Former DHS personnel chief calls Trump 'dangerous' to America
A former senior official in the administration of President Trump is supporting Democratic Challenger Joe Biden as the Democratic National Convention gets under way.
Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff for Homeland Security Department Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, backed the former vice president and presumptive Democratic candidate on Monday.
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Taylor, who called America's president "dangerous" and accused Trump of using his office 's powers repeatedly for political purposes, exclusively told Fox News that "this won't be the last one the president hears of me."
Taylor, a long-time Republican who worked as an adviser to the then GOP-controlled House Homeland Security Committee before moving to the Homeland Security Department as a political appointee in 2017, declared his endorsement in a video released by the Republican Voters Against Trump party.
"What we saw week in and week out was overwhelming for me, after two and a half years in that administration. We 'd go in to try and speak to him about a urgent national security issue.
-- Cyber-attack, the possibility of terrorism — he was not involved in those issues. They weren't goals for him,' said Taylor in the video.
"In view of what I have witnessed in the administration, I will support Joe Biden as president and although I am not a Democrat, although I disagree with key issues, I am sure that Joe Biden will secure the country and I am sure that he will not make the same mistakes as this president," he said.
In the video, Taylor alleged that the president ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA) to withhold disaster funding following catastrophic wildfires in California because Hillary Clinton was elected overwhelming in the 2016 election
"He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses were burned down by a wildfire because he was so rabid that people in the state of California didn't support him and it wasn't a base for him politically," Taylor charged. The White House shot back , saying that California had received federal disaster money to help with wildfire recovery, and that the president was very clear about why he was doing so. We clarified that it was "because of the state's inability to minimize risks from wildfire due to its extreme environmental policies."
Headlined in an opnion article in the Washington Post, "I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America," Taylor spotlighted an Oval Office meeting in March last year in which he alleged that the president "ordered us to close the border between California and Mexico."
Taylor added that Trump claimed that "it would be safer for him strategically than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border-or" dumping "illegal aliens into Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overwhelm their authorities, as he repeatedly suggested."
The White House responded by saying that the president "was very public about his intention of closing the Mexican border" and acknowledged the danger.
"Is that what got Mexico to negotiate an agreement. No border has ever been closed but it was the leadership of the President that succeeded.
White House deputy press secretary and president's special assistant Judd Deere told Fox News that Taylor "is another D.C. guy. Swamp who has never grasped the value of the president's agenda or why he was elected by the American people and simply just wants to cash in.
And he described Taylor as being among a group of "government bureaucrats that are just out for themselves, not this country's forgotten men and women."
Biden's endorsement of Taylor comes on the same day as many high-profile former Republican representatives speak at the Democratic Convention. The list includes former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate and a vocal leader in the Non-Trump movement, as well as former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former New York Rep. Susan Molinari, who gave a keynote speech at the 1996 Republican convention, and 2010 California GOP nominee Meg Whitman, who also supported the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney. Currently Whitman is CEO of Quibi, a streaming site that produces content for mobile devices.