July 13, 2023 • 45 mins
In Sept. 2018, the New York Times publishes an anonymous essay by a Trump administration official. The explosive op-ed reveals presidential misconduct and a White House on the brink. Series host Miles Taylor considers blowing the whistle, knowing it might destroy his life.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Just minutes ago, The New York Times published an anonymous
op ed that editors say was written by a senior
official in the Trump administration. The opbed is titled quote
I Am part of the resistance inside the Trump Administration,
and it details the way in which the author and
his or her colleagues are, according to the op ed,
working to thwart part of the President's agenda and his
(00:24):
worst inclinations.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
That's from Jake Tapper's show on CNN September fifth, twenty eighteen.
The network is reporting that The Times has done something
they almost never do, publish an opinion piece from an
unnamed author. It's a bombshell story, an unprecedented descent from
within the administration, and it dominates the news cycle for weeks.
(00:51):
Inside the White House, the President is, we'll just say,
not happy. He demands to know who it is and
aids begin a hunt to uncover the identity of the author,
but publicly they dismiss so called anonymous as a nobody.
Rudy Giuliani summed up their stance in an interview on
(01:12):
Chris Cuomo's CNN show.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
We don't know who this man is. We don't know
what position he's in this guy is obviously an unhinged guy,
a guy without many morals, without any principle.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That unhinged guy is me. My name is Miles Taylor,
and I've been called a lot of things. A coward,
a patriot, a trader, a hero, a sleezebag, and a
disgruntled employee. Before I was any of those, I was
(01:46):
a government official, serving as senior advisor and eventually Chief
of Staff at the US Department of Homeland Security under
President Donald Trump. Of all the labels I've picked up
along the way, the one I'm most interested in is whistleblower.
I still don't know how I feel about applying it
to myself. What does it mean when you blow the
(02:09):
whistle if you do it anonymously? And even though I
ultimately revealed my identity, I honestly still wonder did I
wait too long? Did speaking out actually change anything? And
was it worth losing almost everything? In this series, I'll
be talking to other people who faced these questions and
(02:32):
who tried to sound the alarm from within one of
the most turbulent presidential administrations in American history. Some of
them were in the President's inner circle, some ran government agencies,
but others were just career public servants working on the
front lines. Their circumstances were all very different, but there
(02:53):
are some common threads. The ethics around what they did
or the way they did it were sometimes confers using contradictory,
a gray area, And though most people who blew the
whistle paid some kind of price, a lot of times
the net of it, after all the uproar and the blowback,
and their lives were upended or their careers were wrecked,
(03:15):
the effect of what they did is often hard to see.
So I want to know was it worth it? This
is The Whistleblowers, Episode one, anonymous. It starts with the
(03:45):
election of one extremely unconventional president.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
The first weeks of the Trump administration were just an
incredible time.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
That's Michael Sheer, white house correspondent for the New York Times.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
To throw out everything you thought you knew because you
were in an administration that was actively hostile.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
We got to know each other early on in my
time in the administration, and it was a pretty typical Washington,
DC relationship where he's a reporter and I'm a source,
someone who's willing to talk mostly off the record. But
we sort of became friends for Michael, there were a
lot of early signals that this was going to be
an unusual time to be part of the White House
(04:27):
Press corps.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Unlike any other administration I've ever seen. You had people
inside that White House knifing each other in the back.
You literally had people trying to get other people ousted
from the White House. It was a chaotic, angry, deceitful,
backstabbing kind of place. And as journalists, I mean you
sort of, you know, make use of that, right.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Michael was not exactly alone in sensing that things were
different in this White House.
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Dogs.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Susan Glasser was founder of Politico magazine, Hello Hello, and
now writes for The New Yorker. And she's married to
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The Times.
Speaker 6 (05:16):
Good Good, How are you good?
Speaker 7 (05:18):
Save the world?
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Yet?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Talk about a power couple. When we get to their house,
there's a television news crew that's leaving just as we're
getting there to do a podcast. This says everything about
this couple that you need to say. They have a TV.
Speaker 8 (05:39):
This is Ellie.
Speaker 9 (05:41):
Ellie is a Golden Retriever Labrador mix.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
With us.
Speaker 8 (05:50):
Strong views herself on you know the story of the
last few years.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
That's what I asked Peter, Susan and Ellie the Dog
about those early days in the West wing of the
White House.
Speaker 6 (06:02):
There was no question that in those early weeks, reporters
in general were hearing a lot from people who had
seen a previous White House and were shocked to see
what the new White House was like, and they were afraid.
They really felt that things were on the edge of
some sort of precipice.
Speaker 8 (06:18):
From the very start, there was an element of the
court of the Mad King. It was more resembling of
court politics than it was of a modern White House.
I've interviewed warlords in Afghanistan that functioned in a roughly
similar way, where basically the retainers sit outside, you know,
the leader's office, wait for a chance to slip in
(06:40):
and you know, get their FaceTime with the Great Man.
It was all about access to this one guy, and
that's the way he wanted it.
Speaker 10 (06:47):
This administration is running like a fine tuned machine that's
being very much misrepresented about and we can't let that happen.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
So how did I end up working for the Mad King.
I grew up in a small town in Indiana, and
I was a teenager on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Like a lot of people, especially young people, at that moment,
it changed my life. I wanted to go into public
service to help protect the country. So that's what I did.
(07:22):
I went to Washington and worked my way up the
ranks on Capitol Hill, in the House Speaker's office, in
the Bush White House, and then back to Congress again
as a National Security aid on various House committees. I
thought of myself as a McCain style Republican, pro deregulation,
smart tax reform, a strong military. What I was not
(07:46):
was a maga person.
Speaker 11 (07:49):
Right now a historic moment, we can now project the
winner of the presidential racie that projects Donald Trump wins
the presidency, the business tycoon, a TV personnelity.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I remember watching from a bar on Capitol Hill when
Wolf Blitzer proclaimed that Donald Trump was the winner. Most
of the people that I talked to in government at
that time had real anxiety about what was happening. But
they felt like the answer to this very unique situation
was to lean on experienced people and stock the place
with so called grownups. Yeah, that would keep things from
(08:24):
going off the rails. In fact, all over cable TV.
Political pundits sounded downright optimistic when the administration announced its appointees,
like Joe Scarborough on his MSNBC show Morning Joe, the
day that General Jim Mattis was named Secretary of Defense.
Speaker 9 (08:41):
Mattis is everything this new administration would need.
Speaker 10 (08:45):
At the Pentagon, I think relieved.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
I guess is a good word to use.
Speaker 6 (08:49):
It's just hearing from the top foreign policy thinkers.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
John Kelly, a respected four star Marine general, was tapped
as Secretary of Homeland Security. Key and Kirsten Nielsen, a
cybersecurity expert from the Bush White House, convinced me to
come to DHS, and that's the Department of Homeland Security
for anyone who's not used to DC's blizzard of acronyms.
(09:14):
My job would be to serve as the secretary's top
intelligence and counter terrorism advisor. Now, to be clear, I
didn't want to work for Donald Trump the White House.
It seemed too chaotic, But I was eager to help
what we called the Axis of adults.
Speaker 8 (09:33):
A lot of even people who were verulently opposed to
Donald Trump, they still had the instincts of, you know,
kind of official Washington.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Susan Glasser again, and I.
Speaker 8 (09:44):
Think got kicked in. And that's why a lot of
the elder statesmen were recommending that people go and work for.
Speaker 6 (09:51):
Trump, people who had not been part of the campaign
necessarily or part of the permanent Republican Washington who thought, okay,
well we get help here. Of course he didn't know
what he was talking you out in the campaign, but
once he gets in there, he'll be more responsible.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
We can help that. Well, Peter, we were wrong. In
the first year of the Trump administration. I tried to
ignore the daily controversies coming out of the Oval Office
(10:24):
and just focus on my job at DHS disrupting terrorist plots,
blocking Russian interference in our democracy, and the ever present
nuclear threat from North Korea. But the White House seemed
to be in perpetual chaos. Cabinet secretaries would drop everything
to rush across town to the Oval Office to persuade
(10:44):
Trump not to do terrible things. But not all of
these fire drills stayed quiet. People started talking. Jesse Eisnger
of Pro Publica was one of the journalists covering the
White House. Jesse has a kind of field guide to
Washington for reporters. There are sources leakers and whistleblowers.
Speaker 9 (11:05):
Sources are people who are telling you what's going on
on a daily basis. Then there's sort of a different
kind of source, somebody who's leaking material to you. It
could be leaking out of personal peak. They could be
leaking out of righteousness, or they could be leaking for
an advantage because it makes them more their principle look good.
