In "Corruptionland," former Trump official warns ‘guardrails’ are breaking down

Claims the president and his administration were behind dozens of episodes of alleged corruption and abuses of power. The executive producer is Miles Taylor. He's a former official in the first Trump administration. He now heads up Defiance.org. Back up late with me tonight here on The Final Five. Miles, always good to have you on. Good to see you again. Great to see you, Jim. How do you define corruption? Well, look, in the film, we say that corruption is the use of federal power for wrongdoing, for riches, or for revenge. And with that framing, we identified at least 100 instances of alleged corruption in the second Trump administration that met that definition. And we used that as the basis for this film. So you're looking at things like pardons and contracts and firings and investigations, all of that stuff. You know, people will look at this and say, where's the line between things that are demonstrably wrong and things that you might or anybody might disagree with? Yeah, well, I mean, ultimately for us, it came down to, is this something that defies the law? Is it something that defies normal rules of ethics in Washington, D.C., whether it's Democratic or Republican administrations and to apply that as the filter? So, for instance, I think one of the biggest things that you see in the second Trump administration is the misuse of federal funds. things where Congress said to the executive branch, you must spend money on this. And either the executive branch spent it on something else like a ballroom or refused to disperse funds to Americans in need. So, I mean, one of the things that we dug into is we've seen the Trump administration statistically reluctant to approve emergency FEMA aid for Democratic blue cities and states, whereas it appears Republican cities and states and localities get almost immediate approval. This is very significant. You've got Americans in places where there are hurricanes and tornadoes and floods. And because they didn't vote for the president, they're not getting the support that they would expect from their federal government. Those sorts of things go up into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. It's not just the money that the president has said he's made since he was president which is north of two billion dollars it's all of the different ways federal funds have been used potentially as means of coercion or intimidation against the american people and certainly ways that the president's lieutenants have potentially tried to profit off of their roles inside the trump administration yeah when you mentioned the disaster funding there's a lot of people in western maryland who know what you're talking about very well after we saw some some terrible storms move through there a while back look there in any administration and you know this having served in a few yourself they're supposed to be guide rails you're supposed to have ethics lawyers you're supposed to have uh inspectors general law enforcement the courts they normally are a bulwark and i think one would argue in the first trump term we saw that happened quite a bit it's not happening much now why is that the case well it's not and and i saw those guardrails up close in the first trump administration jim and to a certain extent love or hate donald trump they worked and in the documentary we go through these as the five corruption filters in washington that have existed in republican and democratic administrations and it's everything from the ethics officials and the lawyers at the white house to an independent justice department and fbi that can investigate if those lawyers don't tell the president no on something that's illegal to the internal watchdogs like inspectors general the external watchdogs like the press and then the courts and the Congress. And we looked at each of those filters and said, how well are they functioning right now? And what we found in talking to nonpartisan experts and members of Congress and members of the media is that most of those layers are under severe duress, and some of them very intentionally from the administration, which means a lot more corruption is getting through than would normally happen. And I will say that this film is not a partisan broadside. We spoke to a lot of Republicans for this film, a lot of people who are worried about corruption, and probably the one issue of corruption we heard about the most was around the Epstein investigation. And a lot of Democrats and Republicans and independents see that as the symbol of a corrupt Washington. The fact that you could have 1,400 women and girls who are estimated to have been sexually abused and want recourse from their government want an investigation and do have it shut down by their government. That i think has been so galling for people. And you see the impact of those sorts of decisions in the film. And folks can, by the way, they can stream it at corruptionland.org for free. And they can also go see the data for themselves, the data we used for this film. There's a map of these 100 alleged instances of corruption, which sum up, by the way, sum up to three hundred and seventy seven billion dollars. When you look at where things stand now and what you encountered, I know early on in this second administration, you talk about the media. There were a lot of media organizations that were very reticent to to investigate or report on alleged malfeasance involving President Trump for various reasons. I think you look at CBS News right now. That's a good example of where you're seeing that resistance play out did you feel like there was any uh resistance to getting this out there i know you're releasing this on the website i mean was there was there difficulty getting this out there getting people on board with talking with you well i mean one of the meta moments in this film was during one of our shoot days in washington dc we went to film at the washington monument which is a location that's managed by the national park service publicly accessible to anyone we got tickets like anyone else and you're allowed to film there you're allowed to take pictures at the Washington Monument. But as we were up there, when we started to talk about the corruption you can see around Washington, D.C., and we wanted to go up there just to get a 360 and point out there's the president's ballroom. There's the golf course he's tearing up. There is the reflecting pool. There's where he wants to build a monument. There's the Kennedy Center he's put his name on. And as we were going around and talking about that, you saw the National Park Service get very nervous. Those officials came up. They asked us to stop filming. We explained to them that we were meeting all of the requirements and obligations. In fact, we were using a camera that the tourists behind us, they were using the same camera. And, Jim, they ultimately kicked us out of the Washington Monument, escorted us out of the building. We decided not to make a scene out of it. And I'll tell you why. I don't blame those park officials. Those people are terrified. You see, and it's one of the things we kept running into, the level of fear inside the federal government is enormous because this administration has systematically fired people, pressured them, coerced them, pushed them out of the federal government. And you could tell that these employees were nervous about us filming a documentary about their bosses, bosses, bosses, alleged corruption. And that moment is captured in the film. You can see it at corruptionland.org. And in a sense, we became a data point on that corruption map that we were trying to document. Miles, appreciate the time. Good to see you again. Thanks, Jim. And we're back after this here on The Final Five.