Trump crosses the Rubicon on ordering investigations of foes [View all]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/10/trump-doj-ivestigations-krebs-taylor/

Trump crosses the Rubicon on ordering investigations of foes
About as stunning as the concept of Trump’s executive actions targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor is their substance.
April 10, 2025 at 5:14 p.m. EDT
Analysis by Aaron Blake

President Donald Trump has spent much of his first three months back in office pursuing an extraordinary agenda of retribution.

But in few cases has this effort been as transparent as it was Wednesday afternoon.

Appearing in the Oval Office, Trump signed a pair of executive actions seeking federal investigations and other sanctions against individual people. Both are high-profile administration critics from his first term.

One is former homeland security official Miles Taylor, who famously wrote an anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed describing an internal resistance to Trump in his first term. The other is Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who exemplified that principled resistance. Krebs played a major role in undercutting Trump’s false claims about 2020 election fraud and was fired as a result.

Trump has consistently signaled that he expects government officials of all stripes to be loyal to him and his agenda. His executive actions Wednesday would seem to send a message to all of them that running afoul of Trump has consequences.

And that is a big moment. He is now expressly ordering investigations of his foes — even criminal ones. That’s something Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, downplayed as a possibility at her January confirmation hearing. (When asked what role the White House would play in investigation and prosecution decisions, Bondi responded: “It is the Department of Justice’s decision.”)

But about as stunning as the broad concept of these presidential memos is their substance.

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