A former Trump administration official argued Friday that the lack of investigations into recent leaks to the media from government officials was a “tacit admission” that the leaks were coming directly from Trump’s “top officials,” and as a means to strengthen its legal cases against Trump’s political adversaries.
Trump’s Justice Department has indicted several former and current government officials who at various points had been adversarial with Trump, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Media reports on the cases against them have included key details from anonymous government officials, details that Miles Taylor, former Homeland Security official under President Donald Trump, argued were clear evidence that the Trump administration itself was approving leaks to the media to bolster its legal cases.
“If Trump's hand-picked people aren’t the ones dishing to the media, then who is? Shouldn’t DOJ and the FBI be launching investigations to find the culprits?” Taylor wrote Friday on his Substack “Treason.”
“They don’t appear to have done so. To me, that’s a tacit admission that, yes, Trump’s top officials are the ones spilling the beans. The president who vowed to ‘de-weaponize’ justice has created the most openly political Justice Department in modern American history, and he’s running it on the principle that laws apply only to Trump’s critics.”
Examples Taylor cited included a CNN report from last week in which the outlet spoke to an anonymous source who had inside knowledge of the investigation into Bolton, who was indicted last week for allegedly sharing classified material.
On the notion of the Trump administration approving leaks of classified information to bolster its prosecution of a former government official over mishandling classified information, Taylor wrote it is “hard to overstate the hypocrisy.”
“Let’s put this into perspective: Trump’s people appear to be talking to the press about a classified-information investigation in which their own allegation is that John Bolton mishandled sensitive information,” Taylor wrote.
“So they’re leaking about ‘the leakers’ who they’re prosecuting… Now one of his own people is under fire for the very misconduct Trump once called treasonous.”