Chris Krebs, Director of CISA, Fired by President Trump

Janell Wang, Staff Writer

President Trump fired Chris Krebs, chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and a Department of Homeland Security official. The president fired Krebs through Twitter on Nov. 17. The reason for this was because Krebs had repeatedly contradicted President Trump’s claims about voter fraud.

Krebs was in charge of overseeing cybersecurity of the election. As the first director of the CISA, he managed to improve coordination between both local and state governments along with increased cybersecurity efforts. He continued to dispute President Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories and fact checked his claims. At first he went for a more subtle approach before going out more forcefully with his fact checking.

As President Trump continued to claim voter fraud, Krebs has stated there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” 

CISA said that it was the most “secure election in American history,” which is what President Trump decided to fire Krebs for. 

“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud,” stated his tweet firing Krebs.

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time President Trump has fired someone simply because they contradicted him. Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense, was fired by President Trump on Nov. 9 and immediately replaced with the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Christopher Miller. While there was no actual reason behind this, Esper had apparently clashed with President Trump on how to get troops out of Afghanistan. There were multiple other instances where Esper conflicted with President Trump. Back in January, President Trump had threatened to bomb Iranian cultural sites which is considered a war crime. Esper said that the military would not attack any cultural sites. Reportedly, President Trump has expressed frustrations with Esper.

The two also clashed on how to handle the protests after George Floyd’s death. President Trump wanted to use military troops to quell the protests, while Esper was against this.

The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now,” said Esper.

Four other senior defense officials at the Pentagon were also fired or resigned and then replaced with who were regarded as Trump loyalists. This served to alarm both military and civilian officials, making them wary of President Trump’s increased sporadic decisions. The question that everyone now has their minds on is: who’s next?

 

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