Trump's 'retribution tour' just took a 'particularly dangerous' turn: CNN legal expert

President Donald Trump has ordered the investigation of two of his former political appointees who turned into critics, and CNN's Elie Honig said that would be a major test for attorney general Pam Bondi.

The president targeted Chris Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor in an executive order stripping their security clearances and directing the Justice Department to open federal investigations of their tenures.

"The retribution tour has now moved on from multi-billion dollar law firms and universities and media outlets, and now it's targeting private, individual citizens," Honig said. "If you look at these proclamations issued on formal letterhead yesterday by the White House, essentially what it does is a couple of things. First of all, it strips security clearances not only from the targeted individuals, Krebs and Taylor, but also from the places where they work. Krebs works for a private cybersecurity firm, Miles Taylor works at the University of Pennsylvania, so it really threatens their livelihood."

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"But the far more important thing that Donald Trump has done here is specifically ordered the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation based on scattershot accusations of things that are not, in fact, crimes, and I think that's what really makes this particularly unusual and particularly dangerous," Honig added.

The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy that prohibits investigations opened for political or personal reasons, which Honig said Trump's order clearly violates.

"You have to have something called predication, which just means basically a kernel of information on which to believe some crime might have been committed," Honig said. "You can look through those proclamations, you can listen to the president's public statements. He said Chris Krebs is a, quote, 'wise guy' – last time I checked, not a federal crime. He says that they are both dishonest actors, wrote anonymous books, are troublemakers, essentially. None of that's a federal crime, so this, I think, will be another test of the attorney general's independence."

"The right thing to do here is just ignore this," he added. "I mean, Bill Barr, who I've criticized quite aggressively, did in fact ignore Donald Trump at times when he called for political prosecutions of his enemies. So we'll see what Pam Bondi does here. She has not shown any real meaningful independence thus far. This will be another test."

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