The former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, doubled down on his conclusion that the election was not rife with fraud.
“There was no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking or compromise of election systems on, before or after November 3,” Krebs told CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
Krebs, who was terminated from his position earlier this month by President Donald Trump after his agency challenged the president’s claims on election fraud, told “60 Minutes” that CISA spent years “gaming out every possible scenario” for how the election could be interfered with. He also called Trump’s complaints of fraud “sensational” and “nonsense” during the interview.
“I have confidence in the security of this election because I know the work that we’ve done for four years in support of our state and local partners,” Krebs said. “I know the work that the intelligence community has done, the Department of Defense has done, that the FBI has done, that my team has done. I know that these systems are more secure. I know based on what we have seen that any attacks on the election were not successful.”
Krebs was appointed to his role at CISA by Trump and approved unanimously by the Senate in 2018. Under his watch, CISA set up a “rumor control” website that sought to correct the record on a number of errant claims made about the election. After Trump made false claims that voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems had deleted millions of votes, CISA, along with other security agencies in the federal government, put out an official statement contradicting his assertions, describing this year’s election as “the most secure in American history.”
Trump fired Krebs via tweet shortly after, on November 17.
Trump responded to Krebs’s comments on Sunday evening by repeating allegations of fraud but still refused to provide evidence for his claims.
“Our 2020 Election, from poorly rated Dominion to a Country FLOODED with unaccounted for Mail-In ballots, was probably our least secure EVER!” Trump wrote in a tweet.
Soon after that tweet was issued, Twitter placed a disclaimer on Trump’s tweet that read, “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
Trump’s legal team and efforts by the president’s allies throughout the U.S. have thus far failed to prove in courtrooms across the country that fraud of any kind actually occurred.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that an attempt by the president’s lawyers to overturn the results in Pennsylvania were without justification of any kind.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
In a second ruling from over the weekend, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court dismissed a lower Republican state judge’s ruling issued last week that had called for the certification process to be halted.
Noting in their ruling that those constitutional concerns were only brought forward after Trump lost the presidential election in the state, the state’s high court unanimously ruled that the certification process should continue unimpeded.
“Unsatisfied with the results of that wager, they would now flip over the table, scattering to the shadows the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians,” Justice David Wecht wrote in a concurring statement with the three-page order. “It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters.
President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump in the state of Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes. Overall, Biden currently leads Trump by more than 6.3 million ballots in the popular vote count, and won the presidency through the Electoral College vote of 306 to 232.