WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump intensified his efforts to punish his critics on Wednesday by signing a pair of memoranda directing the Justice Department to investigate two officials from his first administration and stripping them of any security clearances they may have.
\nTrump\u2019s targeting of Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in Trump\u2019s first term, and Chris Krebs, a former top cybersecurity official, came as the president has sought to use the powers of the presidency to retaliate against his adversaries, including law firms.
\nTrump also on Wednesday retaliated against another law firm, Susman Godfrey, as he seeks to punish firms that have links to prosecutors who have investigated him or employed attorneys he sees as opponents.
\nAlthough Trump has ordered security clearances to be stripped from a number of his opponents, including former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, the president\u2019s order Wednesday directing the Justice Department to broadly investigate the actions of Taylor and Krebs marks an escalation of Trump\u2019s campaign of retribution since he returned to power.
\nTaylor, who left the Trump administration in 2019, was later revealed to be the author of an anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 that was sharply critical of Trump. The person writing the essay described themselves as part of a secret \u201cresistance\u201d to counter Trump\u2019s \u201cmisguided impulses,\u201d and its publication touched off a leak investigation in Trump\u2019s first White House.
\nTaylor later published a book under the pen name \u201cAnonymous\u201d and publicly revealed his identity days before the 2020 election.
\nTrump said Wednesday that Taylor was \u201clike a traitor\u201d and that his writings about \u201cconfidential\u201d meetings were \u201clike spying.\u201d
\n\u201cI think he\u2019s guilty of treason,\u201d he said.
\nTaylor responded by saying Trump had proved his point.
\n\u201cDissent isn\u2019t unlawful. It certainly isn\u2019t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path,\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n
Trump named Krebs the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency but became angered with him after he declared the 2020 election that Trump lost to be secure and the ballot counts to be accurate.
\nKrebs did not respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.
\nTrump has falsely claimed he was cheated out of reelection in 2020 by widespread fraud, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where he disputed his loss all affirmed Biden\u2019s victory. Judges, including some he appointed, rejected dozens of his legal challenges.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s bizarre to see a president investigate his own administration and his own appointee,\u201d said David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer and coauthor of \u201cThe Big Truth,\u201d a book about Trump\u2019s 2020 election lies.
\nBecker noted that Krebs issued his reassurances about the security of the upcoming election for months during 2020 without pushback from the then-president, with Trump only souring on him after the votes were counted.
\n\u201cThe reason he can sit in the White House today and govern from that position is because our election system is secure and has accurately determined who has won the presidency,\u201d Becker said.
\nSusman Godfrey, the firm Trump targeted in an order Wednesday, represented Dominion Voting Systems in a lawsuit that accused Fox News of falsely claiming that the voting company had rigged the 2020 presidential election. Fox News ultimately agreed to pay nearly $800 million to avert a trial.
\nThe order bars the firm from using government resources or buildings, according to White House staff secretary Will Scharf.
\nTrump has issued a series of orders meant to punish firms, including by ordering the suspension of lawyers\u2019 security clearances and revoking federal contracts. He\u2019s succeeded in extracting concessions from some who have settled, but others have challenged the orders in court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump intensified his efforts to punish his critics on Wednesday by signing a pair of memoranda directing the Justice Department to investigate two officials from his first administration and stripping them of any security clearances they may have. Trump\u2019s targeting of Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in Trump\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79443,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79428\/revisions\/79443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}