Trump orders probes into former staffers turned critics

President Donald Trump ordered federal investigators to investigate former employees Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs and strip them of any government clearances. Trump accused each of abusing the authority of their positions within his administration.

Who are Taylor and Krebs? Taylor served as an administrative staff assistant at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term. He wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed criticizing the Trump administration in 2018 before leaving the administration the following year. He then anonymously published the 2019 book A Warning that intimately revealed and criticized the Trump administration. Taylor abandoned his constitutional oath by illegally publishing classified conversations and sharing sensitive information for personal gain, according to Trump’s Wednesday order.

Krebs previously served as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Trump’s first administration. Trump fired Krebs after he disagreed with Trump’s claims of widespread fraud after the 2020 election. Krebs’ department released a statement saying officials had no evidence that votes had been lost, changed, or otherwise compromised in any way. Krebs later served as a key witness to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Trump’s order accused Krebs of abusing his authority to censor online information and conversations around the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. Krebs now serves as the chief intelligence and public policy officer at SentinelOne. The Wednesday order extended beyond Krebs and stripped clearances from any employees at the cybersecurity company.

How did the men respond? Taylor said he expected Trump’s censure in a Wednesday statement. He noted that disagreement is not unlawful and insisted the country was heading down a dark path.

SentinelOne released a Wednesday statement saying it would cooperate with all security clearance reviews and does not expect its business to be impacted. Less than a dozen of SentinelOne employees have government security clearances, according to the company. The company plans to continue building partnerships with the U.S. government and military to continue defending critical cyberspace infrastructure, according to the statement.

Dig deeper: Read Emily Belz’s report about the security of the 2020 election.