President Donald Trump fired the country’s leading cybersecurity official via Twitter late Tuesday, part of a thread promoting the president’s unsubstantiated claims about rampant fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump tweeted that Chris Krebs, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, "has been terminated," referencing a recent statement about alleged voter fraud as "highly inaccurate."
Twitter immediately flagged Trump's tweets as "disputed."
The statement in question, released Thursday by Krebs’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, read in bold letting: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
Krebs headed up cybersecurity and information security for the federal government. He's served in the role since November 2018. Krebs is one of many federal, state and local election officials that have defended the integrity of the results, despite the president's unproven claims.
Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are nothing new.
The president has been pushing the conspiracy theories, even before the election and with increased frequency since Election Night. He has yet to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, who has won the election handily according to projections from several outlets.
Michigan is one of the contested states where courts have tossed out cases filed by the Trump campaign broadly alleging fraud with what experts said was no evidence.
It was a tense scene last night in Wayne County, which Biden won by a wide margin, the Board of Canvassers split along party lines and at first deadlocked as they were trying to certify results. The first vote was 2-2 from two Republicans and two Democrats. Democratic Vice Chair Jonathan Kinloch called it 'reckless and irresponsible' that the Republicans on the committee at first refused to certify the results, and if the deadlock had stood, the state would have had to step in to certify the ballots.
Finally, after a long and passionate public comment section of the meeting, a revote was held and the votes were certified. In the delay, Trump tweeted support for the effort not to certify the results. “Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results!” Trump tweeted Tuesday night. “Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!”
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He also tweeted, “Flip Michigan back to TRUMP," adding unproven claims that Detroit “has tremendous problems with election results."
Many said it was a dangerous attempt to block the results of a safe and legal election, the foundation of American democracy, and they were happy when common sense prevailed.
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Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan tweeted: "Glad to see common sense prevailed in the end. Thank you to all those citizens who spoke up so passionately -- you made the difference!"