File Photo: US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen looks on after a signing ceremony for the CISA Act in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, US, November 16, 2018.
The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, comes as Trump is refusing to recognise the victory of Democrat President-elect Joe Biden and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Nov. 9, part of a broader shakeup that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.
Trump fired back on Twitter later in the day. He repeated unsubstantiated claims about the vote and wrote “effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Krebs kept a low profile even as he voiced confidence ahead of the November vote and, afterward, knocked down allegations that the count was tainted by fraud. At times, he seemed to be directly repudiating Trump, a surprising move from a component of DHS, an agency that has drawn criticism for seeming to be too closely allied with the president’s political goals.
Krebs avoided ever directly criticising the president and tried to stay above the political fray, even as he worked to contradict misinformation coming from the president and his supporters. “It’s not our job to fact check the president,” he said at a briefing with reporters on the eve of the election.
Amid recent reports that Krebs feared he might be fired, Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, had said he was concerned and sent a text to the director to ask him if he was OK. The response was, in effect, “for now,” the Mississippi Democrat said.