In personnel and policy, the Trump administration has demonstrated a dogged devotion to dismantling and destroying the federal government-led censorship-industrial complex. One recent illustration is the State Department’s announcement that it has eliminated the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which censored The Federalist.
One week prior, the White House revealed another vital effort to disarm the speech police — targeting an arguably more pernicious actor than the GEC. In an April 9 memorandum, the president called on relevant officials to revoke any active security clearance held by former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) chief Chris Krebs and to consider suspending security clearances of those at his cybersecurity firm, SentinelOne.
Corporate media pounced on this development as part of a running feud between a president seeking vengeance and his virtuous insubordinate ex-subordinate, but there was far more significance to the memo.
President Donald Trump’s sanctions came in response to the former CISA director’s having “weaponized and abused his government authority” via his involvement in the censorship-industrial complex. Now he will be held to account by losing his access to America’s secrets.
But the president’s memo went still further. After detailing Krebs’ alleged malfeasance, Trump also tasked the attorney general and secretary of homeland security with investigating not only the ex-director for his activities as then-CISA chief, but CISA itself — going back six years and with a focus on “any instances where CISA’s conduct appears to have been contrary to the purposes and policies identified in Executive Order 14149,” which prohibits the federal government from engaging in censorship efforts.
At the conclusion of that probe, the agency heads are to submit a report to the president “with recommendations for appropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to fulfill the purposes and policies of Executive Order 14149.”
What makes this effort so significant? As the plaintiffs in the landmark Murthy v. Missouri case found, CISA was the “nerve center” of fed-led speech policing. In congressional testimony in part building on discovery in that case, I detailed how CISA had coordinated fed-led censorship efforts with Big Tech, flagged offending content for suppression, and helped cultivate consortia of private-sector entities to serve as force-multiplying cutouts for laundering government censorship efforts.
Krebs’ Role in Censorship
Krebs was integral to these efforts. As the presidential memo details, he was involved in “the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic” and helping suppress conservative viewpoints “under… guise of combatting supposed disinformation,” including through pressuring social media platforms to do so. He also assisted domestic political interference through his sub-agencies’ “blind[ing of] the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop” and downplaying or “promot[ing] the censorship of election information” around “risks associated with certain voting practices” and “election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”
Perhaps most notoriously, under Krebs, CISA helped stand up the outsourced surveillance and censorship vehicle, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), with a quartet of outside actors including the Stanford Internet Observatory — then-led by Alex Stamos, former chief security officer for Facebook. After Krebs’ ouster from CISA, Stamos would launch a consultancy with Krebs that would then be bought by SentinelOne.
The EIP, as I reported for RealClearInvestigations, targeted among others The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway for silencing due to content she shared concerning the 2020 election. It did so as part of a broader effort to pressure — alongside government — social media companies to expand their terms of service to suppress wide swaths of protected political speech skeptical of orthodoxy on election processes and outcomes; mass-surveil social media for offending content; and flag such content to social media companies for suppression. Those efforts resulted in the silencing of Americans in the heat of an election.
The president issued Executive Order 14149 prohibiting the federal government from engaging in such efforts. But it also calls for an investigation like that which the president has demanded of CISA, to discover “misconduct by the federal government related to censorship of protected speech.”
Already, the Trump administration has laid off more than 100 CISA staffers including those tasked with liaising with local and state election officials. It is reportedly planning to remove civil service protections from the vast majority of remaining employees, while threatening to remove one-third of them. And it has cut CISA funding to entities involved in 2020 censorship-related efforts. The revocation of Krebs’ security clearance may well impose an economic cost on him. He has stepped away from his firm and vowed to fight the president.
An Accounting of the Censorship Regime
But a fulsome investigation may reveal more about the size, scope, and nature of the sub-agency’s efforts — including those it sought to obscure during the latter years of the Biden administration after its work in “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” began to receive scrutiny. Only with full transparency can we get to the accountability and deterrence the White House is seeking to ensure our First Amendment rights are not violated again going forward.
To date, no one has faced justice for imposing arguably the greatest censorship regime in U.S. history upon the American people.
The Trump administration in exposing that regime, curtailing its efforts, and pursuing policies to ensure it remains de-fanged — doing what it can where it must to defend free speech.
The Supreme Court allowed a partly CISA-driven “whole-of-society” censorship dragnet to persist by failing to rule on the merits of the case against it in Murthy. Ultimately, the legislative branch must codify the administration’s policies to ensure the speech policing apparatus does not once again spring into action under a future president.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
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