Trump's Alleged Promise to Pardon Lawbreakers Detailed in Ex-Staffer's Book

Former President Donald Trump's alleged promise to pardon border officials for violating immigration law has been detailed in a former senior staffer's new book.

Miles Taylor, who famously wrote a critical op-ed in 2018 in The New York Times using the pen name "Anonymous," quoted Trump's words in his new book Blowback: A Warning To Save Democracy From the Next Trump, that was obtained by Newsweek prior to its release on Tuesday.

Taylor, the chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the time, recalls accompanying the former president on a trip to the Mexican border in California on April 5, 2019.

"Everyone was waiting to see what would happen with Trump's on-again, off-again border threat. Would he seal the roads? Would he halt cross-border trade and travel?" Taylor writes.

He recalls Trump "pressuring" agents to seal the border, urging them to tell federal judges that the country was "full."

"Just say, 'Sorry, Judge, I can't do it. We don't have the room,'" Taylor quotes Trump as saying.

Trump was "telling them to ignore federal judges and deport people anyway, even if they had a right to be in the United States," Taylor writes.

A Customs and Border Protection leader—reportedly the agency's then commissioner Kevin McAleenan— tried to explain to Trump why that would be against the law, Taylor writes.

The then president offered a presidential pardon, according to Taylor.

"Seriously, keep them all out. Don't let any more in. If you go to jail for it, I'll pardon you," Taylor quotes Trump as saying.

It was that incident that prompted Taylor to resign, he claims. While Trump backslapped law enforcement officers in front of his border wall, Taylor says he stood on the sidelines drafting resignation letters on his phone.

"One was for me and the other was for [then Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen], though she hadn't officially asked for it," Taylor says. "In my mind, Trump had given us a gift—a reason to resign and shine a light inside his haunted house of a presidency."

Taylor adds: "If a pardon offer to break the law wasn't enough to justify quitting, then we deserved the label assigned to Trump officials who stayed too long: enablers."

Nielsen went to the White House the day after the border trip and told Trump she "couldn't violate federal statutes to repel what he termed an 'invasion' at the southern border," Taylor writes. "He fired her on the spot."

Newsweek contacted Nielsen through Taylor and McAleenan via LinkedIn on Tuesday.

Days later, when details about Trump proposing a "pardons-for-lawbreaking scheme to his DHS lieutenants" were reported in the media, Taylor writes that a "vengeful" president denied it and "launched a wider purge, ridding DHS of officials who were seen as insufficiently MAGA."

Taylor stayed on under McAleenan, who became the acting Homeland Security secretary, until resigning in June that year.

"I remained for a few weeks to provide the thinnest sinew of an orderly transition," he writes.

"I should have quit sooner," Taylor told Newsweek. "But this was my last straw. You cannot witness that kind of naked corruption and stay in the job—and in this case I still don't think he's been held fully accountable."

He added that the Trump administration was "a graveyard of potentially impeachable offenses, and we still don't know where all the bodies are buried."

Newsweek contacted a Trump spokesperson for comment via email on Tuesday.

Taylor followed up his 2018 op-ed in The New York Times with a book published in 2019 called A Warning. He revealed himself as the author of both just days before election day in 2020 as he campaigned against Trump's re-election.

Blowback: A Warning To Save Democracy From the Next Trump, by Miles Taylor, is available from July 18, published by Simon & Schuster.