‘Phone started blowing up’: Lawyer describes moment Trump admin. yanked security clearance

It was just another day for former Obama White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen until he discovered via a social media post that he was among the group of prominent government officials and attorneys whose access to classified government information had been terminated.

Eisen, who previously helped prosecute President Donald Trump’s impeachment case as special counsel to the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee, remained optimistic about what is being interpreted as an act of political retribution carried out by the new administration against the president’s adversaries.

“My phone started blowing up – ‘look at Tulsi Gabbard's tweet,’" Eisen said of the text bombardment he received Monday.

Eisen added that Trump threatened the action “several weeks ago, right after we secured a court order in one of our cases at Democracy Defenders protecting thousands of FBI agents from retaliation for working on January 6 cases.”

“So, you really have to see this as a kind of a backhanded compliment,” Eisen, the executive chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his show, “AC360.”

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Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, announced Monday on X that “Per @POTUS directive, I have revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Andrew Weissman, along with the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden 'disinformation' letter.”

Additionally, Gabbard wrote, “The President's Daily Brief is no longer being provided to former President Biden.”

Eisen said the move is just another round of retribution from a vengeance-hungry president.

“We’re working on over a dozen cases and we've gotten those orders in many of the cases in response to illegal behavior by the administration, and this is more retaliation,” Eisen said. But, he concluded: “Plenty of lawyers are going to stand up to it.”

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