President Donald Trump’s former DHS Chief decried Trump 2.0 imploding the U.S.’s intelligence community at a time when Trump has single-handedly incited war with a historic catalyst for terrorism.
Miles Taylor could not stop himself from piling onto the concerns of MS NOW guest speaker Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who warned MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace that Trump officials have hollowed out U.S. intelligence’s counterterrorism wing with dismissals and firings.
“[FBI Director] Kash Patel, over the last year, has waged war on our counterterrorism capabilities at the FBI. He has summarily dismissed some of our top people who hunt terrorists domestically right now, CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), which is the agency that protects us from cyber threats, is closed,” said Murphy. “… So not only are they not starting up protection against terrorist attacks, they are weakening our ability to find those plots and stop them. And the plot and the threat is going to increase.”
Murphy said terrorist Shia militancy groups, which have been quieter in their designs against the United States, will likely get much louder with Trump’s attacks on Middle Eastern targets.
Taylor added that the White House was apparently “content” to let US intelligence “shut down.”
“It’s like a bureaucratic hostage situation, because even the agencies that are still fully operating, like ICE and [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] have been told to send their counterterrorism people off to do deportation arrests. They've taken them off the mission,” said Taylor.
Worse, Taylor said the intelligence professionals “that are still on the job have been told to keep their bulletins and their warnings to themselves” according to his sources.
“The counterterrorism professionals … are being told to focus on Antifa — a made up domestic terror threat — when we may well face the biggest foreign terrorist threat we have faced since 9/11,” said Taylor, who described Trump’s curtain of silence as “institutional decapitation” due to the number of counterintelligence and counterterrorism officials fired.
“I don't think people realize how serious this is,” said Taylor. “I mean, quite truly, we could be moving towards something that's as big of a deal as the threat level we face before 9/11. Certainly, we now have an adversary capable of carrying out that type of attack at some point.”