President Trump has fired the nation’s top election security official, Christopher Krebs, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Trump announced the new Tuesday night via Twitter.
Krebs, a Trump appointee and former senior counselor at DHS, is widely regarded for his knack of avoiding partisan politics, earning him respect and credibility among Democratic and Republican circles alike.
Trump’s announcement comes as the president and his allies are busy disputing, without merit, the validity of the 2020 race, launching unsupported legal challenges in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, and purposely stoking suspicion and anger around the election process.
[referenced id=”1529384″ url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2020/11/election-security-groups-under-dhs-say-2020-race-was-fully-secure/” thumb=”https://gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/14/lt7gaj73etc6lnpty9ei-300×168.jpg” title=”U.S. Election Security Groups Under DHS Say 2020 Race Was Fully Secure” excerpt=”The U.S. Homeland Security Department’s council on election cybersecurity and its industry-led partner association issued a joint statement late Thursday declaring the 2020 U.S. presidential race “the most secure in American history.””]
In October, Krebs oversaw the launch of the CISA website Rumour Control to help voters “distinguish between rumours and facts on election security issues.” The facts laid out by the site have at times conflicted with the baseless claims of the Trump campaign and its surrogates.
Soon after the election, for example, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Sen. Matt Gaetz, a top ally on Capitol Hill, steered followers online to a Breitbart article about “dead people” on Pennsylvania’s voter rolls. “The dead vote appears to have swung overwhelmingly for Joe Biden,” Gaetz tweeted.
CISA’s Rumour Control website bluntly notes that people routinely die and that the deceased are moved off voter rolls as soon as possible. Election integrity safeguards, such as signature matching and database checks, “protect against voter impersonation and voting by ineligible persons.”
“Taken out of context,” CISA says, “some voter registration information may appear to suggest suspicious activity, but are actually innocuous clerical errors or the result of intended data practices.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, another close Trump ally, also claimed on Fox News that evidence existed of dead people voting in Pennsylvania. A Republican co-chair in charge of Philadelphia’s elections, Al Schmidt, said Wednesday that those claims “have no basis in fact at all.” (Trump later attacked Schmidt on Twitter, calling him a “so-called Republican.”)
The White House has demanded that CISA edit or remove information from the Rumour Control website, according to Reuters, which said Krebs had drawn “the ire” of the White House due to its publishing.
Reuters reported last week that Krebs was expecting to be forced out, citing associates who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a tweet on Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden said that Krebs was a “trusted source of election security information,” and said his firing by Trump suggested the president is “preparing to spread lies about the election from a government agency.”
DHS’s council on election cybersecurity and its industry-led partner organisation said in a joint statement last week that the 2020 presidential race was “the most secure in American history.”
“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too,” the groups said.
Bob Kolasky, who worked directly under Krebs at CISA, personally signed the statement.
The White House fired two top DHS employees last week in a purge of government officials viewed, according to the Washington Post, as “lacking complete loyalty” to the president. Bryan Ware, a senior policy aide at CISA, is among those forced out.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, has called the president’s “cleaning house” at CISA a “national security threat,” further criticising Trump as refusing to “put country before ego.”