President Donald Trump once floated the idea of secretly monitoring the very officials he had appointed, according to a former administration insider who says the president’s suspicion of leakers ran so deep he raised the possibility of wiretapping his own staff. The claim came on July 16, 2026, from Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official who left the first Trump administration and has since become one of its most vocal critics.
Writing in a lengthy online post, Taylor recounted a meeting in October 2018 when he and several other administration officials gathered at a rural Virginia cabin to talk through how they would handle the president. Before any conversation began, he wrote, the group dropped their phones and other devices into a Faraday bag, a specialized pouch designed to block electronic signals from passing in or out.
The precaution, Taylor said, stemmed from a warning that had rattled the president’s own advisers. According to his account, Trump had asked a White House staffer whether it was possible to place his appointees under surveillance.
A Question Raised Inside the White House
“Donald Trump, I was told, had queried a White House staff member about the possibility of wiretapping his own appointees. Us,” Taylor wrote. He said the president wanted to know whether he was being criticized behind his back and who was responsible for leaking unflattering stories.
By Taylor’s telling, the aide gently steered Trump away from the idea, treating the remark as if it had been made in passing. But word spread quickly among nervous advisers, who began quietly passing the warning to people they trusted. The message, as Taylor described it, was blunt: the president wanted to wiretap them.
Taylor was serving at the Department of Homeland Security in 2018 when he anonymously wrote a New York Times op-ed describing what he called a “quiet resistance” to the president’s actions. He later stepped down and subsequently disclosed that he had written the piece. Taylor’s role in that episode has made him a polarizing figure among Trump’s allies.
The White House Fires Back
The current administration dismissed Taylor’s account outright. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Taylor lacked credibility and had betrayed the public by leaking sensitive information, adding that no one should trust his statements about the president or his administration.
Taylor’s decision to revisit the 2018 episode was prompted by fresh reporting about a leak investigation now unfolding inside the current administration. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel have led an effort to find the source of disclosures about security deficiencies in a Qatari jet that had been gifted to the United States and was intended to serve as the president’s plane.
Some officials were reportedly asked to hand over their phones to investigators on White House grounds after Trump grew furious over the leaks. A White House official defended the effort, describing leaks that endanger the president, his staff and the traveling press pool as a threat to national security and pledging to pursue those responsible through every legal avenue.
Echoes of 2018
For Taylor, the current situation feels strikingly familiar. He argued that the loyalists now filling government posts should not feel secure, contending that Trump wants them monitored and that they are aware of it. The careerists, he said, have been pushed out, replaced by allies who remain under watch.
He drew a sharp contrast between then and now. In 2018, Taylor wrote, dissenting officials needed a Faraday bag to speak candidly in a remote cabin; in 2026, he claimed, federal employees may need lawyers on standby in case investigators come for their devices. The paranoia inside Trump’s orbit, he suggested, has not faded so much as escalated, with no one left willing to talk the president out of acting on it.
The allegation revives a subject that has followed Trump for years. In March 2017, during his first term, he publicly accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower, a charge Obama’s team flatly rejected. Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said at the time that neither the former president nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on a U.S. citizen, and former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes noted that no president can unilaterally order a wiretap, pointing to legal safeguards built to prevent exactly that kind of abuse.
Whether Taylor’s latest account can be independently verified remains unclear, and the White House has forcefully disputed his reliability. But his description of a president preoccupied with loyalty, leaks and surveillance lands amid a real and active hunt for the source of the Qatari jet disclosures — a convergence that, in Taylor’s view, shows how little has changed in nearly a decade.