Newsmax's Sebastian Gorka calls for political retribution: “We have to root out individuals like Miles Taylor”

Gorka: “Anyone who committed crimes, denuded Americans of their civil rights like Peter Navarro, like Steve Bannon, like President Trump, like January 6-ers — grandmothers who are going to prison for praying inside Congress. They must be charged.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the May 19, 2024, edition of Newsmax's The Gorka Reality Check

SEBASTIAN GORKA (HOST): God willing, if we do our part, and our former boss becomes the 47th president, not just the 45th, we've got the problem of what we do then with the deep state. After you served in the Marines, before you became President Trump's attorney, you served in the Department of Homeland Security, including alongside seditious individuals like Miles Taylor, the so-called anonymous author. Will you say a couple of words, Christina, on how serious the threat of the permanent bureaucracy is -- those people who are never elected but who think they get to run the country? You saw it from the inside, Christina.

CHRISTINA BOBB (GUEST): Yeah, it's very serious. You know, I had come from the military where you obey orders, and you follow orders. And as you mentioned Miles Taylor, supposedly he's, you know, chastised me for wanting to follow the orders of the president and not using my own discretion to come up with a different plan, other than what the president had ordered. I think it's ludicrous to think that anybody other than the president is in charge of any of the agencies. Certainly there's Cabinet members in charge, but they follow the direction of the president. And these are all people who openly — if you look at the quotes that they're saying and writing and in the articles and in books that they're writing, they are saying it should be the people in these agencies that are making the decision who none of us know. None of us know who they are. If Miles Taylor hadn't outed himself as being, you know, the crazy conspiracy theorist author of Anonymous, which I'm not fully convinced that was all his work anyway — you can't really trust much of what comes out of his mouth — no one would know who he is. No one would know how to hold him — hold him accountable. No one would be able to. So, it's a very real threat that needs to be cleaned out. And Donald Trump, I believe, has every intention of draining the swamp the way that he said. We just didn't know how deep it was.

GORKA: We have to root out individuals like Miles Taylor and anyone who committed crimes, denuded Americans of their civil rights like Peter Navarro, like Steve Bannon, like President Trump, like January 6-ers — grandmothers who are going to prison for praying inside Congress. They must be charged. They must be charged for abuse of power under the color of law, and I know somebody who could bring that case against them.

Miles Taylor is one of the many former Trump officials who are speaking out about the former president's potential return to office:

Taylor said that if Trump returns to the White House, the former president will avoid appointing anyone who might turn against him in an effort to avoid the mistakes of his last administration.

“Donald Trump realized very late in his first term that he had far too many people who went to bed and grew a conscience every night and came back in with little inklings of a conscience to say no and push back,” Taylor said. “He doesn't want those people around. His preference is for that Oval Office to be an echo chamber. That's what he wants, and it's what he'll get.”

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As one of Trump's most vocal critics, Taylor made damning allegations about the former president in the run-up to the 2020 election, including that Trump did not pay attention to intelligence briefings and that he tried to block emergency aid to California at one point because it was a Democratic state.

On Tuesday, Taylor said Trump has already “found ways” to appoint loyalists to his cabinet. He used the example of Chad Wolf, who served as the acting Homeland Security Secretary for a year before a federal court ruled his appointment unlawful because he was never confirmed by the Senate.

“You know what the consequences were?” Taylor asked. “There weren't consequences. They learned a very valuable lesson there, which is Trump can put whoever the hell he wants into these jobs.”

He added, “There were no heroes inside the Trump administration. There were only survivors. And in a second term, it's not going to be heroes, it's not going to be survivors, it's going to be supplicants. And that's by design.”