Trump Orders Probe Against Officials Who Opposed His Election Lies
President Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials Thursday to investigate two of his former first-term officials who publicly refuted his baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent and criticized his chaotic administration from within.
Chris Krebs, who directed Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Miles Taylor, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official, are the latest targets in Trump’s widening retribution campaign against his perceived political enemies.
Trump fired Krebs in November 2020 after the former CISA head defended the integrity of the 2020 election, while Taylor anonymously wrote a New York Times op-ed and later a book detailing the chaos inside the Trump White House.
In two executive orders, Trump stripped Krebs, Taylor and people or companies associated with them of their security clearances as well.
In his order against Krebs, Trump said he was targeting the former public servant for saying the 2020 election was not rigged. “Abusive conduct of this sort both violates the First Amendment and erodes trust in Government, thus undermining the strength of our democracy itself,” Trump’s order reads.
Krebs was a key witness during Congress’s investigation into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. In his testimony before the Jan. 6 Select Committee, Krebs said Republican officials “lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election.”
Krebs Thursday reposted the social media statement he released after Trump fired him.
Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who was a member of the select committee, described Trump’s orders against Krebs and Taylor as “Stalinesque.”
“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen and speaking the truth is only a crime in countries ruled by tyrants,” Cheney said.
“I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path,” Taylor said in a social media post Thursday. “Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”
CISA was formally established in November 2018 through an act of Congress, to address growing cybersecurity threats to the nation.
“Every day, America’s adversaries are testing our cyber defenses. They attempt to gain access to our critical infrastructure, exploit our great companies, and undermine our entire way of life,” Trump said at the time of CISA’s launch. “This vital legislation will establish a new agency within the Department of Homeland Security to lead the federal government’s civilian response to these cyber threats against our nation.”
Krebs, who led the agency in its previous incarnation — a DHS program called the National Protection and Programs Directorate — was approved by Trump to continue his work. But it came to a head in 2020 when, in the weeks after the election, Trump and his acolytes spread disinformation about a rigged election and mass voter fraud. Krebs pushed back on Trump’s election fraud claims, creating a page on CISA’s website to debunk election disinformation, which drew the ire of Trump and his MAGA contingent.
On Nov. 17, 2020, Krebs tweeted about Trump’s election fraud claims, writing that “59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’”
Trump fired him that day, writing on Twitter that “the recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.”
After that, Krebs became a major enemy in the Trump world. Trump’s campaign attorney, Joseph diGenova, even went on Newsmax to say that Krebs “should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.” (Krebs later sued diGenova, the Trump campaign and Newsmax for defamation).
