White House aides were afraid Trump blabbed about classified info to reporters: Ex-DHS chief

Former President Donald Trump's one-time Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor recounted an incident in his book "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump" in which White House staffers were afraid he had exposed classified information to reporters, said NBC News on Friday.

Trump is now under indictment for Espionage Act violations and obstruction of justice, after he hoarded boxes of highly classified military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago country club in South Florida. One of his top aides who allegedly helped him conceal the boxes from authorities, Walt Nauta, is also facing charges.

"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," reported Peter Nicholas. "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."

"During his time in office, some senior aides worried about Trump’s treatment of state secrets. In an interview, [former National Security Adviser John] Bolton said that when Trump would get briefings, aides would 'show him graphics, and that’s where the danger came of him grabbing something and keeping it,'" said the report. "Asking Trump to return material he’d been given wasn't so easy, Bolton said. 'He’s the president of the United States,' Bolton said. 'Are you supposed to say, ‘Mr. President, let’s be clear. We don’t trust you. Give us the document back.’'"

According to the report, Taylor also alleges in the book that Trump asked his staffers if they could wiretap his aides to figure out who was speaking to the press.

Taylor, a longtime critic of the former president, was the author of an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, in which he described himself as part of a "resistance" movement inside the White House to constrain Trump's worst impulses.

When NBC reached out to the Trump campaign about the claims, spokesman Steven Cheung said, “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.”