(11:27):
And then finally there's a whistleblower. I sort of joke
somewhat insensitively that every whistleblower you know on a scale
of one to ten, where ten is absolutely, you know,
off the charts, crazy, one is crazy. You are just
boiling over with consternation, anxiety, rage at some wrong that
(11:54):
you're seeing.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
When most people think of whistleblowers, their mind goes to
something like All the President Men, the film from the
mid seventies, Robert Redford in a dark parking garage as
Deep Throat emerges from the shadows to reveal the ugly
truth about Richard Nixon. Listen, I'm tired of your chicken
shit games.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
I don't want hands.
Speaker 12 (12:18):
I need to know what you know.
Speaker 5 (12:22):
And it was a harument operation.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Whistleblowers aren't new to the Trump White House, and as
Jesse points out, the punishment of whistleblowers is definitely not new.
Speaker 9 (12:34):
We shouldn't pretend that it was easy for whistleblowers before.
The Obama administration was quite bad from a free press
perspective on people who leaked information to journalists.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
During the Obama years, whistleblower became kind of a dirty
word after government employees like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden
leaked classified documents directly to the media. Yeah, but when
Trump came into office, he took a different approach. It
seemed like he would punish any leaker, any whistleblower for anything,
(13:10):
especially if it had to do with him.
Speaker 13 (13:13):
Gave the whistle blow for the information, because that's us
to a spot. You know what we used to do
in the old days, where we were smart, the spies
and tracy we used to hand than we do them.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
That's President Trump venting in a closed door meeting about whistleblowers. Ironically,
the recording itself was leaked to the Los Angeles Times.
Here's Jesse Eisinger again.
Speaker 9 (13:41):
It was retribution on steroids. They were quite aggressive legally.
They were searching for whistleblowers constantly threatening them with firing,
threatening them with legal action, and then of course there
were personal attacks from Trump himself followers.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
I thought the adults in the room were keeping the
chaos contained, but then things really started to break bad.
Speaker 14 (14:10):
This rate here is a Rio Grande processing center. At
this point, more families have been separated leaving this facility
than any other in the country. One and seventy four
children have left this facility being separated from their parents.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
That report from Diane Gallagher on CNN was one of
the first times the public heard about the policy that
came to be known as family separation. From inside DHS,
I watched this slow moving train wreck as the President
tried to force the Department, with all of its complicated
functions and facets, into some kind of personal anti immigration army.
Speaker 15 (14:51):
One of the most important missions of DHS is its
law enforcement mission. This is a law in force agency.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Family separation was a preventable humanitarian disaster. Thousands of migrant
families were split up at the border in the process.
And let me be clear about something, This never should
have happened. When it was conceived. I wasn't working on immigration,
but after I watched the situation spiral I stepped in
(15:31):
to help write an executive order to end it. By
then it was too late. The damage was done and
I felt like it was time to leave. But the
President didn't stop there. The same summer, he ordered US
to shut off federal aid to wildfire victims in California
because it was a democratic blue state that didn't support him.
(15:54):
He threatened to cut the number of refugees allowed into
the United States down to zero. We fought the White
House to beat back these ideas, but it was like
trench warfare. The attacks kept coming and coming. Like when
Trump told us he wanted to pull out of NATO
or expand what he called the weak ass travel ban,
(16:16):
something else needed.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
To be done.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
It was August twenty eighteen. I was in Sydney, Australia,
to meet with US allies about a range of threats.
It was three in the morning when my phone started
buzzing on the nightstand. I looked over and saw it
was the White House. I answered, and I was told
the President was furious he saw American flags flying at
(16:55):
half staff across the United States in honor of the
late Senator John McCain, who had just passed away. Trump
hated McCain, and he wanted DHS to call for the
flags to be raised back up. Now, there were a
lot of reasons to snap during the Trump administration. I'll
(17:15):
be the first to admit that, but this happened to
be my final straw. So, half asleep, jet lagged, I'm
laying there and I decided to do something. I pop
up and go over to my desk in the hotel room,
and I just started writing. I wrote about the dysfunction
of the administration, about how members of Trump's cabinet were
(17:38):
grappling with his immoral and illegal impulses every day, and
how they thought he was a danger to the country,
so much so that some of them even discussed invoking
what is known as the twenty fifth Amendment to remove
the president if it got any worse. At first, this
was just kind of a journal entry, but then I
(17:58):
had a thought, and before I could talk myself out
of it, I picked up my phone and using Signal,
the encrypted messaging app, I sent what I'd written over
to a trusted contact. This was someone I knew would
be able to get it in the hands of someone
else at The New York Times, and that ended up
being an editor on the opinion page named Jim Dowell.
(18:25):
I don't know anything about what your reaction was when
vssay first came in, because I was scared shitless.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
On the other end, I.
Speaker 7 (18:32):
Probably should have been scared more shitless than I was.
And I won't get into who the interlocutor was that
set us up because that remains a secret, but we
both had immense trust in that person. Everybody had an
opinion about whatever Trump was saying in any given day,
but the idea that we could get somebody who could
(18:55):
sort of pull this scrim back a little bit and
help us look inside was obviously really enticing to us.
After I read it, I felt like, well, we can
work with this. I marched it over to my boss,
James Bennett, the opinion editor. I just laid it out
from he's making the case to be anonymous. I think
that's a legitimate case to be made here because this
(19:15):
perspective is so interesting and I think valuable. We rarely
do this, but we have done it a couple times
where we grant the anonymity to an outbed writer. I'd
like to make the case for this one. He read
it and he agreed. Then we marched over to the
publisher's office and talked to him about it. He thought
this was just so unique of a situation and was
(19:38):
willing to take our word for who you were. That
was that. It seems to me there's a pretty valid
case to be made for people within the bureaucracy to
maintain their positions when bad decisions above them are being made,
and to hold the line sometimes.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
I remember thinking when I sent you all the piece
that whoever Jim is, I'm sure he's very well meaning,
but I highly doubt he's going to be able to
protect me. Just my experience in Washington had been nothing
stays a secret for long.
Speaker 7 (20:13):
If you recall, you had to sign a contract with us,
which every writer has to do, right, and that was
the only place anywhere your name was written down in
the files of the New York Times. We just kept
the circle incredibly tight, and it worked.
Speaker 16 (20:30):
Everyone in Washington, and at this point across the country
is now trying to figure out who is behind this
anonymous op ed in the New York Times. The President
is reportedly furious.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
The story dominated cable news, from a round table with
Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC to the Late Night comedy shows.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Some folks think they know who wrote the op ed
because of an unusual word in this passage, which describes
John McCain's legacy as a load star for restoring honor
to public life and our national dialogue. That word might
be a clue because it happens to be one of
Vice President Mike Pence's favorites.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Colbert and others pointed the finger at Mike Pence, but
the Vice President was quick to distance himself.
Speaker 17 (21:19):
Well, I think it's a disgrace.
Speaker 18 (21:22):
The anonymous editorial publishing the New York Times represents a
new low in American journalism.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
It provoked an even bigger reaction than Jim or I
had ever expected.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
I must have been in a meeting or something walked
out of my office like thirty minutes later, and people
were just saying, oh my god. I think it was
within what an hour the President had said something, tweeted
out something I think kind of angrily attacking you as
a coward in the New York Times, as a failed enterprise.
(21:54):
We had no idea it would explode the way it did.
Speaker 10 (21:58):
We have somebody in what I call the failing New
York Times.
Speaker 15 (22:02):
That's talking about he's part of the resistance within the
Trump administration.
Speaker 10 (22:06):
This is what we have to deal with. The dishonest
media is really a disgrace.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
The Times was forced to increase security at its headquarters.
Speaker 7 (22:14):
In the threatening tone of the President and his supporters.
Did I think worry that the Times in a couple
of ways, bomb threats, death threats were a concern. There
was a concern, frankly, that our electronics would not be saved.
We weren't using signal all the time, but we sure
as heck started after that ran tensions were so high
(22:37):
and the President was so bellicose.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Remember I'm still in my job at DHS, living a
kind of double life. But the hunt for anonymous was on.
I was sure any minute I'd be outed. White House
staff had their marching orders find the Trader and in
the meantime, trash them.
Speaker 19 (22:58):
They do need to be found. In the fact that
they're working in government against the President and essentially against
the American people is not good.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Stephanie Grisham was Press secretary for First Lady Malania Trump.
