21 - MiLE$ | Letra e Significado

COOPER: I'm joined now by Miles Taylor, a former Senior of Department of Homeland Security Official in the Trump administration. He has endorsed Joe Biden for president.

Miles, do you ever hear Vice President Pence push back and raise concerns about the president in your time with him? Because, obviously, Vice President Pence is used to normalize things the presidеnt has said or kind of make it seem like it's really not somеthing that's foremost in the president's mind when it clearly is.

TAYLOR: Look, Anderson, first of all, thanks for having me on. I feel bad for Vice President Pence. He is constantly put in this position, an impossible position, where his boss has said something completely contradictory to what Vice President Pence has to come out and say.

I'm sure I've got friends over in the west wing of the White House that are watching you and your program today and they know when I say this, that this is a frequent and constant problem that they face. Of course, the president believes and embraces the conspiracy theories because we would have to deal with it every day.

I mean, the cleanup work of a crazy tweet or him acknowledging any one of those conspiracy theories that you just went through. I mean, Puerto Rico's death toll, for instance, I mean, that was another example of something that we had to deal with.

So, yes, Pence is put in a very difficult position. I don't want to speak about the vice president's private engagements with the president. My focus here really is on Donald Trump and I've said from the get-go, I'm going to try my best to really focus on the president and his character and not so much the people around him.

But it won't surprise you when I say a lot of people in private are silent around the president, all right? When he makes an absurd claim, whether it's in the Oval Office or an event that we would be at with him, far too often, people would sit there with their mouths closed and they would sort of just laugh or shift uncomfortably in the seats when they probably should have spoken up. A lot of the people who used to speak up are largely gone from this administration.

COOPER: Yeah. We witnessed that firsthand when the president, you know, suggested at the podium that there should be experiments on our citizens with injecting bleach into them to possibly cure them of coronavirus or treat them of coronavirus and he actually, you know, turned to Dr. Birx who was there, another official, I think, it was from HHS was there, public health official. And Dr. Birx clearly was just, you know, silent and looking down. And the other official said, oh, yes, we'll essentially look into that.

I was fascinated by the president when he was asked about QAnon, finally, because it's obviously been percolating for a long time. His first response was, "they say very nice things about me," which I thought was so telling, which is something he says a lot. That seems to be the lens through which he views anybody, any group or any individual. "They say nice things about me so, therefore, I'm not going to say terrible things about them as long as they say nice things about me."

TAYLOR: Sure. I mean, Anderson, look back at Charlottesville. I think that we just marked the third anniversary of Charlottesville. And at the time, administration officials, myself included, were astounded that the president embraced some of these radical right-wing elements when he should have condemned them. But we all know now why he embraced them, because these are people who expressed support for President Trump and he's so drawn to that. He doesn't really care what they say.

I mean, this is not a one-time thing. We are at the point now where this is very, very emblematic of Donald Trump's character and the QAnon episode is just one more episode in a long line of episodes that extend before Charlottesville and since then.

COOPER: Just one more thing on QAnon. They believe President Trump is behind the scenes to stop this kabal of global sex traffickers, Democratic officials, and that he is secretly working with the Mueller team to get subpoenas against the Democrats, and that there was going to be this widespread purge. Is- You worked at the department of Homeland Security. Have you- Is President Trump involved in- you know obviously the U.S. works in sex trafficking issues around the globe, thankfully, because it is an actual But is he running kabal, this alleged kabal of Satan worshipping people who drink blood of children?

TAYLOR: You know this is what's so surreal Anderson we're talking about this and real Americans out believe it because the President says it. I mean that's why words matter and that's why his use of words is extremely irresponsible. Then the answer is no, okay? I helped run a department of 250,000 hard-working men and women that protect this country every day. DHS is the largest law enforcement organization in America. I saw no indication whatsoever, not only of a Q-Anon kabal of sex-traffickers, but I didn't see a deep-state working against the president, I didn't see any of these things that he regularly refers to as conspiracy theories. It is not real and we should recognize that when the President of the United States, the leader of the free world is overtaken by these carnival barkers, that it's probably going to have deleterious consequences for our nation's security and certainly I can tell you that it had a huge impact on morale in our department and throughout the federal government.

COOPER: There's a new report that suggests that Trump officials actually held a vote in 2018 during a White House meeting on whether to separate migrant families. Can you expand on that? Do you know about that?

TAYLOR: Yeah I could expand on it far beyond our program, but let me try to give you the shorter version.

At the very beginning of the administration, the White House pushed DHS, when John Kelly was Secretary, to institute a policy of ripping kids apart from their parents at the border. It didn't matter whether they showed up at a port of entry or crossed illegally, they said "let's rip them apart and that'll scare migrants so that they don't show up at the border."

