Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the administration’s top election security official, who had rejected the president’s unsubstantiated claims of “massive” fraud in the vote he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump announced on Twitter the termination “with immediate effect” of Chris Krebs, who heads the agency that jointly declared that “the elections of November 3 were the safest in the history of the United States.”
Trump, who refuses to acknowledge that he lost his re-election bid to Democrat Biden, has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the vote and recount were rife with fraud.
“Chris Krebs’ recent statement on the security of the 2020 elections was very inaccurate, as there was fraud and massive fouls,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
“Therefore, with immediate effect, Chris Krebs has been fired as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”
Krebs, who allegedly told friends last week that he expected to be removed, appeared to confirm this in a tweet on his personal account.
No evidence
“It is an honor to serve. We did well. Defend today, secure tomorrow,” he wrote.
Krebs was in charge of preventing potential intrusions by domestic and foreign hackers into a myriad of voting machines, sorting and counting machines, databases, and other systems that states and localities depend on to count ballots.
Adam Schiff, Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Krebs and his team had “worked diligently to safeguard our elections.”
“Rather than reward this great service, President Trump is retaliating against Director Krebs and other officials who did their duty,” he said in a statement.
Republican Senator Ben Sasse wrote: “Chris Krebs did a very good job, as state election officials across the country will tell you, and obviously he shouldn’t be fired.”
The challenge was even more difficult this year due to the complexities of the coronavirus
, which forced a radical turn to voting by mail.
Under Krebs, CISA had also warned multiple times that Russians and Iranians were trying to break into American systems, as the Russians had done in 2016.
The White House was reportedly particularly unhappy with a CISA website created to combat misinformation called “Rumor vs. Reality.”
The page rejected claims that Trump and others have made, including that many votes were cast on behalf of deceased individuals, that counting ballots days after Election Day is not normal, and that the vote count indicates fraud.
Through numerous reviews, investigations and lawsuits, no evidence has emerged of any significant distortion or loss of votes, by accident or fraud.
“There is no evidence that any voting system has removed or lost votes, changed votes or been compromised in any way,” an official group of top US federal and state election officials said in a report last week.
And on Monday, a group of 59 senior election security experts also dismissed allegations of fraud or significant malfunction, saying the claims “are either unsubstantiated or technically incoherent.”
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