President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor over his “anonymous” essay and book hammering Trump during his first term. Trump went so far as to accuse Taylor of committing treason, a capital offense, for writing about what he saw during Trump’s first term.

Trump also ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, Trump’s election security director during his first term. Trump wildly suggested Krebs was part of an effort to steal the 2020 election as Krebs repeatedly said there was no evidence of fraud that he could find.

White House staff secretary Will Scharf handed Trump a series of executive orders in the Oval Office on Wednesday and offered a quick summary of each one.

“The central memorandum we have for you relates to Miles Taylor. You may recall that Miles Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security during your previous administration. In his capacity with the Department of Homeland Security, he leaked classified information,” Scharf alleged, adding:

He wrote a book under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” making outrageous claims both about your administration and about others in it. What this presidential memorandum is going to do, one, it’s going to strip any act of clearance that he has in light of his past activities involving classified information, it’s also going to order the Department of Justice to investigate his activities to see what else might come up in that context, given his egregious behavior during your previous administration.

Trump then offered some commentary before signing the order, saying, “And I had no idea who this guy was. I had no idea. I saw him on CNN, or one of them, I guess, CNN. A lot. He’d be on all the time, saying that the president is the president. I had no idea. It’s like, you know, in this office, you have a lot of young people, and they’re I’ll see him for two minutes, and I assume he was in the office, but I barely remember him. Barely remember him.” Trump added:

It was somebody that went out and wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things or all lies. And it was like he was this gentleman or that gentleman, like I dealt with him all the time. I had no idea who this guy was. I said, ‘Who the hell is Miles Taylor?’

And he made a living on going on CNN talking about the president. And I think what he did, he wrote a book, Anonymous, said all sorts of lies, bad things. And I think it’s like a traitor. It’s like spying, he walks into the office, he’s supposed to be sitting here. A lot of people, you know, I’ll be here and there’ll be 20 people standing in the room, there’ll oftentimes be young people in the office.

I assume he was one of them at least. But I didn’t know anything about him and he wrote a book, Anonymous, and I always thought it was terrible and now we have a chance to find out whether or not it was terrible. But it was a work of fiction. He got a lot of publicity, got himself a nice job with CNN or one of them.

And I think we have to do something about it. You can’t have that happen. If that happens to other presidents, it wouldn’t be sustainable for other presidents. I seem to be able to sustain. But if that happened to other Presidents, it’s just unfair. And if it was a Democrat president, I’d say that’s a terrible thing. A thing like that can happen, that’s a terrible thing. And it’s time to find out whether or not somebody can do that.

Can they write a book about very confidential meetings? And, you know, because they happen to be one of a lot of people in a room, and they go out and write books, and worse than that, call it anonymous, like it’s a big deal, and everybody’s saying, who is it, who is it? Who is it then? It was found out who he was a long time later, and you got a lot publicity off that one. He’s like a promoter. But we’re going to find out whether or not somebody is allowed to do that. I think it’s a very important case, and I think he’s guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth. But we’ll find out

Taylor served as his deputy chief of staff to Trump’s former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and, in 2018, penned an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times.

Watch the clip above.