White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Wednesday the top U.S. cybersecurity official, Chris Krebs, who was abruptly fired by President Trump Tuesday after contradicting the president’s legal team and defending the 2020 election as the “most secure in American history,” was misleading citizens.
McEnany and lawyers on Trump’s election integrity team assert that there is a great deal of evidence that points to the election system being compromised and of voter fraud, including hundreds of pages of sworn affidavits in Michigan and “real questions” in other battleground states.
“The president has pointed out that he (Krebs) made an inaccurate statement. He actually made a few if you look at his Twitter feed. But, look, if you say that this was the most secure election in American history, as the president rightly pointed out, that may be true from a standpoint of foreign interference” but “to come out and say it’s the most secure election in American history, that’s just not an accurate statement, and it seems like a partisan attempt to just hit back at the president as he pursues important litigation,” McEnany said on Fox & Friends.
On Nov. 12, the federal cybersecurity and infrastructure agency (CISA) led by Krebs released a joint statement with other security partners that read, “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” directly contradicting evidence being gathered by Trump’s lawyers.
Trump mentioned the CISA statement, which also emphasized that “the Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” in his pair of tweets Tuesday night announcing the firing of Krebs.
Krebs’ termination was condemned by many of Trump’s critics in the political arena, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who defended CISA’s head.
A spokesman for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign told news outlets in a statement: “Chris Krebs should be commended for his service in protecting our elections, not fired for telling the truth.”
Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, a Trump campaign lawyer, said in an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday that the Dominion voting system was designed to rig elections and that President Donald Trump’s legal team is receiving “increasingly mounting evidence of significant voter fraud across multiple states that cast into question the validity of elections in every swing state.”
Other Trump supporters have criticized Krebs for discrediting the Trump team’s legal cases, which have yet to be concluded. Fox Business host Lou Dobbs criticized CISA for not revealing that the two main voting machine companies that have been subject to scrutiny by lawyers are CISA council members.
Fox hosts asked McEnany if Krebs had a political agenda driving him, to which she reiterated the legitimacy of the voter fraud claims being made by Trump’s legal team.
“I don’t know if it was a partisan agenda, a personal grievance, what it was. But it definitely seemed to be animated by something, and it seemed to go directly at this president and legitimate claims that he’s pursuing in court,” she said.
Trump announced that he had fired Krebs in a statement on Twitter, accusing Krebs of making a “highly inaccurate” statement on the security of the Nov. 3 election.
“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud—including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more,” the president wrote. “Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”
Krebs said in a statement: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”
Trump’s legal team has filed a number of lawsuits in battleground states over a variety of alleged irregularities, including in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan.
The White House and CISA didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment by The Epoch Times.
Isabel Van Brugen contributed to this report.