That's from Fox and Friends on Fox News. President Trump's
favorite show, Odds Are Good that he was watching as
Stephanie blasted this anonymous character as a treason his coward.
Stephanie ended up having her own change of heart and
(23:25):
we went from enemies to friends, so we can talk.
Speaker 17 (23:28):
About it now.
Speaker 19 (23:32):
I think that level of paranoia started to go bonkers
when that ourbed dropped on our end. It was just
immediate finger pointing. It was immediately who who did this?
But interestingly, the thought wasn't in any agencies. You know,
we were so self centered at this administration. If you
were called a senior administration official, it meant you were
(23:55):
in the White House.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
That's the realization I came to as the year went on,
that he was starting to spin out, and that the
blowback of that decision to wear a mask was in
part making the president more paranoid and potentially creating a
more volatile situation. A couple months after the op ed published,
(24:18):
after John Kelly was fired, another writer, Brett Stevens at
the New York Times wrote a piece, and it was
a piece directed at Anonymous. His message was basically, dear Anonymous,
whoever you are, if you're still in this administration, you're wrong.
The adults have been booted, and if you don't want
to become one of Trump's flunkies. Now's the time to go.
(24:42):
And I read that and I thought, he's right. I
left the administration a couple months later, and my thought was, yeah,
you know, an eight hundred word op ed wasn't enough
to explain who this guy is. So I quit. And
then I'm met a representative from a publisher to make
(25:03):
a much louder statement. We had exactly one meeting. It
was a secret meeting without any electronic devices in an
empty room. In fact, to avoid detection, we devised a
multi layered communications system with encrypted messages and air gapped
devices and swapped simcards and burner phones. Even so, the
(25:26):
contents of the book leaked weeks ahead of its release.
Of course, Rachel Maddow shared excerpts on her show on MSNBC.
Speaker 17 (25:36):
This still anonymous author has written a book, and it's
called quote a Warning. This author is now essentially saying
that if you were comforted at all by the fact
that there were officials inside this administration who were keeping
things on track and thwarting the president's worst and most
misguided impulses, you maybe shouldn't be comforted by that anymore.
Speaker 19 (26:00):
So did you write the book after you left if
your up ed took it to one level. The book
just blew his stack.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Meanwhile, Stephanie Grisham replaced Sarah Huckabee Sanders as press secretary
over at the White House, and she had to deal
with a very angry president. He was angry because this
author Anonymous was now urging voters not to re elect him.
Speaker 19 (26:25):
He was just nuts about it. It was all he
thought about. It would be in meetings about you know
what national security, let's say, and halfway through he would
look at anybody, do you know who anonymous is? Everybody
got tasked with finding who Anonymous was, and so for
me personally, it was frustrating. Here's another thing now that
we can't focus on work because we have to find
(26:46):
whoever this you know, son of a bitch is.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Meanwhile, at the failing New York Times.
Speaker 7 (26:53):
The effort to figure out your identity became this insane distraction.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Times of Opinion editor Jim Dowe.
Speaker 7 (27:02):
It wasn't just the president. It was I'm sure a
lot of people around him. It was people in my business.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
My original piece ran on the opinion page. Those editors
are totally separate from the newsroom at the Times, which
means that times reporters were actually doing their own digging
as it happens. I know two of the journalists at
the paper who were trying to track down the identity
of anonymous. One of them was White House reporter Michael
(27:29):
Sheer and his colleague Julie Hirshfield Davis.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Nobody in the news section, nobody in the Washington Bureau,
none of my editors, nobody knew that it was you.
When nobody could figure it out, I think there was
something of a bit of a relief for us anyway,
because it's like, well that if one of us did
figure it out, it would be a complicated situation. Try
to figure out I suspect.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Except you did well late.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
That was later. Yes, I think the first time we
met was at a Mexican food restaurant, La where we
had a lengthy dinner with some drinks. Julie had been
a White House reporter along with me. She and I
had both covered immigration in various forms for years. Once
we had decided to start writing a book, we started
reaching out to everybody that we could we could think
(28:16):
of in the administration, people who had left the administration,
you know, who could sort of describe what was it
really like behind the scenes. That was our mission.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
I got to know Michael and Julie pretty well. Actually,
I wanted to help them with their reporting to shine
a light on Trump's immigration policies. So I told them
some of the pretty horrific things that I witnessed in
the administration. When they read the new book a warning
by Anonymous, a couple of the details felt pretty familiar,
(28:47):
like they'd heard this story before from me. I think
just before Thanksgiving in twenty nineteen, I was driving down
to South Carolina to go spend time with family for
the holiday, got a message on signal from you. You
made it sound very urgent.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Basically what had happened was that the Trump Book had
come out, still anonymous, and I devoured it, of course,
And there were two different anecdotes that were in your
book that were also in our book, and that frankly
you had told us in some of those dinners, and
that hadn't appeared anywhere else. You know, there had already
been other books at that point that had come out.
(29:29):
There had been lots of investigative reporting in the Post,
in the Journal and Politico and elsewhere, and I couldn't
remember seeing those anecdotes anywhere else, and here they were
again in your or in the anonymous book, and I said,
oh my god, that's it's it's Miles, that's who wrote
this book. So that day I sent you the message,
(29:53):
you called back. We just came right out and said,
we know that you're anonymous, that you wrote the book
in the article, and if I recall, ah, you were,
shall I say not truthful?
Speaker 2 (30:03):
You can say. I remember in that moment driving thinking,
oh fuck.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
I think we were on speaking like I think you
had your family in the car and we were on
speaker too. I remember when we got off and we
had this conversation and we said, well, a couple possibilities.
One is we were wrong, he's not the author. Another
is he's a very very good liar.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
After the book came out, I was pretty determined to
come forward and talk about what I'd seen within the
administration in my own name and actually own it, especially
with reporters hot on my trail. So in the late
summer of twenty twenty, just a couple months before the election,
that's what I did, sort of security to keep our
(30:48):
country safe.
Speaker 12 (30:49):
What we saw was terrifying The president wanted to exploit
the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes
and to fuel his own agenda. Even though I'm not
a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I
have to support Joe Biden for president, and I'm confident
in will.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
That video, produced by a group called Republican Voters Against Trump,
was kind of an attack ad for the last leg
of the presidential campaign. It went viral, and it made
Trump crazy. In his usual style, the President claimed he
didn't even know me, despite the fact that I'd spent
hours and hours with him in the Oval office, on
(31:28):
Air Force One, and in the White House situation room.
Speaker 10 (31:31):
He's a lowlife. Anybody that does that is a lowlife
to me, and it's a shame.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
I never met him, I never heard of him before.
Speaker 13 (31:38):
He's a bad people, He's a sick people.
Speaker 10 (31:40):
He's a lowlife.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Okay, to be clear, I still have not revealed at
this point that I was the anonymous author of the
op Eden book. That's because I knew the second I
did that would become the news story. So first I
wanted to talk about who Donald Trump really was, why
he represented, in my view, a danger to the country.
(32:01):
So I denied that I was the anonymous author, over
and over to anyone who asked, here, I am on
Anderson Cooper three point sixty lying about it.
Speaker 11 (32:13):
There was not bad.
Speaker 19 (32:14):
There was a book by someone calling themselves anonymous.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Are you aware of who that is?
Speaker 18 (32:19):
I'm not look And that was a parlor game that
happened in Washington, d C. Of a lot of folks
trying to think of who that might be. I've got
my own thoughts about who that might be, but you know,
you're not a president. I wear a mask for two things,
Anderson halloweens and pandemics.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
After I left DHS, I took a job in the
tech sector, but with the presidential campaign heating up, I
felt like I couldn't sit on the sidelines. I went
on unpaid leave so I could actually travel around the
country and just tell Americans what I'd witnessed, why this
man was unfit for office. And I set out to
(33:00):
recruit others to come forward to Thankfully, a lot of
them said yes.
Speaker 20 (33:05):
His former chief of staff, John Kelly, who, according to
Nucyan and reporting, has said this of the president to
friends of his and I'm quoting him now. The depths
of his dishonesty is just astounding to me, the dishonesty.
He is the most flawed person I have ever met
in my life.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
I knew that time was up. I'd said as much
as I could about Donald Trump in my own name,
but there was something that I hadn't revealed, which was
that I'd been sounding the alarm for years about him
without my name attached. Frankly, I was procrastinating, and the
honest truth is that I was pretty scared. I was
(33:47):
scared to unmask myself as Anonymous because I knew the
second I did, the revelation would blow up everything in
my life. But at the same time, keeping the secret
was already causing my life to implode. I was basically
pretending to be two different people, and I was also
sending a really terrible message because by staying in the shadows,
(34:10):
Anonymous was basically saying, you don't have to speak the truth,
you can hide. And now was not the time to hide.
