A former Trump administration aide criticized the ex-president over his handling of classified information while he was in office, and said Friday that officials were "legitimately scared" to bring it to him.
The comments from Miles Taylor, who served as a chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security, follow reports that Trump allegedly took classified documents from the White House to his home in Florida.
Taylor was asked about the "hypocrisy" of Republicans criticizing Hillary Clinton over her handling of classified emails, but not criticizing Trump, during an interview on MSNBC.
"I have to start with the hypocrisy though, because it's not just hypocrisy. It's that Donald Trump himself was mind-numbingly incompetent when it came to the protection of classified information," he said. "So it's not just that he criticized Clinton and then did something similar. He did something vastly worse on multiple occasions. So much so that we were scared, legitimately scared to take sensitive, classified information into the Oval Office and tell the president of the United States about it."
Taylor said that officials were worried that Trump "would leak information to the public to foreign adversaries."
He spoke about an instance in which reporters were sitting in the Oval Office for an interview with Trump. Taylor said the former president "had classified information on his desk and he grabbed it and he held it up and waved it in the air to brag about how he gets really important information and I mean our jaws hit the floor."
The former aide, who is a well-known critic of Trump, stated that "people need to come out and say that Donald Trump, like anyone else, should be held accountable in terms of the protection of information."
In 2018, he published an op-ed in The New York Times detailing an internal "resistance" within the Trump administration. In 2020, he revealed himself as the author of the piece.
According to a report in The Washington Post, some of the documents at Trump's Florida property were marked as classified, or "top secret." The report also said the National Archives and Records Administration assisted in retrieving as many as 15 boxes of documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.
In a statement this week, Trump said that media's characterization of his relationship with the National Archives and Records Administration is "Fake News."
"The papers were given easily and without conflict on a very friendly basis, which is different from the accounts being drawn up from the Fake News Media," Trump stated. "In fact, it was viewed as routine and 'no big deal.' In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years."
NEW!
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) February 10, 2022
President Donald J. Trump:
"Following collaborative and respectful discussions, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) openly and willingly arranged with President Trump for the transport of boxes that contained letters, records, newspapers, magazines... pic.twitter.com/4r1wnufbWI
Earlier this week, Clinton trolled Trump after the reports of his alleged handling of classified information were released, announcing that she was selling hats that have the phrase "but her emails" written on them.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment, but did not receive a response before publication on Saturday afternoon.
