What a good day to be talking about defiance. This was the day that we learned that a federal judge threw out the cases against James Comey and Letitia James, asserting that Trump-appointed prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was illegally appointed (making clear who is the one who violated the law).
“I‘m grateful the court ended the case against me, which was a prosecution based on malevolence and incompetence,” former FBI Director James Comey said in a video response. “A message has to be sent that the President of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his enemies. Whatever your politics are, you have to see that as fundamentally un-American and a threat to the rule of law that keeps all of us free.”
Meanwhile, I had the chance to talk to the defiant Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security chief of staff who penned an anonymous op-ed for The New York Times in 2018, which raised the alarm about the dangers of Trump and the efforts of people inside the administration seeking to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations” in order “to preserve our democratic institutions.” Not long after Trump retook the White House, he filed an executive order demanding an investigation of Taylor, falsely claiming that he released sensitive information and may have violated the Espionage Act.
This is scary stuff, enough to cause most of us to go deep bunker. But Taylor was not about to be intimidated. “My friends like to say that I’ve got an allergy or a clinical aversion to bullies—and I really do. I can’t stand it,” he told me, adding, “This guy’s the biggest bully that we’ve ever seen flesh and blood on this planet in our lives—and he deserves to be stood up to.”
Which isn’t to say that it’s been easy for Taylor to withstand the onslaught, both from Trump’s direct attacks and the myriad threats that have followed. “This has been the hardest year for my family, the hardest year in my life,” Taylor acknowledged, including the resulting “social fear” from people he knows who feared their association with him.
I hope you’ll give our conversation a listen, which I think is so important to hear that I’m making the recording immediately available to everyone. The notion that “courage is contagious” has become almost a cliché, but it’s hard to hear from Miles Taylor and not be inspired by his courage. That includes the good work that he’s doing leading the newly launched Defiance.org, created to defend Americans under attack from the Trump regime and serve as a kind of hub for Americans committed to resistance.
These are the kinds of conversations that I look forward to sharing more of with you—to inform and inspire you, yes—but also to keep in mind that we will get through this dark chapter if good people who care about our democracy stick together and remain clear what’s at stake.
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