It was time for people to speak out before it
was too late. And in the meantime, I found out
that innocent people were getting blamed.
Speaker 19 (34:26):
Did you know Peter Navarro put together a whole report
dossier about who Anonymous was.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Peter Navarro was one of Trump's most loyal White House aides,
and he was hell bent on finding out who Anonymous was,
and he wanted to do it for the president. As
Stephanie Grisham recalled, Peter thought he found the culprit, and
he claimed it was Victoria Coates, who was Trump's deputy
National Security advisor.
Speaker 19 (34:49):
Peter lot together a report with a laminated folder and everything.
It was color coded. I mean, it was a great,
like ninth grade English project. But he put it together.
And I laugh about this because everything's okay, right, Victoria's okay,
We're okay. But you know, he had put in this
report that the author of Anonymous was clearly a woman,
(35:12):
because they were very empathetic towards mothers. He went to
the president, he went to everyone. It was Victoria in
the White House, and she was going to be fired.
Poor Victoria in the meantime is going through hell. Everybody's
ignoring her, nobody wants to talk to her, no one
trusts her. That's I think the point that I was
most angry with you, as Anonymous, because I just was
(35:34):
watching this woman suffer and somebody like Peter Navarro, who's
probably the most batshit crazy of our group, you know,
deciding who it.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Was that other people experienced blowback for what I wrote
caused me so much more inner turmoil than it was
worth dealing with the stress and the anticipation of my
life getting detonated. There's no question that I became an alcoholic.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
And we have some breaking news for you. The identity
of anonymous revealed. Now CNN has learned the identity of
that anonymous author, which has been a source of a
great deal of speculation. That anonymous senior administration official is
Miles Taylor.
Speaker 21 (36:20):
No anonymous, you know, there's anonymous that everybody's been looking
for that law enforcement could have found early if they
wanted to. Turned out to be a low level staffer,
a sleeves bag. This is a disgrace to our country.
It shouldn't happen, and he should be prosecuted.
Speaker 15 (36:38):
Are you listening to me.
Speaker 21 (36:39):
Back in watching He should be prosecuted.
Speaker 5 (36:43):
Bad things are going to happen to him.
Speaker 21 (36:44):
It's like a horrible treason, this horrible thing that you
could do this that you can get away with it.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Bad things are going to happen to him. Trump said,
and he was right. His supporters made sure of it.
Information was doxed all over the web, and I got
a lot of phone calls. What you're doing to President
Trump is disgusting. You're disgusting people.
Speaker 6 (37:11):
You're evil, and you're.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Gonna go down.
Speaker 17 (37:13):
Myles Taylor, what the fuck are you thinking going against Trump?
You and your cronies, Your career is ruined.
Speaker 8 (37:20):
You my friends are.
Speaker 12 (37:22):
A piece of ship.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
You are a trader.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
You're dumb motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
You're the dumbest motherfucker I must have ever met.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Sorry, fucking pieces.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Of ship, you fucking political dick.
Speaker 21 (37:34):
And I am so sad morning here.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
You are a pathetic person. The harassment was NonStop. It
was like an avalanche of hate. And as all of
it was happening, my anxiety went completely through the roof
(38:05):
and I did what some people do in those situations.
I drank more, and first that was to cope, kind of,
to make it all go away. I would get so
anxious sometimes though, especially before television appearances, that I'd go
pour whiskey in my coffee cup and take it with
me for the TV hit. In fact, if you saw
me on a news network in October twenty twenty. There's
(38:26):
a good chance I was tipsy, maybe even drunk. Trump
supporters confronted me and restaurants at the airport wherever they
saw me. Others sent creepy packages to my house, sometimes
with pictures of me and my family members and photos
taken outside of their homes, photos of my nieces. Most
(38:47):
of it was tough talk. I knew that, but some
of it resulted in criminal cases that are still open
today that my family is still dealing with. I talked
to Stephanie about all of this. It was, in a
lot of ways worse than I imagined. You know, had
to leave my home, leave my job, lost my personal relationship,
(39:10):
had to have a bodyguard for a few months because
the death threats, lost a lot of friends. Any One
of those things I think could send someone into a
little bit of a tailspin. All of them happened like
within a week of each other. After I came forward.
The social media vitriol was explosive. I found myself on
(39:35):
election Day sitting in a safe house, wasted with pills
in a firearm, thinking, what's the fucking point?
Speaker 10 (39:45):
You know what?
Speaker 19 (39:45):
I find shocking listening to you say what you just
said is that I wasn't shocked. I mean, it's shocking
to me how normal that sounds, as having been there
and dealt with it. I literally sat there and listened
to you just now, as if you were just giving
(40:06):
me your grocery list for tonight.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Stephanie obviously had her own experience with this administration, and
trust me, we will come to her. In my case,
amidst the fallout, I was grateful to find support, sometimes
in the most unlikely places. Here's New York Times reporter
Michael Scher.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
The kind of back and forth that I have with
my very best sources, it is personal at some level.
We get to know each other over these years, and
you understand the trials and tribulations that people go through.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
You were the only reporter who, I think, after all
of that, actually sat down with me at one point
and looked me in the eye and said, how are
you doing? You know, how are you actually doing? After
it all happened, I had had a good deal of
(41:01):
suicidal ideation for a few months, and I think by
the time we got together things were better. Kind of
therapy and was on anidepressants and that sort of thing.
But I remember just being asked the question I remember
being you know, that was significant for me.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
I'm glad. I mean, look, I think one of the
things that we forget in Washington on all of the
different sides of these crazy roles that we play, right,
whether it's journalists or administration official, or lawmaker or congressional
aid or what have you. I mean, you know, there
is a tendency to forget that we're all real people too.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Thankfully I got the help I needed, and I'm proud
to report that I'm one year sober. But in the
course of producing this podcast, I found out that others
who spoke out also ended up in dark places, and
not all of them have found their way out yet.
Times editor Jim daw.
Speaker 7 (41:55):
Have you ever regretted it?
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Then?
Speaker 2 (41:57):
I think my regret, in hind sight, if there is one,
was just not unmasking myself sooner. I think I was
wrong that revealing my name at the last minute would
somehow be more helpful, because now I realize how many
people were scared to come out because there wasn't someone
(42:19):
else out there. They weren't going to be the first
one to do it. I think anonymity is one of
the biggest threats to our democracy right now, in that
people being scared to come forward under their own names
is causing sort of a collective crouch that has allowed
people like Donald Trump to exploit it. I think that's
(42:42):
a huge danger, and I guess that's ironic coming from me.
So so that's what this show is going to be about,
the personal stories of people who decided to speak out
at a time when shutting up would have just been
so much easier. I'm talking to fellow whistleblowers, and I'm
(43:04):
still not sure I accept the term, but I'm asking
them the same questions that I wrestle with when I
think about my own story. What was the line in
the sand? Why not say something sooner? What was the cost?
Was it worth it? And for all of us? Was
it enough? Next time on the Whistleblowers Reality winner went
(43:33):
from a decorated Air Force veteran with a pretty bright
future to a convicted felon after she was arrested for
leaking NSA documents. But the truth is more complicated than
the story of a patriot turned trader. Whistler is a
(44:00):
production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with best Case Studios
and Arc Media. It was hosted by Me Miles Taylor
and written by me Isabel Evans and Adam Pinkiss. Isabel
Evans is also our producer. Associate producers are Hannah leebelwoodzs Lockhart,
and Ashley Warren. Darcy Peacle is consulting producer. Zach Herman
is the VP of Development of ARC Media. This episode
(44:21):
was edited by Daniel Tuik with assistance from Max Michael Miller.
Original music is by James Newberry. Executive producers are Me
Miles Taylor, Adam Pinkis for Best Case Studios, and Barrick
Goodman for ARC Media. Beth Ann Mcaluso is our executive
producer for iHeartMedia, along with Ali Perry. Special thanks to
Kevin Famm, all of our contributors and interviewees, and our
(44:42):
intern Anna Levitt, and a big thanks to the teams
at Government Accountability Project and Whistleblower Aid, two of the
best organizations for government and private sector whistleblowers seeking legal support.
Follow and rate the Whistleblowers on the podcast site of
your choice to hear what these whistleblowers and others have
to say about what they believe will happen under a
(45:02):
second Trump administration or in the White House of AMaGA successor.
