Trump Accused Of Ordering Firing Of DHS Official For Testifying On Russian Interference

Taylor, who served in the department from 2017 to 2019 and is now a CNN contributor, accused Trump of “undermining election security” through a combination of “willful ignorance and outright attacks on the system” in a CNN op-ed.

Taylor points to an incident in September 2018 in which he says Trump ordered then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to fire David Glawe, DHS’ undersecretary for intelligence, after he testified to Congress that he concurred with the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

“We were astounded,” Taylor writes, positing that Trump was “seemingly consumed with fear about the ‘collusion’ narrative” and “dead set on burying the truth by attempting to purge those who embraced it.”

Taylor adds that the order set off a “late-night scramble of phone calls” in which DHS officials enlisted the help of senior White House officials to keep Trump from “tweet-firing the head of DHS intelligence.”

Another charge Taylor makes is that then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney instructed DHS officials to “avoid even raising the subject of Russian interference” because Trump “didn’t want to hear it.”

The op-ed dovetails with a whistleblower complaint filed Wednesday by senior DHS official Brian Murphy that alleges current acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and other top department officials worked to “censor or manipulate” intelligence assessments on Russian interference in the 2020 election.

White House spokesman Judd Deere told Forbes in August that Taylor is a “creature of the D.C. Swamp” who “never understood the importance of the President’s agenda or why the American people elected him and clearly just wants to cash-in.”