One of the great fears of living under this Trump presidency is that so many bad things are happening we may either miss or fail to appreciate the significance of things that would be considered catastrophic in more normal times. On Wednesday, Trump took aim at two former appointees who worked for him in his first administration, taking away their security clearances and directing the Department of Justice to look into their activities for any wrongdoing they may have committed at the time they worked for him.
The two individuals targeted are Chris Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official.
Krebs’ apparent transgression is that he failed to find anything wrong with the way the 2020 election was conducted and said so publicly. Just after Biden’s victory he stated, “in every case of which we are aware, these claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” For his honesty, Krebs was fired by Trump shortly after making this statement.
Miles Taylor wrote a well-publicized and anonymous op-ed in 2018 in the New York Times highly critical of Trump and went on to write a book about the general dysfunction of the White House during Trump’s tenure. Just prior to the 2020 election he identified himself and announced that he would be voting for Joe Biden.
It should go without saying that a president should not be putting pressure on the Justice Department to investigate enemies so that he not be seen as using his office for political retribution, which would be a particularly egregious breach of the judicial process. Clearly Trump is not worried in the least about how this looks.
Though Trump has called Miles Taylor a traitor and has labelled Chris Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority,” there appears to be little chance either is in real legal jeopardy. In their book Lucky Loser about Trump’s business career prior to his first term as president, authors Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig note Trump’s penchant for using litigation or the threat of such to bully those who find themselves in a weaker position. Being right is little solace if it requires going bankrupt to make your case in court.
Taylor and Krebs are surely already paying lawyers and using considerable amounts of their professional energy and talent to dispute Trump’s absurd claims. What they are less likely to be doing is to use that talent and energy to be effective critics of Trump and his administration.
Miles Taylor, upon hearing of Trump’s direction to the DOJ posted on X “I said this would happen…Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous.” All of this is true, but claims by the office of the presidency to the contrary can certainly make it very expensive in time and money to stage a defence. This is the point, and a point for all others who might consider standing up in the future.
Image: Dreamtime
Retired political staffer/civil servant. Dual U.S./Canadian citizen writing about politics on both sides of the border. Twitter @Richard05569297, cross-posting at PhantomPublic.org