Miles Taylor, a former member of the Trump administration, has revealed that his residence was broken into, months after he penned a scathing op-ed anonymously criticizing former President Donald Trump.
Taylor, who previously served as the chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, authored a strongly condemnatory op-ed for The New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” which was published in September 2018. This piece infuriated Trump and triggered an investigation to uncover the author’s identity.
In 2019, Taylor released a follow-up book titled A Warning, in which he revealed himself as the author of both the op-ed and the book just days before the 2020 Election Day. In his forthcoming book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, Taylor unveils that his home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. was broken into shortly before he was set to depart for his wedding in Latin America in early 2019, Newsweek reported citing an excerpt from the book.
Although Taylor didn’t believe the break-in was the work of a typical burglar, he contacted the police. He reveals that the Department of Homeland Security shared his concerns, sending security personnel to conduct a thorough search, especially due to the presence of sensitive communication equipment in his residence.
“They sent a cop on the neighborhood beat to come chat with us,” Taylor told the news outlet, adding that he was not sure if an official report was filed.
“The aftermath was handled by DHS. The Department dispatched internal security personnel to our house to do checks. They never found the intruder, and we still don’t know what their motivation was. But the timing was very unsettling,” he added.
In his book, Taylor writes that the intruder “picked the locks of two doorways into the house, including an iron grate and a thick wooden front door that I found ajar.
“In the process, the individual somehow disabled the alarm system and the video doorbell, both of which went dark during the incident—blacked out for about five minutes.”
But what was even stranger, Taylor writes, was that the inside of the house remained undisturbed. “Not a single possession was moved, broken, or stolen,” he writes.
The incident left Taylor concerned about home security, prompting him to enhance his alarm system, replace the deadbolt with a keypad lock, and install additional battery-powered video cameras capable of operating even during a power outage, as he shares in his book.
