Trump Fires Cybersecurity Chief For Confirming The Election Was Secure, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A Federal Agency Was Reassuring Americans Their Votes Had Been Counted

WASHINGTON. Moving decisively to address a federal agency that had spent weeks assuring the public their ballots were safe, President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday fired Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose chief offense was issuing a statement describing the 2020 election as the most secure in American history.

Krebs, a Trump appointee who had led the agency since its creation in 2018, had overseen a government-wide effort to protect the election from interference, an effort that administration officials confirmed had worked exactly as designed. In the days after the vote, CISA joined a coalition of state and local election officials in a statement declaring that there was no evidence any voting system had deleted, lost, or changed votes. The agency also maintained a "Rumor Control" webpage that methodically corrected false claims about the election, several of which had originated with the President.

"The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate," the President wrote on Twitter, announcing the termination in the medium he reserved for most personnel decisions, "in that there were massive improprieties and fraud." Mr. Trump offered no evidence for the improprieties, a consistency that officials noted reflected the absence of any.

According to one person familiar with the decision, the President had grown frustrated that an agency he himself had stood up to defend the integrity of American elections was, in his view, defending the integrity of American elections. "He felt the agency had lost sight of its mission," the source said, declining to specify which mission.

The firing removed from government the official best positioned to refute the fraud claims on which the President's postelection fundraising operation depended, an operation that would go on to raise more than two hundred million dollars from supporters who had been told the election was stolen. Krebs, for his part, said he stood by the statement that the vote had been secure, a position that the available evidence continued to support.

At press time, the President was reviewing the remaining federal employees whose job it was to tell Americans the truth, to determine how many of them were still doing it.