Trump sacks top cybersecurity official who refuted US election fraud claims
CISA Director Chris Krebs had been running a "Rumor Control" website debunking election fraud claims for weeks before the president fired him.
FollowNew York: President Donald Trump has fired the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after the agency spent weeks debunking election fraud claims on its "Rumor Control" page. Chris Krebs led the agency as its first director after Trump nominated him for the role in February 2018.
During that time, CISA had been responsible for coordinating election security among officials in all 50 states, focusing on improvements at the local and county level. That's included measures like installing sensors in election county networks to detect potential cyberattacks and hosting virtual rooms to share information about threats.
The impeachment of Cripps, appointed by Trump, comes as Trump refuses to acknowledge the victory of President-elect, Joe Biden, and dismisses high-ranking officials seen as insufficiently loyal. Mark Esper, the defense secretary, was sacked on November 9 as part of a broader reshuffle that put Trump loyalists in high positions in the Pentagon.
Krebs had indicated that he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting allegations of widespread voter fraud. The statement said: “The elections of the third of November were the safest in American history.” “There is no evidence that any voting system has been deleted or lost, or votes changed, or endangered in any way.”
Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its inception following Russian interference in the 2016 elections through the November elections. It won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal and local state efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.
Trump mentioned that Siza statement in a tweet Shooting crepes. The president’s tweets have also repeated several of the unfounded allegations of election fraud he has made in recent weeks.
Many senior Democrats were quick to condemn the president’s decision to sack Krebs.
"Chris Krebs should be commended for his service in protecting our elections, not fired for telling the truth," the Biden campaign team said in a statement. "Bipartisan election officials in the administration itself -- and around the country -- have made clear that Donald Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud are categorically false and Trump's embarrassing refusal to accept that reality lays bare how baseless and desperate his flailing is."
Trump hasn't accepted the results of the election and continues to claim that the results were due to fraud, throwing out various theories like votes being cast by dead people and the voting tally being hacked.
On Twitter, Krebs responded to the news and wrote, "Honored to serve. We did it right."
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