Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told MSNBC on Wednesday that President Donald Trump wanted to sell Puerto Rico in 2018.
"He actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico, could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland because, in his words, Puerto Rico was 'dirty' and 'the people were poor'", Taylor said.
The ex-DHS boss argued that POTUS made the comments ahead of a 2018 trip to Puerto Rico for hurricane relief.
Taylor said that he did not take Trump's remarks as a joke at the time, adding, "these are Americans; we don't talk about our fellow Americans that way".
"And the fact that the president of the United States wanted to take a US territory of Americans and swap it for a foreign country is beyond galling", the former official pointed out.
He also asserted that Trump "expressed deep animus towards the Puerto Rican people behind the scenes", saying that POTUS "should be standing by them, not trying to sell them off to a foreign country".
Taylor resigned as DHS chief in 2019 and earlier this week, he moved to support former Vice President and current Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. Trump, for his part, has not commented on Taylor's remarks yet, earlier tweeting that he "has never heard" of Taylor.
The former DHS head's MSNBC interview comes after ex-DHS official Elaine Duke told The New York Times in mid-July that in 2018, Trump considered selling Puerto Rico as one of the options to grapple with Hurricane Maria that pounded the US territory at the time.
"The president's initial ideas were more of as a businessman, you know. Can we outsource the electricity? Can we sell the island? You know, or divest of that asset?”, Duke claimed.
She added that the idea of selling Puerto Rico was never seriously taken into consideration or discussed after it was raised by Trump.
This followed The Wall Street Journal breaking the news of Trump's interest in buying Greenland, which caused flak from Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen who rejected the idea as "absurd".