Former President Donald Trump was "mind-numbingly incompetent" when it came to protecting classified documents and information, according to Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Taylor appeared on MSNBC on Friday afternoon to discuss a New York Times report about Republicans who attacked Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, but have remained silent about Trump taking government records — some of which reportedly were marked "top secret" — to his private residence.
"It's not just hypocrisy, it's that Donald Trump himself was mind-numbingly incompetent to the protection of classified information," Taylor said. "So it's not just that he criticized Clinton and then did something similar. He did something vastly worse on multiple occasions, so much so that we were scared — legitimately scared — to take sensitive classified information into the Oval Office and tell the president of the United States about it. That's how bad it was. We would talk about it before we would go in when we got certain briefs — can we talk to the president about this? — because there was a worry he would leak information to the public, to foreign adversaries."
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As an example, Taylor cited an occasion when Trump was giving reporters a background interview in the Oval Office.
"He had classified information on his desk, and he grabbed it and held it up and waved it in the air to brag about how he gets really important information," Taylor said. "I mean, our jaws hit the floor. There was also a photographer in the room. Fortunately, we found out they didn't capture the highly sensitive classified information that Donald Trump grabbed with his fist and waved in the air. But that's how reckless this man was with that type of information."
Watch below.
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