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Trump slams '60 Minutes' after Chris Krebs calls vote 'most secure in history' on CBS: 'Ridiculous, one-sided'

The president sacked the former CISA chief after he differed with Trump's opinion that the presidential election was compromized

President Donald Trump is known for firing officials. Even after the results of the 2020 presidential election came out, the Republican continued to sack people and they included the likes of Mark Esper and Chris Krebs over differences of viewpoints. Krebs, a lifelong Republican, was removed from the post of the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) earlier this month after he differed with the president to announce this year’s election to be “the most secure in American history”.

While Trump was upset with Krebs’s November 17 tweet certifying the presidential election as clean, he was furious with the latter’s interview on CBS News’ '60 Minutes' on Sunday November 29 night. In a tweet that he posted soon after the interview was aired, Trump targeted '60 Minutes' saying: “.@60Minutes never asked us for a comment about their ridiculous, one sided story on election security, which is an international joke. Our 2020 Election, from poorly rated Dominion to a Country FLOODED with unaccounted for Mail-In ballots, was probably our least secure EVER!”

Twitter soon blue-flagged the tweet with an article that contradicts the claim of widespread electoral malpractice. The president, nevertheless, continued with his tirade on the social media platform, claiming again that the election was rigged and asserted that he could not lose because he drew huge crowds during the campaign phase.

The social media giant flagged his post claiming the election was rigged. In his interview, Krebs explained why he feels convinced that the vote of 2020 was accurate and claiming the opposite puts the country in danger. “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. 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 told Scott Pelley.

Krebs said it was “upsetting” to see the controversial press conference of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Committee Headquarters in DC on November 19 where he said votes of the presidential election were even counted in countries like Germany and Spain. When asked about his thoughts on Giuliani’s press conference, Krebs said: “It was upsetting because what I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people. It's not me, it's not just CISA. It's the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months.”

He added: “They're getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that I just — it didn't make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that's dangerous.” He also said that all votes in the US are counted in the US. When asked if money from foreign powers like China or Cuba were used to influence the election, Krebs told Pelley that there is no end to making those “farcical claims” but countered it saying the recounts were found to be consistent with the initial count and it also made it evident that there was no voter fraud. 

Krebs worked on cybersecurity in the administration of George W Bush and became the director of cybersecurity policy at Microsoft and joined the homeland security department under Trump in 2017. His priority was to prevent anybody from repeating Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election. He was put in charge of the new CISA in November 2018 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate.