Ex-Trump staffer sounds alarm over administration's new 'ruse' to arrest critics
President Donald Trump's "anti-fraud" project led by Vice President J.D. Vance is nothing more than a "ruse" for a pretext to lock up his political foes, former Trump administration staffer Miles Taylor warned.
Taylor, who previously served in the Department of Homeland Security and is the author of the "anonymous" resistance op-ed, laid out the scheme on his "Defiance" Substack on Thursday.
The scheme is much more obvious when you consider the latest target of the administration's anti-fraud crusade, Taylor wrote: a food truck in Santa Ana, California.
"Of all the suspects DOJ could go after, why spend valuable federal prosecutorial and investigative resources on a food truck? Why not leave that to the local authorities?" wrote Taylor.
But it all makes sense, he continued, when you realize the evidence was gathered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — "an agency already on a quest to validate Donald Trump’s claim that immigrants are stealing from Americans — and its agents evidently decided to focus finite resources on a tiny business in an immigrant heavy community outside of Los Angeles… in a state the White House has begun targeting aggressively… where DOJ also appears to have its governor, Gavin Newsom, under investigation."
It's all an attempt to gin up a narrative, said Taylor — and when you view the huge federal surge of agents into Minnesota earlier this year, it all makes even more sense, he added.
"Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024," Taylor wrote. "Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn’t need gun-toting agents." Ultimately, two people lost their lives and national outrage forced the operation to draw down.
The good news, concluded Taylor, is that Trump and Vance have put themselves in a bind, because they can't destroy the evidence of their scheme. That's because in order for the criminal charges they want to bring to stick, "there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away," wrote Taylor.
And in a future administration, he said, "when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead ... back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens. That’s when the real fraud trials will begin."