Former Trump Staffer Says Home Was Broken Into Before Wedding
Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, has revealed his home was broken into before his wedding and a few months after he wrote the scathing 'Anonymous' op-ed about President Donald Trump.
Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a fiercely critical op-ed for The New York Times headlined "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."
The essay, published in September 2018, infuriated Trump and set off an investigation to unmask the detractor.
Taylor penned a follow-up book published in 2019 called A Warning and ultimately revealed himself as the author of both just days before Election Day in 2020.
But in his upcoming book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, an extract of which was obtained exclusively by Newsweek, he reveals his home in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood was broken into shortly before he was to leave for his wedding in Latin America in early 2019. There is no suggestion that anyone in the Trump administration was behind the break-in.
Taylor told Newsweek that he reported the incident, which occurred on January 2, 2019, to the Metropolitan Police Department.
"They sent a cop on the neighborhood beat to come chat with us," he said, adding that he was not sure if an official report was filed.
"The aftermath was handled by DHS. The Department dispatched internal security personnel to our house to do checks. They never found the intruder, and we still don't know what their motivation was. But the timing was very unsettling."
The Metropolitan Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security have been contacted for comment via email.
In his book, Taylor writes that the intruder "picked the locks of two doorways into the Capitol Hill row house, including an iron grate and a thick wooden front door that I found ajar.
"In the process, the individual somehow disabled the alarm system and the video doorbell, both of which went dark during the incident—blacked out for about five minutes."
But what was even stranger, Taylor writes, was that the inside of the house remained undisturbed. "Not a single possession was moved, broken, or stolen," he writes.
Taylor contacted the police, even though he didn't believe the break-in was the work of an ordinary burglar.
The Department of Homeland Security didn't either, he writes. Security personnel were dispatched to do a sweep, the former senior staffer writes, "particularly because of the sensitive communications equipment installed in my residence."
But Taylor recalls being alarmed for another reason.
"After the unsigned essay was released, I suspected that a foreign intelligence service might try to unmask Anonymous," he writes. "The fastest way for world leaders to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump was to flatter him, or attack his enemies. How better to curry the president's favor than to hunt down and expose the dissenter in his midst?"
But there was nothing in his home that tied him to the op-ed. "There was no paper trail anywhere, save for a single signed document affirming my authorship, which the Times kept in a locked safe at their headquarters," he writes.
The incident left him on edge about home security. "We upgraded our alarm system, replaced the deadbolt with a keypad lock, and added more video cameras which ran on batteries even if the power was cut off," he writes.
Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, by Miles Taylor, is available from July 18, published by Simon & Schuster.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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