistance within the Trump administration”. In it, he wrote that Trump “continues to act in ways detrimental to the health of our republic.” Taylor’s identity remains a mystery. until he got naked in 2020.
Trump lashed out at the perpetrator after the exposure, calling him “a sleazebag who never worked in the White House” and saying he should be prosecuted.
Taylor, then a Republican, opposed Trump’s re-election that year, appearing on a video supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy and denouncing Trump as “unfocused” and “undisciplined.”
