Trump target reveals 'jealous' remarks that show 'dictator' ambitions: 'He's not joking'

One of the former officials targeted by President Donald Trump isn't buying his denials of involvement in the FBI raid of John Bolton.

Federal agents searched the former national security adviser's home last week as part of an investigation into possible mishandling of classified materials, but former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor told "CNN News Central" that he's not buying Trump's claims that he had nothing to do with the raid.

"I have a really hard time believing it," Taylor said. "A really, really hard time believing that the man who declares himself the chief law. enforcement officer of the United States, who has been so personally invested in the persecution of his critics, had no idea anything like this was going to happen. Days before he reportedly had lunch with Kash Patel. He's been talking about John Bolton days before, he was messaging, he was posting about John Bolton, so it would be a real surprise to me if he didn't know."

Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing his administration to investigate Taylor, who penned an anonymous 2018 op-ed in the New YorkTimes exposing chaos inside the White House, for possible treason and revoked his security clearance.

"But even if he didn't know," Taylor said, "that's not what really matters here. There's been way too much focus on what John Bolton might have done wrong, and the analogy I use is it's like if a bartender starts poisoning a guy's drink at the bar and then afterwards people say, 'Well, I heard that the guy forgot to pay his tab.' It's not about the guy who forgot to pay his bar tab. In this case, John Bolton may or may not have forgotten to pay his bar tab. It's about the guy poisoning the drink. We need to focus on whether the president of the United States directed the resources of the federal government when he came into office, to go after his enemies, to go find a crime that John Bolton committed. That's what's worrying here, that's what's dangerous to the rule of law."

Taylor also expressed concern about the president musing about acting as a dictator, which he said tracked with comments he'd made during his first term.

"Look at what Trump said five years ago," Taylor said. "He said, when you are president of the United States, the authority is total, and that's how it's got to be, and five years later, he's still saying things that would indicate his interest in being a dictator. Now I will tell you, having spent time personally with the man in the first Trump administration, he would wax poetic in private about foreign dictators he admired. He was jealous of their ability to exert total control over their populations."

"That's the president of the United States we are seeing now, and he is not joking," Taylor added. "When he said he was going to be Americans' retribution, people said, 'No, he's joking about that.' When he said he was going to lock people up, they said he was joking. When he said he was going to send in the troops, people said, 'Nah, he's joking.' He's doing all of those things – it's not a joke."

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