On Targets

This week, President Trump signed two memorandums directing the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to probe the actions of two members of his first administration. It’s one of his most direct attacks yet on election security and the rule of law.

This time, Trump is targeting Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official. Both were responsible for overseeing critical election and national security work while they were in office.

After Trump started spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election, Krebs publicly refuted his claims. Trump fired him shortly afterwards. Krebs later testified to the Jan. 6 Committee about his work to defend and uphold the integrity of the 2020 results.

In one of the memos, Trump said that Krebs was being targeted because he told the truth about the election results and debunked Trump’s baseless claims of fraud. Trump repeated lies about the 2020 election in the memo, calling it “rigged and stolen” and claiming that voting machines had “serious vulnerabilities”—claims that have been repeatedly disproven. He also continued to discredit CISA—an agency created by legislation Trump signed into law in 2018, which has been gutted by the administration’s widespread staff and funding cuts—based on more lies.

Taylor was the author of a 2018 op-ed that described how people within Trump’s administration were working to push back against the president. Taylor later expanded on his account in a book, which Trump’s memo alleges without evidence is “full of falsehoods and fabricated stories.”

During her confirmation hearings, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “it is the Department of Justice’s decision to determine what cases will be prosecuted.” That is not what’s happening here. This is the president using the executive branch to continue pushing lies and conspiracy theories and attacking those who challenge him.

These memos are Trump’s latest move to target and intimidate anyone who has or might check his power. Krebs and Taylor are examples of why those checks are important.

➡️ WATCH: States United CEO Joanna Lydgate shares her thoughts

This Week in Democracy

• President Trump issued two memorandums targeting people who served in his first administration. One targeted Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who in 2020 debunked Trump’s lies about the presidential election being stolen. The other targeted Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official who spoke out against Trump anonymously while working in the administration. The memos are the latest acts of retribution the president has made against his opponents, raising alarm among cybersecurity and election officials.

  ➡️ WATCH: States United CEO Joanna Lydgate shares her thoughts

• Federal judges in New York and Texas blocked the Trump administration from continuing to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act. The rulings came after the U.S. Supreme Court decided earlier this week that the cases needed to be re-filed in the states where people were detained, not D.C. In that decision, the justices wrote that anyone being targeted for deportation should be given the opportunity to challenge their removal in court.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About the Alien Enemies Act

• A federal judge ordered the White House to allow the Associated Press to cover presidential events, citing First Amendment concerns. In February, the White House banned AP reporters from entering the Oval Office because of the agency’s refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

  The judge wrote that “under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists … it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.” The administration has appealed the decision.

• 22 state attorneys general urged the Supreme Court to uphold judges’ rulings blocking Trump’s executive order that would unconstitutionally deny citizenship to some U.S.-born children from going into effect.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About Birthright Citizenship

• A Delaware judge found that Newsmax, a right-wing news company, defamed Dominion Voting Systems when it aired false claims that the company’s machines manipulated the results of the 2020 presidential election. Dominion sued Fox News in 2021 over similar claims, which resulted in a $787 million settlement. Last September, Newsmax agreed to pay $40 million to settle a similar defamation case with Smartmatic, another voting equipment manufacturer.
• Despite the fact that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal and state elections, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill requiring voters to provide proof of American citizenship to vote. But many citizens don’t have the documents outlined in the bill—more than half of all Americans don’t have a passport, for example. Attempts to break the existing law are also extremely rare, and that law is already enforced by state election officials.

  The House also passed a bill that attempts to limit federal judges’ power to issue orders with nationwide effects. It comes as judges across the country have blocked or limited the Trump administration’s actions, and as Trump and his allies attempt to undermine the courts.

  The U.S. Senate is unlikely to pass either bill.

State of the States

In Maine, Attorney General Aaron Frey sued the Trump administration in an attempt to restore funding from the Department of Agriculture to his state. Among other things, the federal funds go towards meals for schoolchildren. The money is held up despite multiple court orders directing the administration to unfreeze funds for states.

In Nevada, a federal appeals court unanimously dismissed a lawsuit that attempted to overturn the state’s Election Worker Protection Act. Sec. Cisco Aguilar, the state’s chief election official, welcomed the decision. “I will always fight to protect election workers—they are the unsung heroes of our democracy,” he said in a statement. “No one should be harassed or intimidated for supporting our democratic process.”

In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court ruled that around 60,000 votes in the 2024 state Supreme Court election challenged by Judge Jefferson Griffin should be counted. However, the Court upheld Griffin’s challenge to other voters’ eligibilities, finding that potentially thousands of voters need to submit additional documents within 30 days, or have their votes discarded. The Court also ruled that a smaller number of overseas voters’ ballots would not be counted.

Griffin, who lost the state Supreme Court race by 734 votes, is seeking to retroactively change the election rules in an effort to overturn the election.

In Wisconsin, Michael Gableman, a former justice of the state Supreme Court, agreed to have his law license suspended for three years. Gableman led a sham review of the state’s 2020 presidential election results that cost Wisconsin taxpayers more than $2 million, and spread conspiracy theories about elections throughout the process.