'Shocking': CNN's Jake Tapper aghast as whistleblowers targeted 'for telling the truth'

CNN’S Jake Tapper launched a terse take down of President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting two members of his former administration he now views as his political enemies with Department of Justice investigations.

The presidential directives came Wednesday during an Oval Office signing ceremony where Trump called former Homeland Security cybersecurity director Chris Krebs “a disgrace” and “fraud.” Trump made similar statements about former DHS official Miles Taylor, who he said was “guilty of treason,” as he asked his DOJ to probe the two former Republican officials.

“This is shocking,” Tapper said Wednesday as he broke down the stark implications of the directives on his show, “The Lead.”

“Krebs’s apparent crime is telling the truth about the 2020 election,” the host added.

CNN’s Paula Reid said in the decade she has spent covering Trump’s various legal issues, she’s “never seen anything like this.”

“This is a blatant attempt to violate the First Amendment and weaponize the Justice Department,” Reid, the network’s chief legal affairs correspondent, said. She added: “I mean, Jake, investigate them for what?”

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Tapper continued to scold Trump’s latest move aimed at his perceived political opponents, telling viewers “Neither of these are acceptable.”

“But what Chris Krebs was doing was his job,” Tapper said. “He was attesting to the cybersecurity of the 2020 election, and there has never been any credible evidence that any – I mean, remember all the cockamamie theories that they were putting out there that the Italians used satellites to hack into voting systems – all that stuff was unfettered nonsense.

Tapper concluded: “Chris Krebs said these elections were secure – and they were! They were. It’s exactly: here’s the defendant, go find the crime.”

Reid ended with concluded that the legal drama sparked by Trump’s Wednesday orders could potentially ignite “this constitutional crisis that people have been talking about for a long time.”

“This is a very important question for the attorney general,” Reid said of Pam Bondi. "If she follows this instruction from the president, it will be clear that those declarations are a farce. So, will she follow this order or not?”

Watch the clip via CNN below or at the link here: