White House officials worried Trump showed reporters classified material while in office, new book recounts
WASHINGTON — A forthcoming book by an ex-Trump administration aide describes an episode in which officials worried that then-President Donald Trump was cavalier in his handling of classified information while talking to reporters, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.
Miles Taylor, who was a top aide to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, writes about the 2018 episode in a book set to be published this month. As a sitting president at the time, Trump had broad powers to declassify information. Yet the incident Taylor describes suggests that his aides still believed he needed to show more care toward state secrets — an issue that landed him in legal peril after he left office and took sensitive records with him.
Taylor is a prominent critic of Trump. He authored an anonymous op-ed while working at the Department of Homeland Security, in which he said that many senior administration officials were trying to limit Trump’s impulses and frustrate his agenda.
Also in the book, excerpts of which were obtained first by NBC News, Taylor describes having heard about Trump’s interest in “tapping” the phones of White House aides in a bid to stanch press leaks. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said in an interview with NBC News that Trump had wanted to pursue leakers by tapping phones, but that Kelly pushed back and never carried it out.
Trump had long been angry over press leaks, as have past 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 senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway wrote in her book, “Here’s the Deal,” that in Trump’s view, “leakers were traitors and weaklings.”