delivers an update on “Operation Warp Speed” in the Rose Garden of
the White House in Washington, DC on November 13, 2020. MANDEL NGAN
/ AFP
Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the government’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 “effective
immediately” of Chris Krebs, who leads the agency that jointly
declared “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American
history.”
Trump, who refuses to acknowledge that he lost his bid for
reelection to Democrat Biden, has repeatedly claimed without
evidence that the voting and count were replete with fraud.
“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020
Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive
improprieties and fraud,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
“Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been
terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency.”
Krebs, who reportedly told friends last week he expected to be
removed, appeared to confirm it in a tweet on his personal
account.
– No evidence – “Honored to serve. We did it
right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow,” he wrote.
Krebs was in charge of fending off possible foreign and domestic
hacker intrusions into myriad voting machines, sorting and counting
machines, databases and other systems that states and localities
rely on to tally ballots.
Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, said Krebs and his team had “worked diligently to
safeguard our elections.”
“Instead of rewarding this great service, President Trump is
retaliating against Director Krebs and other officials who did
their duty,” he said in a statement.
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Republican Senator Ben Sasse wrote: “Chris Krebs did a really
good job — as state election officials all across the nation will
tell you — and he obviously should not be fired.”
The challenge was even tougher this year because of the
complexities of the coronavirus, which forced a sweeping turn to
voting by mail.
Under Krebs, CISA had also warned several times that Russians
and Iranians were making attempts to break into US systems, as
Russians had tried in 2016.
The White House was reportedly particularly unhappy about a CISA
webpage set up to fight disinformation called “Rumor vs
Reality.”
The page rejected claims Trump and others have made, including
that many votes were made in the names of dead people, that
counting the ballots days after election day is not normal and that
shifting vote counts indicate fraud.
Through numerous reviews, investigations and lawsuits, no
evidence has come up of any significant distortion or loss of
votes, by accident or fraud.
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost
votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” an official
group of senior US federal and state election officials said in a
report last week.
And on Monday, a group of 59 top election security experts also
dismissed claims of significant malfunction or fraud, saying the
claims “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically
incoherent.”
AFP
Read more https://swordpress.com.ng/2020/11/18/trump-fires-top-us-election-security-official/