Breaking: Trump Sics Justice Department on Taylor, Krebs
Former DHS officials singled out for retribution for contradicting Trump's false claims of 2020 election fraud, other presidential actions
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.
Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.
Taylor, who served as chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering New York Times Op-ed, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous," detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October. 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump
“You can't have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he's guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we'll find out.”
The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”
Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. 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.”
Chris Krebs served as Director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from Nov. 2018 until mid-Nov. 2020, when Trump fired him for contradicting the president’s false claims of election fraud, saying there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Krebs, a lifelong Republican who worked on cybersecurity in the Bush administration, subsequently became director of cybersecurity policy before joining DHS in 2017 as its top cyber security official. He made it a priority to stop a repeat of Russian interference in the 2016 election elections—until he was fired.
In 2020 he told “60 Minutes” in an interview, “I'm not a public servant anymore, but I feel I still got some public service left in me. And, you know, it's hard once you take that oath to uphold and defend the constitution from threats foreign and domestic, it's hard to walk away from that. And if I can reinforce or confirm for one person that the vote was secure, the election was secure, then I feel like I've done my job.“
He has not yet commented on the Trump executive order.
Chris Krebs is one of the finest examples of a serious contributor to our national security. As the head of CISA, Chris was responsible for protecting all of our national security assets, meaning attacks on any of our government agencies as well as private sector companies. He was a true leader in developing new defensive measures against threats from all quarters. Election integrity was only one of his jobs.
This assault on such an outstanding IC leader is disgusting and goes a long way to furthering the destruction of the intelligence community’s functionality and its morale. Our security in this dangerous world that we live in as been made even more insecure.
People in the U.S. lack experience with dictatorship or oppressive regimes, which means many of them are stuck in a false narrative that everything will eventually be ok, or at least they could vote differently next time.
My family experienced two types of dictatorships: first, the Nazis, and shortly after, a one-party dictatorship. Unfortunately, with dictators and oppressive regimes, there is no second chance.
We remember very well how slippery this slope is. The communists won regular elections and then seized power. Similarly, in Germany, the Nazis had followed a comparable path.
I still believe there is a chance for the U.S., but with each passing day, that chance grows thinner. It might not appear that way on the surface; however, in my humble opinion the power takeover is happening beneath, and it is alarmingly fast.