Trump fires agency head who vouched for 2020 vote security

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump fired the nation’s top election security official, a widely respected member of his administration who had dared to refute the president’s unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud and vouch for the integrity of the vote.

While abrupt, the dismissal Tuesday of Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was not a surprise.

Since his loss, Trump has been ridding his administration of officials seen as insufficiently loyal and has been denouncing the conduct of an election that led to an embarrassing defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

That made Krebs a prime target. He had used the imprimatur of Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security, where his agency was based, to issue a stream of statements and tweets over the past week attesting to the proper conduct of the election and denouncing the falsehoods spread by the Republican president and his supporters — without mentioning Trump by name.

Krebs stood by those assertions after his ouster.

“Honoured to serve. We did it right,” he said in a brief statement on Twitter. “Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”

He closed with the phrase “Protect 2020,” which had been his agency’s slogan ahead of the election.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, came the week after the dismissal of Defence Secretary Mark Esper, part of a broader shakeup that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

A former Microsoft executive, Krebs ran the agency, known as CISA, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as CISA coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

Hours before being dismissed, Krebs tweeted out a report citing 59 election security experts saying there is no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election outcome.

Trump responded on Twitter later in the day. He repeated unsubstantiated claims about the vote and wrote “effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”

Officials with CISA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, had no immediate comment.

Follow The Gleaner on Twitter and Instagram @JamaicaGleaner and on Facebook @GleanerJamaica. Send us a message on WhatsApp at 1-876-499-0169 or email us at onlinefeedback@gleanerjm.com or editors@gleanerjm.com.