You can pick up my new book, Blowback, from Simon
and Schuster
Just minutes ago, The New York Times published an anonymous
op ed that editors say was written by a senior
official in the Trump administration. The opbed is titled quote
I Am part of the resistance inside the Trump Administration,
and it details the way in which the author and
his or her colleagues are, according to the op ed,
working to thwart part of the President's agenda and his
(00:24):
worst inclinations.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
That's from Jake Tapper's show on CNN September fifth, twenty eighteen.
The network is reporting that The Times has done something
they almost never do, publish an opinion piece from an
unnamed author. It's a bombshell story, an unprecedented descent from
within the administration, and it dominates the news cycle for weeks.
(00:51):
Inside the White House, the President is, we'll just say,
not happy. He demands to know who it is and
aids begin a hunt to uncover the identity of the author,
but publicly they dismiss so called anonymous as a nobody.
Rudy Giuliani summed up their stance in an interview on
(01:12):
Chris Cuomo's CNN show.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
We don't know who this man is. We don't know
what position he's in this guy is obviously an unhinged guy,
a guy without many morals, without any principle.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That unhinged guy is me. My name is Miles Taylor,
and I've been called a lot of things. A coward,
a patriot, a trader, a hero, a sleezebag, and a
disgruntled employee. Before I was any of those, I was
(01:46):
a government official, serving as senior advisor and eventually Chief
of Staff at the US Department of Homeland Security under
President Donald Trump. Of all the labels I've picked up
along the way, the one I'm most interested in is whistleblower.
I still don't know how I feel about applying it
to myself. What does it mean when you blow the
(02:09):
whistle if you do it anonymously? And even though I
ultimately revealed my identity, I honestly still wonder did I
wait too long? Did speaking out actually change anything? And
was it worth losing almost everything? In this series, I'll
be talking to other people who faced these questions and
(02:32):
who tried to sound the alarm from within one of
the most turbulent presidential administrations in American history. Some of
them were in the President's inner circle, some ran government agencies,
but others were just career public servants working on the
front lines. Their circumstances were all very different, but there
(02:53):
are some common threads. The ethics around what they did
or the way they did it were sometimes confers using contradictory,
a gray area, And though most people who blew the
whistle paid some kind of price, a lot of times
the net of it, after all the uproar and the blowback,
and their lives were upended or their careers were wrecked,
(03:15):
the effect of what they did is often hard to see.
So I want to know was it worth it? This
is The Whistleblowers, Episode one, anonymous. It starts with the
(03:45):
election of one extremely unconventional president.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
The first weeks of the Trump administration were just an
incredible time.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
That's Michael Sheer, white house correspondent for the New York Times.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
To throw out everything you thought you knew because you
were in an administration that was actively hostile.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
We got to know each other early on in my
time in the administration, and it was a pretty typical Washington,
DC relationship where he's a reporter and I'm a source,
someone who's willing to talk mostly off the record. But
we sort of became friends for Michael, there were a
lot of early signals that this was going to be
an unusual time to be part of the White House
(04:27):
Press corps.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Unlike any other administration I've ever seen. You had people
inside that White House knifing each other in the back.
You literally had people trying to get other people ousted
from the White House. It was a chaotic, angry, deceitful,
backstabbing kind of place. And as journalists, I mean you
sort of, you know, make use of that, right.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Michael was not exactly alone in sensing that things were
different in this White House.
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Dogs.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Susan Glasser was founder of Politico magazine, Hello Hello, and
now writes for The New Yorker. And she's married to
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The Times.
Speaker 6 (05:16):
Good Good, How are you good?
Speaker 7 (05:18):
Save the world?
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Yet?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Talk about a power couple. When we get to their house,
there's a television news crew that's leaving just as we're
getting there to do a podcast. This says everything about
this couple that you need to say. They have a TV.
Speaker 8 (05:39):
This is Ellie.
Speaker 9 (05:41):
Ellie is a Golden Retriever Labrador mix.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
With us.
Speaker 8 (05:50):
Strong views herself on you know the story of the
last few years.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
That's what I asked Peter, Susan and Ellie the Dog
about those early days in the West wing of the
White House.
Speaker 6 (06:02):
There was no question that in those early weeks, reporters
in general were hearing a lot from people who had
seen a previous White House and were shocked to see
what the new White House was like, and they were afraid.
They really felt that things were on the edge of
some sort of precipice.
Speaker 8 (06:18):
From the very start, there was an element of the
court of the Mad King. It was more resembling of
court politics than it was of a modern White House.
I've interviewed warlords in Afghanistan that functioned in a roughly
similar way, where basically the retainers sit outside, you know,
the leader's office, wait for a chance to slip in
(06:40):
and you know, get their FaceTime with the Great Man.
It was all about access to this one guy, and
that's the way he wanted it.
Speaker 10 (06:47):
This administration is running like a fine tuned machine that's
being very much misrepresented about and we can't let that happen.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
So how did I end up working for the Mad King.
I grew up in a small town in Indiana, and
I was a teenager on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Like a lot of people, especially young people, at that moment,
it changed my life. I wanted to go into public
service to help protect the country. So that's what I did.
(07:22):
I went to Washington and worked my way up the
ranks on Capitol Hill, in the House Speaker's office, in
the Bush White House, and then back to Congress again
as a National Security aid on various House committees. I
thought of myself as a McCain style Republican, pro deregulation,
smart tax reform, a strong military. What I was not
(07:46):
was a maga person.
Speaker 11 (07:49):
Right now a historic moment, we can now project the
winner of the presidential racie that projects Donald Trump wins
the presidency, the business tycoon, a TV personnelity.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I remember watching from a bar on Capitol Hill when
Wolf Blitzer proclaimed that Donald Trump was the winner. Most
of the people that I talked to in government at
that time had real anxiety about what was happening. But
they felt like the answer to this very unique situation
was to lean on experienced people and stock the place
with so called grownups. Yeah, that would keep things from
(08:24):
going off the rails. In fact, all over cable TV.
Political pundits sounded downright optimistic when the administration announced its appointees,
like Joe Scarborough on his MSNBC show Morning Joe, the
day that General Jim Mattis was named Secretary of Defense.
Speaker 9 (08:41):
Mattis is everything this new administration would need.
Speaker 10 (08:45):
At the Pentagon, I think relieved.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
I guess is a good word to use.
Speaker 6 (08:49):
It's just hearing from the top foreign policy thinkers.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
John Kelly, a respected four star Marine general, was tapped
as Secretary of Homeland Security. Key and Kirsten Nielsen, a
cybersecurity expert from the Bush White House, convinced me to
come to DHS, and that's the Department of Homeland Security
for anyone who's not used to DC's blizzard of acronyms.
(09:14):
My job would be to serve as the secretary's top
intelligence and counter terrorism advisor. Now, to be clear, I
didn't want to work for Donald Trump the White House.
It seemed too chaotic, But I was eager to help
what we called the Axis of adults.
Speaker 8 (09:33):
A lot of even people who were verulently opposed to
Donald Trump, they still had the instincts of, you know,
kind of official Washington.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Susan Glasser again, and I.
Speaker 8 (09:44):
Think got kicked in. And that's why a lot of
the elder statesmen were recommending that people go and work for.
Speaker 6 (09:51):
Trump, people who had not been part of the campaign
necessarily or part of the permanent Republican Washington who thought, okay,
well we get help here. Of course he didn't know
what he was talking you out in the campaign, but
once he gets in there, he'll be more responsible.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
We can help that. Well, Peter, we were wrong. In
the first year of the Trump administration. I tried to
ignore the daily controversies coming out of the Oval Office
(10:24):
and just focus on my job at DHS disrupting terrorist plots,
blocking Russian interference in our democracy, and the ever present
nuclear threat from North Korea. But the White House seemed
to be in perpetual chaos. Cabinet secretaries would drop everything
to rush across town to the Oval Office to persuade
(10:44):
Trump not to do terrible things. But not all of
these fire drills stayed quiet. People started talking. Jesse Eisnger
of Pro Publica was one of the journalists covering the
White House. Jesse has a kind of field guide to
Washington for reporters. There are sources leakers and whistleblowers.
Speaker 9 (11:05):
Sources are people who are telling you what's going on
on a daily basis. Then there's sort of a different
kind of source, somebody who's leaking material to you. It
could be leaking out of personal peak. They could be
leaking out of righteousness, or they could be leaking for
an advantage because it makes them more their principle look good.
