Donald Trump wanted to “tap the phones” of White House aides who he suspected of leaking information, according to bombshell claims made by a former Trump administration official.
Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff under Mr Trump, has claimed in his new book Blowback that the then-president floated the idea “to pursue leakers by tapping phones” at some point in 2018.
The idea was quickly shut down by then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly who warned Mr Trump he would be breaking the law.
Mr Kelly “quickly nixed the suggestion, knowing it would be illegal,” Mr Taylor writes in the book excerpt, obtained by Axios.
Mr Trump’s camp has since denied the claim and hit out at Mr Taylor and his memoir which has made a series of shocking claims about Mr Trump’s time in office.
In a statement to Axios, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung fired back: “Miles Taylor is a loser and a lying sack of s***. His book either belongs in the discount bin of the fiction section or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”
Mr Trump once accused his predecessor, former president Barack Obama, of tapping his own phone in the run-up to the 2016 election – without any evidence.
Mr Trump made the shocking claim in 2017 that Mr Obama had wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower in Manhattan. For his part, Mr Obama strongly denied the accusation and Mr Trump later walked back the claim, saying he meant surveillance more broadly.
The news of the disgraced ex-president’s desire to surveil his own staffers comes just days after the release of a sworn statement from Mr Kelly in which the ex-Marine general said Mr Trump floated the idea of targeting critics and perceived enemies with Internal Revenue Service probes.
In a deposition taken as part of a lawsuit from ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok, Mr Kelly said Mr Trump “questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies” could be mounted into Mr Strzok, who along with another FBI colleague had been shown to have disparaged Mr Trump in private text messages.
