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18th Nov 2020

Donald Trump fires election security official who said election result was valid

Wayne Farry

The fallout from the election continues

There was a brief period last week during which it appeared that Donald Trump may have finally accepted defeat in the American presidential election to Joe Biden.

On November 15, Trump tweeted the words ‘He won’, but then quickly followed them up with a slightly less factual diatribe, insisting that Biden only reached the required 270 electoral college votes because the ‘election was rigged’.

That claim, which the president and his team of sycophants have continually perpetuated since the election at the start of November, has been widely denied by election officials, and rejected by the vast majority of world leaders who have chosen to congratulate president-elect Joe Biden.

Some within the apparatus of power have also poured cold water on Trump’s claims, and that includes Cybersecurity agency director Chris Krebs, who this week was fired from his position as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency after stating that the election result was, in fact, valid.

In a series of tweets which Twitter added a ‘disputed claim’ notice to, Trump confirmed that Krebs’ employment had been ‘terminated’:

“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. Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”

The firing of Krebs, which The Guardian reports he had expected to be in the pipeline, relates to a joint statement released last week by a group of national, state and private election officials, which read: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

In the aftermath of his sacking, Krebs tweeted a short statement which read: “Honoured to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”