President Donald Trump’s attempt to surveil the phone of former FBI Director James Comey has prompted much discussion as to how far the former is willing to go to punish his enemies. According to a whistleblower from his first term, however, Trump has turned the “ intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying.”
This is the assertion of Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, during which he famously penned an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance group within the White House. As Taylor explains, last week, it was revealed that while attempting to secure charges against Comey for posting an Instagram photo of shells spelling the numbers “86 45” — which Trump claims were a call for assassination — the president, via the DOJ, ordered the Secret Service to begin tracking and surveilling Comey’s phone, which agents recognized as problematic.
As Taylor elaborates, “The Secret Service’s own supervisor put his objection in writing. Pinging the phone ‘could be done,’ he warned, ‘but it would be a bad idea.’ Warrantless emergency tracking requires an imminent threat to life, and ‘we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger.’ It was, in his words, ‘legally questionable.’ His boss agreed, according to the emails, ‘but said we might do it anyway.’ And they did.” Agents tracked Comey’s movements as he and his wife drove to...
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