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 visit their son’s grave, with Trump allegedly following the progress from Air Force One.
“So, to be clear,” emphasizes Taylor, “we found out that the president of the United States was aboard his airplane, personally tracking the surveillance of a private citizen who had posted a photo of four digits. Obvious free speech. Breathtaking abuse of power to punish it.” What’s more, not only did the investigation turn up nothing, but the government continued to pursue Comey, with the FBI obtaining warrants for his Apple and Google accounts.
“I believe the Comey prosecution will be remembered as one of the most significant First Amendment cases in American history,” asserts Taylor. “An American president is trying to imprison a critic for posting a photograph. And to build the absurd case, the government surveilled that critic without a judge’s approval, in a manner its own agents admitted in writing was illegal. The filings answer some questions about what was done to Comey, but they open a far larger one that may not be answered for years: how many other people is this administration illegally watching and preparing to illegally punish?”
“I don’t write this as a bystander of course,” notes Taylor. “Trump has publicly accused people like me, John Brennan, James Clapper, Adam Schif, and even Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of treason. I have to assume some of us are already under surveillance for the audacity of criticizing the sitting president, while he has agents hunt for something — anything — to charge us with as punishment … Ironically, one of those criticisms is that I’ve long warned a second Trump term would turn the intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying. Again, the wannabe despot in the Oval Office has proven my point.”
As Taylor concludes, “We don’t know how many Americans are being warrantlessly monitored right now, or individually targeted despite their constitutional rights. That is the problem. Comey’s surveillance surfaced only because his prosecution forced these documents into open court. Everything about how this administration treats the people it considers enemies tells me his case is the rule, not the exception, and that there may be far more people they’ve decided to watch than to tip their hand by bringing weak and foolish cases.”