Kelly rejected that out of hand, Nielson rejected that out of hand, so what the Attorney General of the White House decided to do was they said "Well look, we'll just prosecute everyone who crosses illegally." That ended up having the effect because there weren't enough resources to process people quickly of leaving them apart from their children for an unacceptably long period of time.

Secretary Nielson at the time was very, very concerned about that potential backlog after the Attorney General announced the policy. She pushed back against the White House again and again. The White House got so frustrated that finally at that date in the Spring, they sat down with a number of members of the Cabinet and the Senior Staff and they held a vote. And they said, "Look, you know Secretary Nielson says we're not ready, but do you think we're all ready? Do we have the resources to do this?" And look, I wasn't in the room for that, but I was very aware after the fact that I'd heard read-outs from those conversations. She was the one individual who said "No I'm not raising my hand. We are not ready to do this."

She was outvoted and the department of Homeland Security was put in the impossible position of implementing this policy and trying to do it quickly enough so that children wouldn't be apart from their parents for an unacceptably long period of time while they went through the justice system.

This is a textbook example of how policymaking went wrong in the Trump administration and it emanated from the top. The President is responsible for this. Now, granted, a lot of us- some of this is on us. I mean we could've done more to pump the brake. The Secretary certainly tried to behind-the-scenes. And then finally, rightfully, we convinced the President to sign an Executive Order that Summer ending the policy, but as I've said before Anderson, almost every single month that we were in the administration after that, the President said he wanted to reinstitute the policy and go further and revert back to that version they'd proposed in year one, that sickening version of "let's just rip them apart to scare migrants from coming to the border." That was one of the reasons that I ended up leaving this administration.

COOPER: You also have talked about behind-the-scenes when the President threatened to, quote, "bus and dump immigrants in sanctuary cities," which was- he talked about-I mean th t was highly reported. What was going on behind-the-scenes with that?

TAYLOR: So in roughly February of 2019, the President called us and he said exactly those words you just used. He said he wanted us to "bus and dump all the illegal immigrants we picked up at the border and go drop them at Democratic sanctuary cities." Basically a way to punish these cities because they would refuse to turn over illegal immigrants to immigration and customs enforcement.

We had our lawyers look at this. Anderson, we didn't need to have our lawyers look at this. This was patently illegal on it's face. This would be missuse of federal funds. That's not a legitimate law enforcement operation. So I was the one who personally went back to the White House to the Chief of Staff's office, to several other Senior advisor's offices, and I said, "Listen we think this is illegal, you need to let the President know this is not legal."

The President called us again and said "You need to do this." The Secretary at the time said "No sir, we're not able to do this." And of course, as is the case in the Trump administration, within days, as I remember, the President went out and tweeted that this policy idea was actively under consideration, even though we had told him it was illegal.

Anderson, this won't even be on page fourteen of any newspaper today, but again, we have another example of the President of the United States being told something is unlawful to do, yet he'll still try to go forward and implement those types of policies. There's a litany of examples of him embracing and trying to pursue illegal behavior.

COOPER: We all know that the President watches a lot of television and you say that one host served as the de-facto Chief of Staff.

TAYLOR: Yeah, this is really disheartening, but there was a period of time where, you know, at first jokingly we would say that FOX late-night host Lou Dobbs was the sort of shadow Chief of Staff of the Trump administration. Why did we say that? Because the President would call us and he would say, and pardon my language, he would say "Why the hell didn't you watch Lou Dobbs last night, you need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I wanna do." So if Lou Dobbs pedals a conspiracy thoery on late night television, or made an erronious claim about what should be done either at the border or with some law enforcement operation, the President wanted us to be tuning in every night.

My response to that was "I don't have any time to watch Lou Dobbs in the evening." You got us running a 250,000 person department and we're trying to play-you know guard against some of the most severe threats to this country. We can't be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him. This happened on a regular basis.

COOPER: You also talked about a meeting involving school violence that didn't go well. Well, this an example Anderson of the President being unable to focus on things that are very important.

TAYLOR: I think this was round the end of 2018. We went to meet with the President to talk about a very important issue: school safety. Okay, our mission was to tell him what he recommendations we had developed were around keeping kids from being shot in classrooms around our country. Alright, a sobering meeting, an important subject, we went in to discuss it. Within minutes of bringing up the subject, the President was instantly distracted, wanted to talk about the wall, and in fact, the words he used that day were "I want my wall to be a beautiful work of art, a beautiful work of art. Go make it a work of art and here's how to design it."

I'm sitting there, in my hands with recommendations about how to keep our nation's children safe in their classrooms. He doesn't want to talk about that. He wants to talk about the aesthetics of his border wall. This says a lot about his priorities. This says a lot about his indiscipline.

21

Descrição

Descrição ainda não cadastrada.

Letra

Gírias

Próxima música