(Credit: Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)
President Trump is apparently not done being mad at Chris Krebs, the security professional he appointed as the first head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) before firing him for saying the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history."
On Wednesday, Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum that directs "the head of every federal agency to immediately revoke any active security clearance held by Krebs" and to suspend all clearances "held by individuals at entities associated with Krebs" to determine if "such clearances are consistent with the national interest." It also directs the attorney general and secretary of homeland security to investigate Krebs's government work.
On Wednesday night, Krebs reposted the tweet he posted the day Trump fired him in 2020, which says, "We did it right."
Trump calls for a review of Krebs' leadership of CISA from 2018 to 2020 and "all of CISA’s activities over the last 6 years." His memo also targets Krebs' employer, SentinelOne, the Mountain View, California, security firm where he’s worked as chief public policy officer since 2023.
In a statement, a SentinelOne spokesperson said that it views the White House "as a crucial collaborator" in its mission to "defend customers, enterprises, and governments against cyber threats." The company adds that it will "actively cooperate in any review of security clearances held by any of our personnel – currently less than 10 employees overall and only where required by existing government processes and procedures to secure government systems.”
The White House memo leaves little to imagine about what a federal investigation may "find." Trump calls Krebs "a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused" his authority to censor "conservative" views on social media about election security, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and COVID-19.
The Supreme Court rejected the entire social-media censorship thesis in a June 2024 opinion that said it's not censorship for government officials to suggest that social platforms enforce their rules—or for those officials to scold them for not enforcing those rules—as long as there is no "do this or else" punishment. Six of the court’s nine justices joined that opinion, including two of the three Trump appointed.
Another paragraph in Wednesday’s memo repeats Trump’s past lies about losing the 2020 election by saying Krebs “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”
That is false. Trump decisively lost the 2020 election, then lost dozens of court challenges attempting to have votes thrown out and Electoral College results overturned before inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. No serious reports have emerged of flaws in voting machines used in 2020—many of which remained in use in the 2024 election that Trump won.
“US election infrastructure isn't perfect, and there's still work to do to make it more secure, but there is absolutely no credible evidence that the 2020 election outcome was altered through technical attacks, despite exhaustive scrutiny over more than four years,” emailed Matt Blaze, a computer-science chair at Georgetown University’s law school who has written extensively about election security.
(One of Blaze’s talks on that subject also led me to serve as a poll worker for my county, which is another reason why I know Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about on that issue.)
A TechCrunch piece on Wednesday gave another reason to question Trump’s concern over security. The site reports that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has placed a hold on Trump’s nominee to head CISA, Sean Plankey, to compel that agency to release a finished report on security vulnerabilities in American telecoms that could have enabled Chinese “Salt Typhoon” hacks of those carriers.
The Krebs memo fits into a pattern of Trump using executive orders, press releases, and other statements as a form of rage-tweeting on White House stationery. It also fits into a pattern of Trump making a public show of revoking the security clearances of political opponents. A list maintained by The New York Times and last updated on Monday (so, already obsolete) counts 67 such people.
Trump has also played the clearance-revocation card against multiple law firms that worked on past lawsuits against him or his administration and thrown in another threat of or-else punishment: losing current and future government contracts. Wednesday’s statements on the White House site added another to that list, Susman Godfrey.
Some of these firms have responded by agreeing to renounce diversity outreach efforts and commit tens of millions of dollars in pro bono work to defend Trump's priorities in future litigation.