Former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor claims his home was targeted by a break-in shortly after he published a scathing "Anonymous" op-ed about Donald Trump's presidency.
Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, published the sharply critical op-ed, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," in the New York Times in September 2018, and he wrote in his forthcoming book, "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump," that someone broke into his house just months later, reported Newsweek.
"They sent a cop on the neighborhood beat to come chat with us," Taylor told the publication. "The aftermath was handled by DHS. The Department dispatched internal security personnel to our house to do checks. They never found the intruder, and we still don't know what their motivation was. But the timing was very unsettling."
Taylor isn't sure whether Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan police filed an official report, and neither the police department or DHS responded to requests for comment from Newsweek.
"[The intruder] picked the locks of two doorways into the Capitol Hill row house, including an iron grate and a thick wooden front door that I found ajar," Taylor wrote in his book. "In the process, the individual somehow disabled the alarm system and the video doorbell, both of which went dark during the incident — blacked out for about five minutes."
Nothing was "moved, broken or stolen" during the break-in, Taylor writes, and DHS personnel searched his home for sensitive communications equipment, and while there's no suggestion anyone with the Trump administration was involved, he suspects the incident was related to his op-ed.
"After the unsigned essay was released, I suspected that a foreign intelligence service might try to unmask Anonymous," Taylor wrote. "The fastest way for world leaders to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump was to flatter him, or attack his enemies. How better to curry the president's favor than to hunt down and expose the dissenter in his midst?"