(11:27):
And then finally there's a whistleblower. I sort of joke
somewhat insensitively that every whistleblower you know on a scale
of one to ten, where ten is absolutely, you know,
off the charts, crazy, one is crazy. You are just
boiling over with consternation, anxiety, rage at some wrong that
(11:54):
you're seeing.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
When most people think of whistleblowers, their mind goes to
something like All the President Men, the film from the
mid seventies, Robert Redford in a dark parking garage as
Deep Throat emerges from the shadows to reveal the ugly
truth about Richard Nixon. Listen, I'm tired of your chicken
shit games.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
I don't want hands.
Speaker 12 (12:18):
I need to know what you know.
Speaker 5 (12:22):
And it was a harument operation.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Whistleblowers aren't new to the Trump White House, and as
Jesse points out, the punishment of whistleblowers is definitely not new.
Speaker 9 (12:34):
We shouldn't pretend that it was easy for whistleblowers before.
The Obama administration was quite bad from a free press
perspective on people who leaked information to journalists.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
During the Obama years, whistleblower became kind of a dirty
word after government employees like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden
leaked classified documents directly to the media. Yeah, but when
Trump came into office, he took a different approach. It
seemed like he would punish any leaker, any whistleblower for anything,
(13:10):
especially if it had to do with him.
Speaker 13 (13:13):
Gave the whistle blow for the information, because that's us
to a spot. You know what we used to do
in the old days, where we were smart, the spies
and tracy we used to hand than we do them.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
That's President Trump venting in a closed door meeting about whistleblowers. Ironically,
the recording itself was leaked to the Los Angeles Times.
Here's Jesse Eisinger again.
Speaker 9 (13:41):
It was retribution on steroids. They were quite aggressive legally.
They were searching for whistleblowers constantly threatening them with firing,
threatening them with legal action, and then of course there
were personal attacks from Trump himself followers.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
I thought the adults in the room were keeping the
chaos contained, but then things really started to break bad.
Speaker 14 (14:10):
This rate here is a Rio Grande processing center. At
this point, more families have been separated leaving this facility
than any other in the country. One and seventy four
children have left this facility being separated from their parents.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
That report from Diane Gallagher on CNN was one of
the first times the public heard about the policy that
came to be known as family separation. From inside DHS,
I watched this slow moving train wreck as the President
tried to force the Department, with all of its complicated
functions and facets, into some kind of personal anti immigration army.
Speaker 15 (14:51):
One of the most important missions of DHS is its
law enforcement mission. This is a law in force agency.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Family separation was a preventable humanitarian disaster. Thousands of migrant
families were split up at the border in the process.
And let me be clear about something, This never should
have happened. When it was conceived. I wasn't working on immigration,
but after I watched the situation spiral I stepped in
(15:31):
to help write an executive order to end it. By
then it was too late. The damage was done and
I felt like it was time to leave. But the
President didn't stop there. The same summer, he ordered US
to shut off federal aid to wildfire victims in California
because it was a democratic blue state that didn't support him.
(15:54):
He threatened to cut the number of refugees allowed into
the United States down to zero. We fought the White
House to beat back these ideas, but it was like
trench warfare. The attacks kept coming and coming. Like when
Trump told us he wanted to pull out of NATO
or expand what he called the weak ass travel ban,
(16:16):
something else needed.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
To be done.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
It was August twenty eighteen. I was in Sydney, Australia,
to meet with US allies about a range of threats.
It was three in the morning when my phone started
buzzing on the nightstand. I looked over and saw it
was the White House. I answered, and I was told
the President was furious he saw American flags flying at
(16:55):
half staff across the United States in honor of the
late Senator John McCain, who had just passed away. Trump
hated McCain, and he wanted DHS to call for the
flags to be raised back up. Now, there were a
lot of reasons to snap during the Trump administration. I'll
(17:15):
be the first to admit that, but this happened to
be my final straw. So, half asleep, jet lagged, I'm
laying there and I decided to do something. I pop
up and go over to my desk in the hotel room,
and I just started writing. I wrote about the dysfunction
of the administration, about how members of Trump's cabinet were
(17:38):
grappling with his immoral and illegal impulses every day, and
how they thought he was a danger to the country,
so much so that some of them even discussed invoking
what is known as the twenty fifth Amendment to remove
the president if it got any worse. At first, this
was just kind of a journal entry, but then I
(17:58):
had a thought, and before I could talk myself out
of it, I picked up my phone and using Signal,
the encrypted messaging app, I sent what I'd written over
to a trusted contact. This was someone I knew would
be able to get it in the hands of someone
else at The New York Times, and that ended up
being an editor on the opinion page named Jim Dowell.
(18:25):
I don't know anything about what your reaction was when
vssay first came in, because I was scared shitless.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
On the other end, I.
Speaker 7 (18:32):
Probably should have been scared more shitless than I was.
And I won't get into who the interlocutor was that
set us up because that remains a secret, but we
both had immense trust in that person. Everybody had an
opinion about whatever Trump was saying in any given day,
but the idea that we could get somebody who could
(18:55):
sort of pull this scrim back a little bit and
help us look inside was obviously really enticing to us.
After I read it, I felt like, well, we can
work with this. I marched it over to my boss,
James Bennett, the opinion editor. I just laid it out
from he's making the case to be anonymous. I think
that's a legitimate case to be made here because this
(19:15):
perspective is so interesting and I think valuable. We rarely
do this, but we have done it a couple times
where we grant the anonymity to an outbed writer. I'd
like to make the case for this one. He read
it and he agreed. Then we marched over to the
publisher's office and talked to him about it. He thought
this was just so unique of a situation and was
(19:38):
willing to take our word for who you were. That
was that. It seems to me there's a pretty valid
case to be made for people within the bureaucracy to
maintain their positions when bad decisions above them are being made,
and to hold the line sometimes.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
I remember thinking when I sent you all the piece
that whoever Jim is, I'm sure he's very well meaning,
but I highly doubt he's going to be able to
protect me. Just my experience in Washington had been nothing
stays a secret for long.
Speaker 7 (20:13):
If you recall, you had to sign a contract with us,
which every writer has to do, right, and that was
the only place anywhere your name was written down in
the files of the New York Times. We just kept
the circle incredibly tight, and it worked.
Speaker 16 (20:30):
Everyone in Washington, and at this point across the country
is now trying to figure out who is behind this
anonymous op ed in the New York Times. The President
is reportedly furious.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
The story dominated cable news, from a round table with
Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC to the Late Night comedy shows.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Some folks think they know who wrote the op ed
because of an unusual word in this passage, which describes
John McCain's legacy as a load star for restoring honor
to public life and our national dialogue. That word might
be a clue because it happens to be one of
Vice President Mike Pence's favorites.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Colbert and others pointed the finger at Mike Pence, but
the Vice President was quick to distance himself.
Speaker 17 (21:19):
Well, I think it's a disgrace.
Speaker 18 (21:22):
The anonymous editorial publishing the New York Times represents a
new low in American journalism.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
It provoked an even bigger reaction than Jim or I
had ever expected.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
I must have been in a meeting or something walked
out of my office like thirty minutes later, and people
were just saying, oh my god. I think it was
within what an hour the President had said something, tweeted
out something I think kind of angrily attacking you as
a coward in the New York Times, as a failed enterprise.
(21:54):
We had no idea it would explode the way it did.
Speaker 10 (21:58):
We have somebody in what I call the failing New
York Times.
Speaker 15 (22:02):
That's talking about he's part of the resistance within the
Trump administration.
Speaker 10 (22:06):
This is what we have to deal with. The dishonest
media is really a disgrace.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
The Times was forced to increase security at its headquarters.
Speaker 7 (22:14):
In the threatening tone of the President and his supporters.
Did I think worry that the Times in a couple
of ways, bomb threats, death threats were a concern. There
was a concern, frankly, that our electronics would not be saved.
We weren't using signal all the time, but we sure
as heck started after that ran tensions were so high
(22:37):
and the President was so bellicose.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Remember I'm still in my job at DHS, living a
kind of double life. But the hunt for anonymous was on.
I was sure any minute I'd be outed. White House
staff had their marching orders find the Trader and in
the meantime, trash them.
Speaker 19 (22:58):
They do need to be found. In the fact that
they're working in government against the President and essentially against
the American people is not good.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Stephanie Grisham was Press secretary for First Lady Malania Trump.
That's from Fox and Friends on Fox News. President Trump's
favorite show, Odds Are Good that he was watching as
Stephanie blasted this anonymous character as a treason his coward.
