The recently canned director of a federal agency charged with election security said that Thursday’s Trump campaign press conference was “the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history.
Chris Krebs, who until this week led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within DHS, was referring to the outlandish claims and conspiracy theories asserted by three Trump lawyers over 90 minutes at the Republican Party headquarters in D.C.
That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.
— Chris Krebs (@C_C_Krebs) November 19, 2020
Among other things, the attorneys — Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — asserted that hundreds of thousands of legitimate votes were in fact “illegal,” and that voting machines and software may have “trashed” Trump votes, “injected” Biden votes, and “flipped” votes between the two. The crew didn’t assert any specific case as much as a buffet of conspiratorial nonsense.
President Donald Trump fired Krebs, who’d spent much of the post-Election-Day period debunking such conspiracy theories, this week.
In a tweet, Trump said Krebs was canned because he hadn’t affirmed Trump’s baseless claims of “massive improprieties and fraud” in the 2020 elections.
After Krebs’ ouster, observers across the aisle praised the outgoing official’s work. “It is a dark day for government integrity if Director Krebs has been fired due to his adherence to the truth,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos (D) said. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) said Krebs “is a dedicated public servant who has done a remarkable job during a challenging time.”
“Chris Krebs did a really good job — as state election officials all across the nation will tell you — and he obviously should not be fired,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said.
