A former senior Department of Homeland Security official said Saturday that Vice President JD Vance's recent comments dismissing Watergate amount to a "tacit admission" that the Trump administration's conduct is more serious than the scandal that ended Richard Nixon's presidency — and could ultimately make it easier to hold administration officials accountable.
Miles Taylor, the former DHS chief of staff who now runs the group Defiance.org, made the remarks during an appearance on MS NOW's "Alex Witt Reports," responding to Vance's claim that Watergate would be little more than a brief news story if it happened today.
Taylor offered a grim partial agreement, saying that compared to what President Donald Trump is doing now, Watergate might warrant only a multi-day story. The reason, he argued, is that Trump has done things he described as substantially more unconstitutional than Watergate — and Vance's comment, in Taylor's view, was an acknowledgment of exactly that.
But Taylor drew a sharp distinction between the two presidencies. Nixon, he noted, tried to cover up his abuses. Trump and his team, by contrast, have carried out actions that federal judges have ruled facially unconstitutional out in the open, without any attempt to hide them.
That brazenness, Taylor argued, cuts both ways.
He pointed to prosecutors who previously worked in the Justice Department who believe the administration's open defiance of the law will ultimately work against it. By wearing what Taylor called the lawlessness on their sleeves, officials may be handing a future Democratic Congress and a future administration the evidence needed to pursue accountability.
Taylor framed the dynamic as a double-edged sword for the administration — the same out-in-the-open conduct that alarms defenders of the rule of law could, down the line, become the basis for holding those responsible to account.