Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who was in charge of handling cybersecurity efforts during the federal government’s election, was recently fired by President Donald Trump via Twitter.
What We Know:
- Krebs became the target of public criticism from Trump ever since the Nov. 3 election due to his agency’s “Rumor Control blog.” This blog listed a plethora of rebuts over various false claims about the integrity of this year’s general elections ranging from hack to fraud. Many of which were said to be true by Trump and his lawyers.
“I’m proud of the work we did at CISA,” Krebs said on Tuesday after his termination. “I’m proud of the teammates I had at CISA. We did it right.”
- Sources indicated that Krebs was made aware of his firing over the president’s tweets. Naturally, it was disappointing for him because he’s said before that he liked to take his work seriously. It’s also been reported that Krebs has said the past few days that it was a matter of “when, not if, Krebs would be fired.” According to NBC News, “He’s been on death watch,” stated someone close to Krebs.
- One of Trump’s previous tweets acknowledged Kreb’s statement over the election as “highly inaccurate,” apparently a reference to a joint statement Thursday from the CISA, the Election Assistance Commission and other groups representing chief election officers in states. A notable quote from the said statement read, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud – including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, “glitches” in the voting machines which changed…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2020
- Even after over two weeks since Election Day, Trump has yet to concede defeat to his rival Joe Biden and continues to imply that the election was rigged, despite not having any actual evidence to back up those claims. Many state and federal agencies vouch that the election has been legitimate up to this point.
- Krebs has been one of the more outspoken government officials regarding the legitimacy of the election, specifically the conspiracy revolving around Dominion Voting Systems machines. Since the beginning, Krebs also clearly defended mail-in ballots stating that the CISA observed no fraud regardless of the pandemic.
With Krebs now out of the picture, this opens up the opportunity for the recently defeated president to hire another loyal candidate to fill his position. Most importantly, this makes the government vulnerable for “bad cyber actors to take advantage,” said a former official of the Department of Homeland Security.
