Trump Orders Investigation Of Two First-term Administration Aides Who Criticized Him

President Donald Trump is targeting two former first-term appointees over their criticism of his actions, stripping their security clearances and opening federal probes of their tenures.

The directives that Trump signed on Wednesday order the Justice Department to scrutinize former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor and Christopher Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him.

Taylor authored a high-profile anonymous op-ed in 2018 that criticized Trump and offered a scathing firsthand account of his decision making. He later authored a book portraying the chaos inside the Trump White House, before revealing his identity and endorsing then-candidate Joe Biden in the days before the 2020 election.

Trump on Wednesday called Taylor a “traitor,” even as he insisted that the former DHS chief of staff played a minimal role in his first administration.

“I barely remember him. Somebody that went out and wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things that were all lies,” Trump said in the Oval Office Wednesday. “I think he’s guilty of treason.”

Taylor left the Trump administration in 2019. On Wednesday, Taylor said Trump’s decision to target him was a sign the country was headed down “a dark path.”

“I said this would happen,” he posted on X. “Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

The president signed a similar order taking aim at Krebs, who was fired after he contradicted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud following the 2020 election.

Krebs, who was the administration’s top cybersecurity official responsible for election security, tweeted shortly after Biden’s victory that “in every case of which we are aware, these claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”

As he signed the order stripping Krebs’ security clearance and opening an investigation into his activities, Trump repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

“It was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out about this guy too, because this guy is a wise guy.”

Krebs was fired by Trump via tweet shortly after the presidential election in 2020 following a joint statement by CISA and other stakeholder groups that asserted the election was secure and that there was no indication of votes being changed or stolen.

Krebs is currently the chief intelligence and public policy officer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne. The executive order signed by Trump also takes aim at his current colleagues, suspending any security clearances held by individuals at SentinelOne that work with Krebs.

A spokesperson for the company did not immediately respond to request for comment.