Stephanie ended up having her own change of heart and
(23:25):
we went from enemies to friends, so we can talk.
Speaker 17 (23:28):
About it now.
Speaker 19 (23:32):
I think that level of paranoia started to go bonkers
when that ourbed dropped on our end. It was just
immediate finger pointing. It was immediately who who did this?
But interestingly, the thought wasn't in any agencies. You know,
we were so self centered at this administration. If you
were called a senior administration official, it meant you were
(23:55):
in the White House.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
That's the realization I came to as the year went on,
that he was starting to spin out, and that the
blowback of that decision to wear a mask was in
part making the president more paranoid and potentially creating a
more volatile situation. A couple months after the op ed published,
(24:18):
after John Kelly was fired, another writer, Brett Stevens at
the New York Times wrote a piece, and it was
a piece directed at Anonymous. His message was basically, dear Anonymous,
whoever you are, if you're still in this administration, you're wrong.
The adults have been booted, and if you don't want
to become one of Trump's flunkies. Now's the time to go.
(24:42):
And I read that and I thought, he's right. I
left the administration a couple months later, and my thought was, yeah,
you know, an eight hundred word op ed wasn't enough
to explain who this guy is. So I quit. And
then I'm met a representative from a publisher to make
(25:03):
a much louder statement. We had exactly one meeting. It
was a secret meeting without any electronic devices in an
empty room. In fact, to avoid detection, we devised a
multi layered communications system with encrypted messages and air gapped
devices and swapped simcards and burner phones. Even so, the
(25:26):
contents of the book leaked weeks ahead of its release.
Of course, Rachel Maddow shared excerpts on her show on MSNBC.
Speaker 17 (25:36):
This still anonymous author has written a book, and it's
called quote a Warning. This author is now essentially saying
that if you were comforted at all by the fact
that there were officials inside this administration who were keeping
things on track and thwarting the president's worst and most
misguided impulses, you maybe shouldn't be comforted by that anymore.
Speaker 19 (26:00):
So did you write the book after you left if
your up ed took it to one level. The book
just blew his stack.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Meanwhile, Stephanie Grisham replaced Sarah Huckabee Sanders as press secretary
over at the White House, and she had to deal
with a very angry president. He was angry because this
author Anonymous was now urging voters not to re elect him.
Speaker 19 (26:25):
He was just nuts about it. It was all he
thought about. It would be in meetings about you know
what national security, let's say, and halfway through he would
look at anybody, do you know who anonymous is? Everybody
got tasked with finding who Anonymous was, and so for
me personally, it was frustrating. Here's another thing now that
we can't focus on work because we have to find
(26:46):
whoever this you know, son of a bitch is.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Meanwhile, at the failing New York Times.
Speaker 7 (26:53):
The effort to figure out your identity became this insane distraction.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Times of Opinion editor Jim Dowe.
Speaker 7 (27:02):
It wasn't just the president. It was I'm sure a
lot of people around him. It was people in my business.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
My original piece ran on the opinion page. Those editors
are totally separate from the newsroom at the Times, which
means that times reporters were actually doing their own digging
as it happens. I know two of the journalists at
the paper who were trying to track down the identity
of anonymous. One of them was White House reporter Michael
(27:29):
Sheer and his colleague Julie Hirshfield Davis.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Nobody in the news section, nobody in the Washington Bureau,
none of my editors, nobody knew that it was you.
When nobody could figure it out, I think there was
something of a bit of a relief for us anyway,
because it's like, well that if one of us did
figure it out, it would be a complicated situation. Try
to figure out I suspect.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Except you did well late.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
That was later. Yes, I think the first time we
met was at a Mexican food restaurant, La where we
had a lengthy dinner with some drinks. Julie had been
a White House reporter along with me. She and I
had both covered immigration in various forms for years. Once
we had decided to start writing a book, we started
reaching out to everybody that we could we could think
(28:16):
of in the administration, people who had left the administration,
you know, who could sort of describe what was it
really like behind the scenes. That was our mission.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
I got to know Michael and Julie pretty well. Actually,
I wanted to help them with their reporting to shine
a light on Trump's immigration policies. So I told them
some of the pretty horrific things that I witnessed in
the administration. When they read the new book a warning
by Anonymous, a couple of the details felt pretty familiar,
(28:47):
like they'd heard this story before from me. I think
just before Thanksgiving in twenty nineteen, I was driving down
to South Carolina to go spend time with family for
the holiday, got a message on signal from you. You
made it sound very urgent.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Basically what had happened was that the Trump Book had
come out, still anonymous, and I devoured it, of course,
And there were two different anecdotes that were in your
book that were also in our book, and that frankly
you had told us in some of those dinners, and
that hadn't appeared anywhere else. You know, there had already
been other books at that point that had come out.
(29:29):
There had been lots of investigative reporting in the Post,
in the Journal and Politico and elsewhere, and I couldn't
remember seeing those anecdotes anywhere else, and here they were
again in your or in the anonymous book, and I said,
oh my god, that's it's it's Miles, that's who wrote
this book. So that day I sent you the message,
(29:53):
you called back. We just came right out and said,
we know that you're anonymous, that you wrote the book
in the article, and if I recall, ah, you were,
shall I say not truthful?
Speaker 2 (30:03):
You can say. I remember in that moment driving thinking,
oh fuck.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
I think we were on speaking like I think you
had your family in the car and we were on
speaker too. I remember when we got off and we
had this conversation and we said, well, a couple possibilities.
One is we were wrong, he's not the author. Another
is he's a very very good liar.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
After the book came out, I was pretty determined to
come forward and talk about what I'd seen within the
administration in my own name and actually own it, especially
with reporters hot on my trail. So in the late
summer of twenty twenty, just a couple months before the election,
that's what I did, sort of security to keep our
(30:48):
country safe.
Speaker 12 (30:49):
What we saw was terrifying The president wanted to exploit
the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes
and to fuel his own agenda. Even though I'm not
a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I
have to support Joe Biden for president, and I'm confident
in will.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
That video, produced by a group called Republican Voters Against Trump,
was kind of an attack ad for the last leg
of the presidential campaign. It went viral, and it made
Trump crazy. In his usual style, the President claimed he
didn't even know me, despite the fact that I'd spent
hours and hours with him in the Oval office, on
(31:28):
Air Force One, and in the White House situation room.
Speaker 10 (31:31):
He's a lowlife. Anybody that does that is a lowlife
to me, and it's a shame.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
I never met him, I never heard of him before.
Speaker 13 (31:38):
He's a bad people, He's a sick people.
Speaker 10 (31:40):
He's a lowlife.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Okay, to be clear, I still have not revealed at
this point that I was the anonymous author of the
op Eden book. That's because I knew the second I
did that would become the news story. So first I
wanted to talk about who Donald Trump really was, why
he represented, in my view, a danger to the country.
(32:01):
So I denied that I was the anonymous author, over
and over to anyone who asked, here, I am on
Anderson Cooper three point sixty lying about it.
Speaker 11 (32:13):
There was not bad.
Speaker 19 (32:14):
There was a book by someone calling themselves anonymous.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Are you aware of who that is?
Speaker 18 (32:19):
I'm not look And that was a parlor game that
happened in Washington, d C. Of a lot of folks
trying to think of who that might be. I've got
my own thoughts about who that might be, but you know,
you're not a president. I wear a mask for two things,
Anderson halloweens and pandemics.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
After I left DHS, I took a job in the
tech sector, but with the presidential campaign heating up, I
felt like I couldn't sit on the sidelines. I went
on unpaid leave so I could actually travel around the
country and just tell Americans what I'd witnessed, why this
man was unfit for office. And I set out to
(33:00):
recruit others to come forward to Thankfully, a lot of
them said yes.
Speaker 20 (33:05):
His former chief of staff, John Kelly, who, according to
Nucyan and reporting, has said this of the president to
friends of his and I'm quoting him now. The depths
of his dishonesty is just astounding to me, the dishonesty.
He is the most flawed person I have ever met
in my life.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
I knew that time was up. I'd said as much
as I could about Donald Trump in my own name,
but there was something that I hadn't revealed, which was
that I'd been sounding the alarm for years about him
without my name attached. Frankly, I was procrastinating, and the
honest truth is that I was pretty scared. I was
(33:47):
scared to unmask myself as Anonymous because I knew the
second I did, the revelation would blow up everything in
my life. But at the same time, keeping the secret
was already causing my life to implode. I was basically
pretending to be two different people, and I was also
sending a really terrible message because by staying in the shadows,
(34:10):
Anonymous was basically saying, you don't have to speak the truth,
you can hide. And now was not the time to hide.
