Christopher Krebs oversaw the defense of the 2020 elections — and vouched for their integrity afterward.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired Christopher Krebs, the U.S. government’s top cybersecurity official, after he spent weeks contradicting the election-related conspiracy theories that Trump and his allies have promoted to deny the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, oversaw the defense of the 2018 and 2020 elections, as well as the protection of federal computer networks and critical infrastructure facilities such as hospitals and power plants.
In tweets posted Tuesday evening, Trump claimed that a recent statement issued by Krebs’ agency and several partners, which reassured Americans that the 2020 election had been conducted securely, “was highly inaccurate.”
“There were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed … votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more,” Trump tweeted, though those claims are false. “Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated.”
Krebs, one of the few Trump appointees with nearly universal bipartisan support, spent years navigating his new agency through DHS’s leadership turmoil and the administration’s political controversies. At the same time, he built relationships with fellow officials and private security experts to reform and promote the government’s cyber mission.
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