President Trump’s first-term efforts to spur law enforcement officials to pursue his political enemies were haphazard, informal and often hashed out in private.
Now, his demands for investigations are starting to become more formalized through written presidential decrees as he seeks to use the power of public office to punish people and companies he has cast as enemies and silence potential critics.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump crossed a new line. Flanked by senior aides and cabinet secretaries, the president signed presidential memos that singled out two officials from his first term who had either defied or simply contradicted him. In a clear escalation, he directed the government to examine their actions for any criminal wrongdoing.
The president signed a third order, his most recent attack on law firms for taking clients or hiring former officials he did not like, this time targeting the law firm Susman Godfrey. The firm has led successful defamation suits against news outlets that spread Mr. Trump’s election lies, including a $787.5 million settlement paid by Fox News.
Taken together, the memos send a stark message: To oppose Mr. Trump will mean risking punishment at the hands of the federal government.
One of those memos identified a perceived adversary for criminal scrutiny, Christopher Krebs, a former cybersecurity expert who contradicted baseless claims by some Trump supporters that he lost the 2020 election because electronic voting machines were compromised.
Mr. Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to review Mr. Krebs’s actions to see whether there was any evidence he provided classified information to anyone not authorized to receive it, a federal crime under the Espionage Act.
In the other directive, Mr. Trump took aim at Miles Taylor, a former homeland security official. Mr. Taylor is better known as the anonymous author of a 2018 New York Times opinion essay in which he identified as part of the resistance inside the first Trump administration that he said was working to thwart the president’s most dangerous impulses.
Stripping Mr. Taylor of his security clearance, Mr. Trump instructed the Department of Homeland Security to review his actions, but stopped short of ordering Justice Department prosecutors to follow suit. Still, his memo also suggested that Mr. Taylor may have violated the Espionage Act and committed treason, a crime punishable by death.
Mr. Krebs has declined to comment on what took place. Mr. Taylor said on social media: “Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path.” Susman Godfrey has called the order unconstitutional and promised to fight back.
Mr. Trump’s approach to intimidating and harassing his political adversaries has ratcheted up over the nearly 10 years since he became a Republican presidential candidate. In July 2015, he revealed the cellphone number of a Republican primary rival who had criticized him. By October 2016, he was telling his opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, at a debate that “you’d be in jail” if he won the election.
Now, Mr. Trump is openly using his control of the executive branch to satisfy his desire for retribution against people he perceives as working against him. And his officials are readily helping him.
“It’s a lot more directing than nudging,” said Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “In the first term it was a lot of: ‘Why won’t my people do what I want them to do? Why do I not have lawyers who will do what I want them to do?’”
“All that stuff from the first term is now unnecessary,” Professor Buell said, “because he has a team of people who believe the president gets to make all the decisions and are going along with it.”
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Trump was working to restore standards for who has “access to government perks and intelligence,” but did not address whether the president had crossed a line by ordering law enforcement to scrutinize particular people.
Mr. Trump is not barred legally from directing the Justice Department to open investigations. But after the Watergate scandal, the United States developed a constitutional norm of law enforcement officials making investigative decisions independently of the White House.
Mr. Trump chipped away at that norm in his first term. He often tried to get the Justice Department to investigate leaks that embarrassed him but were not classified. Privately, senior officials often resisted, reasoning that they were responsible for investigating crimes, not unflattering press coverage.
In the spring of 2018, he privately told his first White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that he wanted prosecutors to investigate Mrs. Clinton and the former director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey Jr. But Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump that he had no authority to order such investigations, according to people familiar with the conversation.
Still, Mr. Trump repeatedly portrayed his adversaries as criminals in public, and the Justice Department occasionally proved more responsive to such indirectly advertised desires. It opened several politically tinged criminal investigations. Those included inquiries into former Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Comey, as well as the attempt by a special counsel to find a basis to charge Obama-era security officials or Mrs. Clinton over the Russia investigation.
To Mr. Trump’s anger and frustration, prosecutors did not charge them. Still, the targets underwent years of stress, legal defense bills and, in some cases, reputational harm.
After leaving office, when Mr. Trump came under criminal investigation for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his refusal to return classified documents, he vowed that if he returned to the White House he would assert control of the Justice Department and direct criminal investigations.
Many of his advisers received subpoenas from the federal and state investigations and shared Mr. Trump’s feeling of persecution. They also adopted his claim that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was orchestrating the investigations from the White House. No evidence has emerged to support that allegation, but Mr. Trump is now openly doing to his perceived adversaries what he baselessly accused Mr. Biden of doing.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has found other ways of using his official powers to impose pain on people and institutions he does not like.
He stripped security protections and clearances from former officials who had angered him.
His orders targeting law firms that have employed or represented people Mr. Trump dislikes not only bar such firms from government contracts but also threaten withholding or canceling contracts for their clients. The directives appear aimed at crippling those law firms’ business, making it harder for his adversaries to find defense lawyers or, in some cases, jobs.
Mr. Trump has now escalated his tactics by initiating a process to encourage the potential criminal prosecution of Mr. Taylor and especially Mr. Krebs.
Mr. Krebs led the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency when Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election to Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump and his allies spread lies that widespread voter fraud cost him the race.
The claims included the baseless conspiracy theory that a super computer had switched votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. As the government’s senior cybersecurity official, Mr. Krebs disputed those claims, coordinating a joint statement by election officials that the election “was the most secure in American history.” Mr. Trump, furious at the claims being contradicted, then fired him.
In his directive on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump denounced Mr. Krebs for having “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen,” ordered his security clearance to be revoked and suspended the clearances of anyone at his cybersecurity company, along with ordering the review of his activities for any wrongdoing.
Under guidelines imposed after revelations of abuses of power by the F.B.I. in the J. Edgar Hoover era, the Justice Department is supposed to have some factual basis before opening an investigation. It can also open a narrower assessment to evaluate public information or files already in Justice Department databases.
But Mr. Trump’s order sidesteps those limits, which were intended to protect civil liberties, instead requiring a law enforcement review of their actions.
“This review should identify any instances where Krebs’s conduct appears to have been contrary to suitability standards for federal employees, involved the unauthorized dissemination of classified information,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting from Washington.
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