It was time for people to speak out before it
was too late. And in the meantime, I found out
that innocent people were getting blamed.
Speaker 19 (34:26):
Did you know Peter Navarro put together a whole report
dossier about who Anonymous was.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Peter Navarro was one of Trump's most loyal White House aides,
and he was hell bent on finding out who Anonymous was,
and he wanted to do it for the president. As
Stephanie Grisham recalled, Peter thought he found the culprit, and
he claimed it was Victoria Coates, who was Trump's deputy
National Security advisor.
Speaker 19 (34:49):
Peter lot together a report with a laminated folder and everything.
It was color coded. I mean, it was a great,
like ninth grade English project. But he put it together.
And I laugh about this because everything's okay, right, Victoria's okay,
We're okay. But you know, he had put in this
report that the author of Anonymous was clearly a woman,
(35:12):
because they were very empathetic towards mothers. He went to
the president, he went to everyone. It was Victoria in
the White House, and she was going to be fired.
Poor Victoria in the meantime is going through hell. Everybody's
ignoring her, nobody wants to talk to her, no one
trusts her. That's I think the point that I was
most angry with you, as Anonymous, because I just was
(35:34):
watching this woman suffer and somebody like Peter Navarro, who's
probably the most batshit crazy of our group, you know,
deciding who it.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Was that other people experienced blowback for what I wrote
caused me so much more inner turmoil than it was
worth dealing with the stress and the anticipation of my
life getting detonated. There's no question that I became an alcoholic.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
And we have some breaking news for you. The identity
of anonymous revealed. Now CNN has learned the identity of
that anonymous author, which has been a source of a
great deal of speculation. That anonymous senior administration official is
Miles Taylor.
Speaker 21 (36:20):
No anonymous, you know, there's anonymous that everybody's been looking
for that law enforcement could have found early if they
wanted to. Turned out to be a low level staffer,
a sleeves bag. This is a disgrace to our country.
It shouldn't happen, and he should be prosecuted.
Speaker 15 (36:38):
Are you listening to me.
Speaker 21 (36:39):
Back in watching He should be prosecuted.
Speaker 5 (36:43):
Bad things are going to happen to him.
Speaker 21 (36:44):
It's like a horrible treason, this horrible thing that you
could do this that you can get away with it.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Bad things are going to happen to him. Trump said,
and he was right. His supporters made sure of it.
Information was doxed all over the web, and I got
a lot of phone calls. What you're doing to President
Trump is disgusting. You're disgusting people.
Speaker 6 (37:11):
You're evil, and you're.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Gonna go down.
Speaker 17 (37:13):
Myles Taylor, what the fuck are you thinking going against Trump?
You and your cronies, Your career is ruined.
Speaker 8 (37:20):
You my friends are.
Speaker 12 (37:22):
A piece of ship.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
You are a trader.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
You're dumb motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
You're the dumbest motherfucker I must have ever met.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Sorry, fucking pieces.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Of ship, you fucking political dick.
Speaker 21 (37:34):
And I am so sad morning here.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
You are a pathetic person. The harassment was NonStop. It
was like an avalanche of hate. And as all of
it was happening, my anxiety went completely through the roof
(38:05):
and I did what some people do in those situations.
I drank more, and first that was to cope, kind of,
to make it all go away. I would get so
anxious sometimes though, especially before television appearances, that I'd go
pour whiskey in my coffee cup and take it with
me for the TV hit. In fact, if you saw
me on a news network in October twenty twenty. There's
(38:26):
a good chance I was tipsy, maybe even drunk. Trump
supporters confronted me and restaurants at the airport wherever they
saw me. Others sent creepy packages to my house, sometimes
with pictures of me and my family members and photos
taken outside of their homes, photos of my nieces. Most
(38:47):
of it was tough talk. I knew that, but some
of it resulted in criminal cases that are still open
today that my family is still dealing with. I talked
to Stephanie about all of this. It was, in a
lot of ways worse than I imagined. You know, had
to leave my home, leave my job, lost my personal relationship,
(39:10):
had to have a bodyguard for a few months because
the death threats, lost a lot of friends. Any One
of those things I think could send someone into a
little bit of a tailspin. All of them happened like
within a week of each other. After I came forward.
The social media vitriol was explosive. I found myself on
(39:35):
election Day sitting in a safe house, wasted with pills
in a firearm, thinking, what's the fucking point?
Speaker 10 (39:45):
You know what?
Speaker 19 (39:45):
I find shocking listening to you say what you just
said is that I wasn't shocked. I mean, it's shocking
to me how normal that sounds, as having been there
and dealt with it. I literally sat there and listened
to you just now, as if you were just giving
(40:06):
me your grocery list for tonight.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Stephanie obviously had her own experience with this administration, and
trust me, we will come to her. In my case,
amidst the fallout, I was grateful to find support, sometimes
in the most unlikely places. Here's New York Times reporter
Michael Scher.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
The kind of back and forth that I have with
my very best sources, it is personal at some level.
We get to know each other over these years, and
you understand the trials and tribulations that people go through.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
You were the only reporter who, I think, after all
of that, actually sat down with me at one point
and looked me in the eye and said, how are
you doing? You know, how are you actually doing? After
it all happened, I had had a good deal of
(41:01):
suicidal ideation for a few months, and I think by
the time we got together things were better. Kind of
therapy and was on anidepressants and that sort of thing.
But I remember just being asked the question I remember
being you know, that was significant for me.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
I'm glad. I mean, look, I think one of the
things that we forget in Washington on all of the
different sides of these crazy roles that we play, right,
whether it's journalists or administration official, or lawmaker or congressional
aid or what have you. I mean, you know, there
is a tendency to forget that we're all real people too.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Thankfully I got the help I needed, and I'm proud
to report that I'm one year sober. But in the
course of producing this podcast, I found out that others
who spoke out also ended up in dark places, and
not all of them have found their way out yet.
Times editor Jim daw.
Speaker 7 (41:55):
Have you ever regretted it?
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Then?
Speaker 2 (41:57):
I think my regret, in hind sight, if there is one,
was just not unmasking myself sooner. I think I was
wrong that revealing my name at the last minute would
somehow be more helpful, because now I realize how many
people were scared to come out because there wasn't someone
(42:19):
else out there. They weren't going to be the first
one to do it. I think anonymity is one of
the biggest threats to our democracy right now, in that
people being scared to come forward under their own names
is causing sort of a collective crouch that has allowed
people like Donald Trump to exploit it. I think that's
(42:42):
a huge danger, and I guess that's ironic coming from me.
So so that's what this show is going to be about,
the personal stories of people who decided to speak out
at a time when shutting up would have just been
so much easier. I'm talking to fellow whistleblowers, and I'm
(43:04):
still not sure I accept the term, but I'm asking
them the same questions that I wrestle with when I
think about my own story. What was the line in
the sand? Why not say something sooner? What was the cost?
Was it worth it? And for all of us? Was
it enough? Next time on the Whistleblowers Reality winner went
(43:33):
from a decorated Air Force veteran with a pretty bright
future to a convicted felon after she was arrested for
leaking NSA documents. But the truth is more complicated than
the story of a patriot turned trader. Whistler is a
(44:00):
production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with best Case Studios
and Arc Media. It was hosted by Me Miles Taylor
and written by me Isabel Evans and Adam Pinkiss. Isabel
Evans is also our producer. Associate producers are Hannah leebelwoodzs Lockhart,
and Ashley Warren. Darcy Peacle is consulting producer. Zach Herman
is the VP of Development of ARC Media. This episode
(44:21):
was edited by Daniel Tuik with assistance from Max Michael Miller.
Original music is by James Newberry. Executive producers are Me
Miles Taylor, Adam Pinkis for Best Case Studios, and Barrick
Goodman for ARC Media. Beth Ann Mcaluso is our executive
producer for iHeartMedia, along with Ali Perry. Special thanks to
Kevin Famm, all of our contributors and interviewees, and our
(44:42):
intern Anna Levitt, and a big thanks to the teams
at Government Accountability Project and Whistleblower Aid, two of the
best organizations for government and private sector whistleblowers seeking legal support.
Follow and rate the Whistleblowers on the podcast site of
your choice to hear what these whistleblowers and others have
to say about what they believe will happen under a
(45:02):
second Trump administration or in the White House of AMaGA successor.
You can pick up my new book, Blowback, from Simon
and Schuster
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