Donald Trump has fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election and pushed back on the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud.

Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

Trump mentioned the Cisa statement in his tweet firing Krebs. The president’s tweets also repeated many of the baseless election fraud claims he has made in recent weeks.

Several top Democrats were swift to condemn the president’s decision to fire Krebs.

On CNN, senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “Chris Krebs’ federal service is just the latest casualty in President Trump’s four-year-long war on the truth.”

Angus King, the Maine senator who is among the candidates who may be appointed Director of National Intelligence in the upcoming Biden administration, called Krebs “a dedicated public servant who has helped build up new cyber capabilities in the face of swiftly-evolving dangers.

“By firing him for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”

Adam Schiff, the Democratic California congressman who chairs the House intelligence committee, said that Trump’s move is “ pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.

And Mark Warner, a Democratic senator of Virginia and co-chair of the Senate cybersecurity caucus, said Krebs “is an extraordinary public servant and exactly the person Americans want protecting the security of our elections”.

(Source: The Guardian)