The payback against people who have criticized Trump has ranged in severity, but it’s come quickly, within his first week back in power.
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For those who may have crossed President Donald Trump, the message is sinking in: Payback is coming, and coming fast.
John Bolton, a former White House national security adviser who wrote a damning book about Trump’s first term, lost the Secret Service detail assigned to protect him from assassination threats from Iran.
Also losing his detail was Anthony Fauci, the public health scientist whom Trump called a “disaster” over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and who has been a target of far-right anger ever since. (Fauci has hired his own private security team in response.)
A portrait of Mark Milley, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who broke with Trump over a photo-op at a church during the George Floyd racial justice protests, was abruptly removed from the walls of the Pentagon. Defense officials said they have no idea who ordered it taken down or why.
And Trump yanked the security clearances of dozens of former national security officials who’d signed a letter during the 2020 campaign opining that emails from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
All that happened within days of Trump’s inauguration — and in some cases, hours.
“There are plenty of early warning signs that confirm the worst fears of people who were concerned about a second Trump administration and what it would mean for the rule of law,” David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official under Republican and Democratic administrations, said in an interview. “The real question remains what checks and balances will there be to prevent the creeping establishment of an authoritarian state in the United States.”
“I thought he was a very dumb person,” Trump said of Bolton, adding that the government can’t pay for people’s Secret Service protection in perpetuity. (Ex-presidents receive lifetime security details.)
“When you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off,” he told reporters. “And you know, you can’t have them forever.”
A White House spokesman, meanwhile, said the former national security officials deserved to lose their security clearances.
“By abusing their previous positions in government, these individuals helped sell a public relations fraud to the American people,” said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. “They greatly damaged the credibility of the Intelligence Community by using their privileges to interfere in a presidential election. President Trump’s action is restoring the credibility of our nation’s institutions.”
The Trump administration’s moves thus far impose varying levels of hardship for those on the receiving end. Milley’s portrait had been unveiled 10 days before Trump’s swearing-in. Its abrupt disappearance from a wall dedicated to the Joint Chiefs of Staff may serve as a warning to future chiefs that they, too, can be erased from Pentagon history if they fall out of favor with the commander in chief.
Bolton said he’s taking private safety measures now that he’s lost his Secret Service detail. In 2022, the Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in a plot to murder Bolton, likely in retaliation for the Trump administration’s killing of an Iranian general two years earlier.
Biden first provided Bolton with a security detail in December 2021, and it had been renewed every six months since then — most recently last month, Bolton told NBC News.
“This is part of the retribution campaign,” Bolton said.
“It doesn’t really matter to him [Trump] the level of seriousness,” he added. “Each thing he can do makes him feel a little bit better.”
Members of the U.S. intelligence community told him in the days before Trump’s swearing-in that the threat of assassination remained unchanged and had not gone away, he said.
“They are playing with his life, not merely damaging his professional opportunities, but they’re putting a man’s life at risk in order to punish him for criticizing Donald Trump,” said Rosa Brooks, a former senior Defense Department official in the Obama administration and a co-leader of the Democracy Futures Project hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Should Iran harm Bolton in some way, that could compel the U.S. to respond militarily, escalating tensions and drawing the two nations closer to war.
Denying security clearances to those who co-signed the Hunter Biden letter can create financial distress for some who are now in the private sector and need them to fulfill government contracts.
One person whose security clearance was taken away said in an interview, “They are now being hurt financially — and also the country is being hurt — because these are people with decades of experience who continue to serve the government after they retire.”
“There’s no legitimate policy purpose that this serves,” this person continued, speaking on condition of anonymity. “From the standpoint of freedom of speech and our rights as U.S. citizens, we have every right to warn the American people that the Russians continue to engage in these information operations to influence American politics and elections.”
Still, it’s not clear how much thought the new administration gave in announcing the punishment. Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents some who signed the letter, said in an interview that most of the people no longer possess a security clearance.
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