with Tonya Riley

If White House officials thought they could silence criticism of the president’s baseless election fraud claims by firing the government’s top cybersecurity officials, they were sorely mistaken. 

Christopher Krebs reasserted there’s no evidence the election was undermined by hacking in a Washington Post op-ed last night and knocked back some of the same phony claims that got him fired by presidential tweet two weeks ago as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. 

“The 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history. This success should be celebrated by all Americans, not undermined in the service of a profoundly un-American goal,” he wrote. 

Krebs will be speaking with David Ignatius in a Washington Post Live event at 11 a.m. today. 

Krebs’s deputy Matthew Travis, who was ousted at the same time, also slammed the Trump campaign’s election fraud claims during an address at the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Summit. 

“What we were hearing from the Trump campaign was in effect politicizing the security of a sub-sector of infrastructure, namely the election system,” he said. 

President Trump’s fraud claims, meanwhile, are falling flat — both in courtrooms and increasingly among Republicans. 

The hardest blow to date came yesterday when Attorney General William P. Barr declared he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” effectively withdrawing support from Trump’s efforts to contest President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. 

Barr had previously joined Trump in spreading unfounded claims of potential fraud before the election, including the false claim that mail ballots could easily be forged by foreign powers. 

The shift reflects the slow but increasingly sure vindication of election officials’ hard work to ensure a secure and transparent election process over the president’s insistent disinformation campaign. 

© Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
President Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

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