Former Trump Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor said that despite his many years at DHS, President Donald Trump has corrupted the organization and is calling for it to be detonated, reconfigured, reimagined, and remade — or else Americans will have to face a police state.

“The Department of Homeland Security has been weaponized against the people, the damage has been done, and it’s time to go back to the drawing board,” Taylor wrote at Defiance News, his home on Substack.

He said he believed that DHS “was the future of our defense against foreign threats and terrorists,” but now, “it’s being used to terrorize Americans.”

Taylor noted that even during Trump’s first term, the president was “magnetically attracted” to DHS’s power and wanted to use it “against the people, not to protect them.”

“DHS had two things he really liked — badges and guns — and it had lots of them,” Taylor wrote. “Indeed, it is America’s largest federal law-enforcement agency, and Donald Trump soon saw those gun-toting agents as his agents, not just the nation’s. They were a means to an end. As Trump told us face-to-face on several occasions, if there’s one thing he learned in business, it’s that you need leverage over people to get what you want from them.”

“Nothing gives you leverage like a gun.”

READ MORE: GOP Exodus Continues as Another Prominent Congressman Retires

Now that Trump is back in office, “we are watching the darkest nightmares of a weaponized DHS come to fruition, as the Department is transformed end-to-end into Donald Trump’s ‘pocket police.'”

Taylor lamented how “DHS social-media accounts mused on New Year’s Eve about mass deportations in the breezy iconography of a vacation advertisement. Then DHS agents were dispatched for their largest deployments in history to Minnesota, under the thin veneer of investigating alleged accounting discrepancies at Somali-American kindergartens.”

And he pointed to the “breathtaking and aggressive crackdown, in which two innocent U.S. citizens were killed at the hands of DHS agents and branded ‘domestic terrorists’ before facts were established, before investigations had even begun, and before the public could get its hands on contrary evidence.”

Taylor warned that “when the president himself tells agents to use ‘whatever means necessary’ against protesters — or the Vice President says officers have ‘absolute immunity’ after killing civilians — ordinary people everywhere rightfully worry that they’re under siege.”

He wrote that “what’s happened in Minnesota is by design. It’s the deliberate implementation of top-down presidential guidance. And it’s working. Officials are turning DHS into a juggernaut for ridding America of so-called ‘domestic terrorists,’ whose crimes appear to be that they hold viewpoints contrary to the president.”

“But it doesn’t stop there,” he observed.

Taylor said that DHS “must be taken apart and put back together with the clear goal of making it harder — much, much harder — to weaponize.”

Here is how.

“First, split immigration off from the DHS mothership,” Taylor wrote, then, “give more DHS agency heads an apolitical tenure,” “supercharge the Inspector General,” and finally, “revoke the president’s domestic terrorism order.”

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The Republican exodus from the U.S. House of Representatives is continuing, with longtime Congressman Vern Buchanan of Florida announcing he will be retiring. Twenty-nine House Republicans have now exited or announced their intention to leave their positions this term already. Buchanan, who serves as the Vice Chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was first elected in 2006.

Some of the other prominent Republicans leaving the House include U.S. Reps. Chip Roy (TX), Andy Biggs (AZ), Byron Donalds (FL), Nancy Mace (SC), and Elise Stefanik (NY).

On Monday, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman reported: “Today, we only see 18 out of 435 races as toss-ups, but Republicans would need to win two-thirds of the toss-up column to hold their House majority.”

He suggested that Democrats are “modest favorites” to regain the House majority.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s margin over House Democrats is so thin that he directed Republican lawmakers to “take vitamins” earlier this month.

READ MORE: Former Federal Prosecutor Blasts Trump’s ‘New Malignant Normal’

Last month, political pundits and anonymous Republican lawmakers began predicting that a large GOP exodus from the House of Representatives would come after the winter break, when lawmakers had time to spend with their families to make decisions.

Reporting that “frustrated G.O.P. members are running for the exits before things get worse,” Puck News in December suggested that up to 20 House Republicans could be announcing their retirements soon.

Opposition researcher Tyson Brody, responding to the Buchanan announcement, predicted that more GOP resignations were coming: “the ‘i’m too old to go back into the minority’ retirements are only going to pick up from here.”

Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff for U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), offered more insight.

Noting that Buchanan could ultimately have been chairman of the Ways and Means Committee had he stayed longer, Fritschner added that in his opinion, this “looks like a true ‘we are screwed’ retirement ala 2018,” when Democrats flipped over 40 House Republican seats in a “blue wave.”

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Attorney and author James D. Zirin is blasting the “new malignant normal in the administration of justice” that he says President Donald Trump has brought to America.

Zirin, a former SDNY federal prosecutor who wrote a book on Trump’s lawsuits, in an opinion piece at The Hill, walked through the past year of the president’s tenure.

Examining Trump’s “sorry record,” Zirin includes the “drip feed disclosure of Epstein files, ordered to be produced on Nov. 19,” and notes: “we are told there are 5.2 million pages to go.”

“Extrajudicial killings on the high seas,” he continues, “outsized assertions of executive power, resignations of U.S. attorneys over questionable prosecutions, threats to annex Greenland because Trump is miffed that Norway denied him the Nobel Peace Prize. And hovering over it all investigations and prosecutions of political enemies.”

Zirin pointed to a video made by six Democrats, “directly quoting the Uniform Code of Military Justice about the military’s responsibility to reject illegal orders.”

READ MORE: Trump Shifts Minnesota Messaging After Second Deadly Shooting Sparks Backlash

“Their message,” he noted, “came straight out of the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of 22 Nazi leaders accused, among other things, of ‘crimes against humanity’ where the international court ruled that the ‘I was only following orders’ defense would not wash.”

The president, Zirin wrote, “blasted the video, calling it ‘SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!’ He added: ‘Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.’ Imagine! Legislators who disagree with Trump executed by lethal injection.”

After detailing the efforts Trump administration officials took to respond to the video, including those from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Zirin reminded readers: “Politicized prosecutions have no place in America; yet they are too much with us. Weaponized prosecutions undermine confidence in the criminal justice system and only lend succor to the cynic. Using prosecution to silence critics is a tactic common to authoritarian regimes.”

Zirin concludes, “helicoptering over it all, we have the politicized investigation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Minneapolis of Renée Good, killed in her confrontation with ICE officers, which has not led to an investigation of the officer who was the shooter, but an FBI inquiry into Good’s widow.”

“Attorney General Todd Blanche said that ‘there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation’ into the ICE agent. How about the videotape evidence showing that Good was veering her car away from the ICE agent?”

Summing it up, Zirin notes that he “lived through the Watergate era,” and, apparently by comparison, that “Nixon’s shenanigans appear as normal as apple pie.”

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