WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration's announcement this week that it would rescind the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials was hardly an isolated act.
In ordering the revocation of the clearances, President Donald Trump was turning to a favored retributive tactic that he's wielded — or at least tried to — against high-profile political figures, lawyers and intelligence officials.
The latest targets include officials who have served in the government across a range of agencies and positions, including on former President Joe Biden's national security team and at the CIA and National Security Agency.
It's not entirely clear how the list of 37 officials was developed, though some had worked on issues related to Russian threats to elections in 2016 and 2020, an issue that has long provoked Trump's ire.
Some were among the national security professionals who had signed onto a 2019 letter that criticized Trump and that was recently highlighted online by influential Trump ally Laura Loomer. Among them was Joel Willett, a military veteran and former CIA officer who spent time in the White House Situation Room under then-President Barack Obama before leaving the government 10 years ago. He said he was not given a reason for why he was targeted but doesn't think it has anything to do with his long-past government service.
“I think there was a profound sadness and disappointment that this is what our country has become in 2025,” he said in describing how he felt when he got the news.
The practical impact is unclear because it's not known how many of the people newly singled out by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard still maintain security clearances. But critics are decrying the move as an act of retribution meant to chill dissent and make the intelligence community think twice before reaching conclusions at odds with the president's interests.
A look at some of the other people and industries affected by Trump's security clearance actions:
On his first day in office, Trump moved to revoke the clearances of more than four dozen former intelligence officials who in 2020 had signed a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop saga bore the hallmarks of a “Russian information operation.”
The list includes prominent officials like James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under Obama; and John Brennan and Leon Panetta, who both served as Obama’s CIA directors. Also targeted was John Bolton, who was fired as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term and later wrote a book whose publication the White House unsuccessfully sought to block on grounds that it disclosed national security information.
The laptop storyline surfaced after The New York Post in 2020 reported that it had obtained from longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani a hard drive of a computer that Hunter Biden had dropped off at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop. The newspaper published communications related to the younger Biden's business dealings in Ukraine.
A subsequent letter from 51 former intelligence officials raised alarms about the provenance of emails reported by the Post. The signatories wrote that they didn’t know whether the emails were authentic but that their emergence has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Trump's then-director of national intelligence and current CIA director, John Ratcliffe, contradicted that assessment by saying there was no intelligence to support the idea that Russia had anything to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI, which was conducting its own criminal investigations into the younger Biden, seemed to back up Ratcliffe’s statement by telling Congress in a letter that it had nothing to add to what he had said.
Hunter Biden was subsequently convicted of both tax and gun charges but was pardoned by his father.
Trump followed up with a separate order stripping Biden of his clearance, saying there was no need for him to continue receiving access to classified information. He also ended intelligence briefings for Biden in payback for Biden doing the same to him in 2021.
Top Biden administration officials saw their security clearances suspended in a March order, including former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
A host of Trump's perceived adversaries also were targeted in that same March order, including:
— Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor on the Justice Department special counsel team that during Trump's first term investigated ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign.
— Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney whose office prosecuted Trump last year in connection with hush money payments in 2016 to an adult film actor who has said she had sex with Trump.
— Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington national security lawyer whose clients have included an intelligence community whistleblower whose complaint initiated the first of two impeachment cases against Trump.
Zaid subsequently sued, calling it an act of “improper political retribution” that jeopardized his ability to continue representing clients in sensitive national security cases.
Trump also made the suspension of clearances a key provision in a spate of executive orders this year targeting prominent law firms over legal work he disfavored or for their relationships with attorneys he did not like.
The actions also sought to bar firm attorneys from accessing federal buildings and threatened the cancellation of federal contracts.
Four firms — Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Susman Godfrey and Jenner & Block — sued in federal court to block the enforcement of the orders and in each case prevailed in getting them struck down, leaving the clearances intact.
President Donald Trump listens during an event in the Oval Office to mark the 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act, Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has arrived at a delicate moment as he weighs whether to order a U.S. military response against the Iranian government as it continues a violent crackdown on protests that have left more than 600 dead and led to the arrests of thousands across the country.
The U.S. president has repeatedly threatened Tehran with military action if his administration found the Islamic Republic was using deadly force against antigovernment protesters. It's a red line that Trump has said he believes Iran is “starting to cross” and has left him and his national security team weighing “very strong options.”
But the U.S. military — which Trump has warned Tehran is “locked and loaded” — appears, at least for the moment, to have been placed on standby mode as Trump ponders next steps, saying that Iranian officials want to have talks with the White House.
