Trump says Miles Taylor should be prosecuted, fired for ‘Anonymous’ op-ed
'It turned out to be a low-level staffer, a sleazebag, who has never worked in the White House.'
Miles Taylor, former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official, has identified himself as the “anonymous” writer behind a New York Times op-ed that was highly critical of President Donald Trump.
An earlier report on theGRIO noted that the identity of Anonymous had been hidden until Taylor, an outspoken Trump critic, tweeted Wednesday that he wrote the 2018 op-ed in The New York Times and a subsequent book.
Trump responded by calling Taylor a “low-level staffer” and a “sleazebag” who should be “prosecuted” for penning the op-ed.
“It turned out to be a low-level staffer, a sleazebag, who has never worked in the White House,” Trump said at a rally in Goodyear, Ariz. TheHill reports.
“Anonymous was a nobody, a disgruntled employee who was quickly removed from his job a long time ago for, they tell me, incompetence,” Trump said.
“I have no idea who he is,” he added.
“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 continued. “The whole thing was just one more 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.”
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Taylor previously denied being anonymous in an interview last year with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“There was an op-ed, there was a book, by someone calling themselves ‘Anonymous.’ Are you aware of who that is?,” Cooper asked Taylor, per TheHill.
“I’m not,” Taylor replied. “That was a parlor game that happened in Washington, D.C., of a lot of folks trying to think of who that might be. I’ve got my own thoughts about who that might be —”
“You’re not ‘Anonymous?’ ” said Cooper.
“I wear a mask for two things Anderson: Halloween and pandemics. So no,” Taylor replied.
Taylor left the Trump administration last year and currently works as a contributor for CNN.
“I witnessed Trump’s inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years. Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals,” Taylor wrote Wednesday.
“So when I left the Administration 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,” he added.
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