By Michelle L. Price
Washington (AP) – President Donald Trump intensified his efforts to punish his criticisms by signing a pair of memoranda ordering the Ministry of Justice to investigate two officials of his first administration and eliminate them from any security authorization they may have.
Trump targeting by Miles Taylor, a former head of the Ministry of Internal Security at the first Mandate of Trump, and Chris Krebs, a former senior cybersecurity, came while the republican president sought to use the powers of the presidency to retaliate against his opponents, including law firms.
Trump also retaliated on Wednesday against another law firm Susman Godfrey, while he seeks to punish companies who have links with prosecutors who investigated him or employees of lawyers whom he sees as opponents.
Although Trump has ordered security authorizations to be withdrawn from a number of his opponents, including former President Joe Biden and former vice-president Kamala Harris, the order of the president ordering the Ministry of Justice to investigate Taylor and Krebs’ actions marks a climbing of Trump’s remuneration campaign since he returned to power.
Taylor, who left the Trump administration in 2019, was later revealed to be the author of an anonymous editorial of the New York Times in 2018 who criticized Trump strongly. The person writing the test was described as part of a secret “resistance” to counter Trump’s “erroneous impulses”, and his publication addressed a flight investigation in Trump’s first White House.
Taylor later published a book under the name of the “Anonymous” pen and publicly revealed his identity a few days before the 2020 elections.
Trump said on Wednesday that Taylor was “like a traitor” and that his writings on “confidential” meetings were “like espionage”.
“I think he’s guilty of betrayal,” he said.
Taylor replied by saying Trump had proven his point.
“Dissent is not illegal. It is certainly not betrayal. America is moving down a dark path,” he wrote on X.
Trump appointed Krebs the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, but angry with him after declaring the 2020 elections that Trump lost to be secure and the ballot counts to be exact.
Krebs did not respond to a message asking for comments, but late Wednesday he shared on X a message he initially published when he left the government in 2020: “Honored to serve. We did it well.”
Trump falsely said that he had been deceived in 2020 by a generalized fraud, despite a mountain of contrary evidence. Tells, criticism and audits in the battlefield of the States where he challenged his loss confirmed the victory of Biden. The judges, some of which he appointed, rejected dozens of his legal challenges.
“It is weird to see a president investigating his own administration and his own appointed,” said David Becker, former lawyer for the Ministry of Justice and co-author of “The Big Truth”, a book on the elections of Trump elections in 2020.
Becker noted that Krebs had issued his insurance on the security of the next elections for months in 2020 without decline in the president of the time, with Trump only on him after the counted votes.
“The reason for which he can sit at the White House today and governing from this position is that our electoral system is secure and has determined with precision who won the presidency,” said Becker.
Susman Godfrey, the cabinet that Trump targeted in an order on Wednesday, represented Dominion voting systems in a trial which accused Fox News of wrongly claiming that the voting company had rigged the presidential election of 2020. Fox News finally agreed to pay nearly 800 million dollars to avoid a trial.
The order prohibits the company from using government resources or buildings, according to the secretary of the White House staff, Will SCHARF.
In a statement, Susman Godfrey replied that people who know the business know that he is taking his duty seriously to respect the rule of law. “This principle now guides us,” said the firm. “There is no doubt that we are going to fight this unconstitutional order.”
Trump issued a series of prescriptions intended to punish businesses, in particular by ordering the suspension of law enforcement authorizations and revoining federal contracts. He managed to extract concessions from some who have settled, but others challenged the orders before the court.
The editors of the Associated Press Zeke Miller and Eric Tucker in Washington and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