“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages the administration is receiving privately, and I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday. “However, with that said, the president has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary, and nobody knows that better than Iran.”
Hours later, Trump announced on social media that he would slap 25% tariffs on countries doing business with Tehran “effective immediately” — his first action aimed at penalizing Iran for the protest crackdown, and his latest example of using tariffs as a tool to force friends and foes on the global stage to bend to his will.
China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Brazil and Russia are among economies that do business with Tehran. The White House declined to offer further comment or details about the president’s tariff announcement.
The White House has offered scant details on Iran's outreach for talks, but Leavitt confirmed that the president's special envoy Steve Witkoff will be a key player engaging Tehran.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and key White House National Security Council officials began meeting Friday to develop a “suite of options,” from a diplomatic approach to military strikes, to present to Trump in the coming days, according to a U.S. official familiar with the internal administration deliberations. The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Trump told reporters Sunday evening that a “meeting is being set up” with Iranian officials but cautioned that “we may have to act because of what’s happening before the meeting.”
“We’re watching the situation very carefully,” Trump said.
Demonstrations in Iran continue, but analysts say it remains unclear just how long protesters will remain on the street.
An internet blackout imposed by Tehran makes it hard for protesters to understand just how widespread the demonstrations have become, said Vali Nasr, a State Department adviser during the early part of the Obama administration, and now professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.
“It makes it very difficult for news from one city or pictures from one city to incense or motivate action in another city,” Nasr said. “The protests are leaderless, they're organization-less. They are actually genuine eruptions of popular anger. And without leadership and direction and organization, such protests, not just in Iran, everywhere in the world — it’s very difficult for them to sustain themselves.”
Meanwhile, Trump is dealing with a series of other foreign policy emergencies around the globe.
It's been just over a week since the U.S. military launched a successful raid to arrest Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and remove him from power. The U.S. continues to mass an unusually large number of troops in the Caribbean Sea.
Trump is also focused on trying to get Israel and Hamas onto the second phase of a peace deal in Gaza and broker an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end the nearly four-year war in Eastern Europe.
But advocates urging Trump to take strong action against Iran say this moment offers an opportunity to further diminish the theocratic government that's ruled the country since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
The demonstrations are the biggest Iran has seen in years — protests spurred by the collapse of Iranian currency that have morphed into a larger test of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's repressive rule.
Iran, through the country’s parliamentary speaker, has warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be “legitimate targets” if Washington uses force to protect demonstrators.
Some of Trump's hawkish allies in Washington are calling on the president not to miss the opportunity to act decisively against a vulnerable Iranian government that they argue is reeling after last summer's 12-day war with Israel and battered by U.S. strikes in June on key Iranian nuclear sites.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on social media Monday that the moment offers Trump the chance to show that he's serious about enforcing red lines. Graham alluded to former Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012 setting a red line on the use of chemical weapons by Syria's Bashar Assad against his own people — only not to follow through with U.S. military action after the then-Syrian leader crossed that line the following year.
“It is not enough to say we stand with the people of Iran,” Graham said. “The only right answer here is that we act decisively to protect protesters in the street — and that we’re not Obama — proving to them we will not tolerate their slaughter without action.”
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another close Trump ally, said the “goal of every Western leader should be to destroy the Iranian dictatorship at this moment of its vulnerability.”
“In a few weeks either the dictatorship will be gone or the Iranian people will have been defeated and suppressed and a campaign to find the ringleaders and kill them will have begun,” Gingrich said in an X post. “There is no middle ground.”
Indeed, Iranian authorities have managed to snuff out rounds of mass protests before, including the “Green Movement” following the disputed election in 2009 and the “woman, life, freedom” protests that broke out after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022.
Trump and his national security team have already begun reviewing options for potential military action and he is expected to continue talks with his team this week.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank, said “there is a fast-diminishing value to official statements by the president promising to hold the regime accountable, but then staying on the sidelines.”
Trump, Taleblu noted, has shown a desire to maintain “maximum flexibility rooted in unpredictability” as he deals with adversaries.
“But flexibility should not bleed into a policy of locking in or bailing out an anti-American regime which is on the ropes at home and has a bounty on the president’s head abroad,” he added.
Activists take part in a rally supporting protesters in Iran at Lafayette Park, across from the White House, in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters at the White House, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump waves after arriving on Air Force One from Florida, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
