Trump Signs Memoranda Stripping Clearances and Ordering Probes of Krebs and Taylor, Sweeping In the University of Pennsylvania

On April 9, 2025 Trump signed two presidential memoranda directing the government to investigate two former officials of his own first administration and to suspend their security clearances. Both men had publicly broken with him. Neither was accused in the documents of a specific crime.

Christopher Krebs, the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — fired in 2020 after his agency called the 2020 election secure — was described as a “significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.” The memo directed the Attorney General and the Homeland Security Secretary to “take all appropriate action to review” his activities.

Miles Taylor, DHS chief of staff in the first term and the author of the 2018 “Anonymous” New York Times op-ed and the 2019 book A Warning, was accused of having “stoked dissension by manufacturing sensationalist reports on the existence of a supposed ‘resistance’ within the Federal Government.” The White House fact sheet calls him “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position” and orders a review of his conduct as a government employee for departures from “suitability standards” or “unauthorized dissemination of classified information.”

The part that reaches past the two men. Taylor’s memorandum does not stop at Taylor. It suspends clearances held by “individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.” Taylor was affiliated with Penn’s SNF Paideia Program. The operative category is therefore not conduct but association: people at a university lost clearances because of where a critic of the President worked, having done nothing themselves that the memorandum alleges.

That is the mechanism worth holding. A clearance suspension requires no charge, no hearing, and no finding — it is an administrative act, reviewable barely if at all, that can end a career in national security work. Applied to an individual it is retaliation. Applied to an institution that employs the individual, it converts every employer of a government critic into a party with a material interest in not employing them. The cost of association is priced in advance, and no one has to be prosecuted for the price to be paid.

Taylor has publicly contested the order as an attack on free speech. This corpus separately records the same instrument operating at larger scale — Gabbard’s revocation of 37 clearances in August 2025 — and the executive-order campaign against law firms representing disfavored clients, which courts have since ruled against. The shape recurs: a discretionary authority built for one purpose, pointed at people whose offense is what they said.

Sourcing note. The quoted memorandum language and the University of Pennsylvania scope are from the White House’s own fact sheet, a primary source, corroborated by NBC News and PBS. One correction to the surrounding coverage: several outlets reported the Taylor memo as accusing him of “possibly violating the Espionage Act.” The White House fact sheet contains no Espionage Act reference — it speaks of “unauthorized dissemination of classified information.” The memorandum text itself was not read here, so whether the statute is named in the memo but not the fact sheet is unresolved; the phrase should not be quoted to the memo without pulling it. The number of Penn clearances actually suspended is not established in these sources. This entry was written from a ledger capture of Miles Taylor’s 25th-anniversary 9/11 essay in Defiance News; that essay’s own analytical claims are not carried into canon — it is a tier-2 single-author opinion piece, and what it argues (that the post-9/11 apparatus has been turned inward) is already documented here as events rather than as argument. What the capture surfaced that canon lacked was Taylor’s status as a named target of the machinery he describes, which is this entry.