Trump fires head of cybersecurity agency who vouched for 2020 vote security

President Donald Trump dismissed the nation’s top election security official, a widely recognised member of his government who had ventured to oppose the president’s unsupported claims of electoral fraud and vouch for the honour of the vote.

The removal of Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was not a shock. Since his loss, Trump has been shedding his administration of officials seen as inadequately loyal and has been criticising the conduct of a vote that led to an embarrassing loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

That made Krebs a top target. He had used the approval of Trump's own Department of Homeland Security, where his company was based, to issue a stream of comments and tweets over the past week attesting to the proper conduct of the election and exposing the false statements spread by the president. — without mentioning Trump by name.

" It was an honour to serve. We did it correctly," he said in a brief comment on Twitter. "Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow."

He closed with the phrase "Protect 2020," which had been his agency’s slogan before the election. 'Unsupported or technically incoherent.'

The firing of Krebs, a Trump representative, came the week after the

announcement of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, part of a larger shakeup that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon posts.

A previous Microsoft executive, Krebs ran the company, known as CISA, from its origin in the wake of Russian tampering with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan applause as CISA coordinated federal state and local efforts to support electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

Hours before being discharged, Krebs tweeted out a report citing 59 election security experts stating there is no reliable data of computer cheat in the 2020 election outcome.