President Donald Trump is targeting two former first-term appointees over their criticism of his actions, stripping their security clearances and opening federal probes of their tenures.
The directives that Trump signed on Wednesday order the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.
The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him.
A president ordering investigations of specific individuals whom he considers to be his political enemies is a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Under that norm of separation, criminal investigations are supposed to be insulated from political pressure, but Trump has repeatedly scorned the notion of DOJ independence. Making Wednesday’s action even more remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Trump used the formal power of executive orders to effectively brand two individuals as subjects of criminal investigations.
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4 comments:
The main flaw in your article here is that the DOJ was created by Congress to be placed under the Attorney General's full authority. The Attorney General is a political appointee of the President's, confirmed by the Senate. It's always been a political issue. This is why I'm against centralization. Anytime a government allows centralization like under an Education Department or a Justice Department or the Military or even health, etc., the corruption will always start with a demagogue - a democratically elected demagogue. It's why the ancient philosophers cautioned much more against democracy than any other form of government.
Dictatorship is a poor solution to corruption.
Yet corruption ends in dictatorship and centralization leads to corruption. The DOJ might have had a noble goal at its start, but it was bound to end up the same way as Rome did under Caesar.
Also, politics aside, you missed my point entirely. I think Thomas Hobbes would sum up the current word "dictator" as he would the word "tyrant" that was in popular usage when he was writing: "a ruler misliked"...or in this case, a President. What makes Trump more of a dictator than his predecessor who insisted people like me were spreading diseases because we didn't get a vaccine that his own VP questioned the safety of on the campaign trail? The same predecessor who imposed employers hire on race-based quotas? Etc.
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