[ad_1]
SAN FRANCISCO: President Donald Trump on Tuesday (November 17) fired top US cybersecurity official Chris Krebs in a tweet, accusing him without evidence of making a “highly inaccurate” statement about the security of the US elections.
Reuters reported last week that Krebs, who worked to protect the election from hackers but provoked the ire of the Trump White House for efforts to discredit the disinformation, had told his associates that he expected to be fired.
Krebs headed the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
A CISA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
READ: Trump’s silent public rally contradicts White House in tumult
According to the Associated Press, Krebs’ firing comes as Trump refuses to acknowledge the victory of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden and removes high-level officials deemed insufficiently loyal.
Trump had fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on November 9, as part of a broader shakeup that put Trump loyalists in high-level positions in the Pentagon.
The Reuters report drew a great deal of support from security experts across the country, who praised Krebs for his bipartisan work over the past two years.
Krebs enraged the White House over a CISA-run website called “Rumor Check,” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
A former Microsoft executive, he ran CISA from its inception in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 election until the November election.
Krebs won bipartisan praise as CISA coordinated federal, state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference, according to AP.
READ: Biden calls Trump’s refusal to admit a ‘shame’
Recently, Krebs has repeatedly rejected false claims that the elections were tainted.
Earlier on Tuesday, he tweeted a report citing 59 election security experts as saying there is no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election result.
Trump responded on Twitter later that day. He reiterated the unsubstantiated claims about the vote and wrote “with immediate effect, Chris Krebs has been fired as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”
Krebs, from his personal Twitter account, responded: “It is an honor to serve. We did it well. Defend today, ensure tomorrow. “He closed with the phrase” Protect 2020 “, which had been the motto of his agency before the elections.
Krebs kept a low profile even as he expressed his confidence before the November vote and later dropped allegations that the count was tainted by fraud.
At times, he appeared to be outright repudiating Trump, a surprising move by a component of DHS, an agency that has come under fire for seeming too allied with the president’s political goals.
READ: Trump backs down by acknowledging that Biden won the election, he concedes ‘nothing’
CISA issued statements dismissing claims that large numbers of people killed could vote or that someone could change the results without being detected.
It also distributed a statement from a coalition of federal and state officials in which it concluded that there was no evidence that the votes were compromised or altered in the November 3 election and that the vote was the safest in US history.
Krebs avoided direct criticism of the president and tried to stay above the political fray, even as he worked to counter misinformation coming from the president and his supporters.
“It is not our job to verify the facts of the president,” he said in a briefing with reporters on the eve of the elections.
