President Donald Trump was once so paranoid about leakers and critics that he wanted to wiretap his own staff, a former Homeland Security official revealed.
Miles Taylor, a Trump 1.0 official turned defector, said he and several other administration officials gathered in a rural Virginia cabin in October 2018 to discuss their plans for dealing with the president—but first deposited all their devices into a Faraday bag, a specialized pouch that blocks electronic signals from going in or out.
“Donald Trump, I was told, had queried a White House staff member about the possibility of wiretapping his own appointees. Us,” Taylor wrote in a Substack post on Thursday. “He wanted to know if he was being critiqued behind his back and who was leaking bad stories about him.”
“He raised the idea with the aide and, from what I know, was gently waved off—treated as if he’d said it by accident,” Taylor went on. “Yet it didn’t take long before rattled advisers began quietly sharing the information with trusted confidants. Beware: the president wants to wiretap us.”
When reached for comment, a White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dubbed Taylor “a hack.” Taylor resigned from the first Trump administration after anonymously writing in a 2018 New York Times op-ed that he was part of a “quiet resistance” within the government.
“He always has been and always will be an irrelevant loser who betrayed the American people by disclosing sensitive information through unauthorized methods and he is wholly unqualified to speak about anything related to the President or his administration,” Jackson said. “No one should believe anything he says.”
Taylor made the revelation after CNN reported that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel personally oversaw a crackdown to determine who leaked information about the security deficiencies of a Qatari jet gifted to the U.S.
Some officials were asked to turn over their phones to investigators on White House grounds, insiders told CNN, after Trump fumed over leaks about the Qatari jet intended to be used as his presidential plane.
A White House official told CNN that “Leaks that jeopardize the safety of the President, his staff, and the traveling press pool are dangerous and a threat to national security. The White House takes these leaks seriously and will do everything legally to ensure the individual or individuals are caught and it does not happen again.”
It’s a situation that sounds eerily familiar to Taylor.
“The careerists have been purged. The loyalists are very firmly in place, though they shouldn’t get too confident that Trump believes they’re true ‘loyalists.’ He wants them to be watched, and now, they know that they are being watched,” he wrote on his Substack.
“In 2018, we needed a Faraday bag to speak freely in a cabin in rural Virginia, but in 2026, federal employees evidently need lawyers on speed dial because the president’s henchmen might come for their phones at any minute,” he added. “So it’s clear the paranoia inside Trumpworld hasn’t changed much. What’s obviously changed is that no one is waving the president off anymore. His personal fears have been permitted to become chilling acts of censorship.”
