Trump fires US election security official for ‘rejecting fraud claims’

6 min readNov 18, 2020

US president Donald Trump shakes hands with Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (R) looks on after a signing ceremony for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, US 16 November 2018.Reuters

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 3rd November 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

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“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.

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.”

US president Donald Trump delivers a statement to reporters about reopening places of worship by declaring them “essential” in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, US on 22 May.Reuters

Two months before he is due to leave office, president Donald Trump asked top aides about the possibility of striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, The New York Times reported Monday.

During a meeting at the Oval Office last Thursday, the outgoing Republican leader asked several top aides, including vice president Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, general Mark Milley, “whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks,” the newspaper said.

The senior officials “dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike,” warning him that such an attack could escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of his presidency, the Times wrote.

Trump reportedly asked the question after a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that Iran was continuing to stockpile uranium.

According to the Times, the most likely target of such a strike would have been Natanz, where the IAEA reported that Tehran’s “uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr Trump abandoned in 2018,” three years after it was signed in a bid to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Iran has long been Trump’s bete noire, and he first reintroduced sanctions and then tightened them even further after scrapping the nuclear accord.

European partners in the accord have struggled to keep the deal afloat despite Trump’s efforts to torpedo it, and are hoping for a renewed diplomatic approach after the election victory of Democrat Joe Biden on 3 November, although Trump refuses to concede his loss.

The Trump administration has pledged to step up the punitive measures, which some critics see as an attempt to build up a “wall of sanctions” that Biden would have difficulty tearing down once he takes office.

Trump fires US election security official for ‘rejecting fraud claims’

Written by Chopsao Duta