What top US election security official said after Donald Trump fired him

US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs says ‘we did it right’ after Donald Trump fires him in a tweet

Official had rebuffed Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election

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Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge that he lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Joe Biden. Photo: AP

Published: 10:15am, 18 Nov 2020Updated: 8:39pm, 18 Nov 2020

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election.

Trump fired Christopher Krebs in a tweet, saying his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, comes as Trump is refusing to recognise the victory of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Defence Secretary Mark Esper on November 9, part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

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.

In recent days, Krebs has repeatedly pushed back against false claims that the election was tainted. Earlier Tuesday, he tweeted out a report citing 59 election security experts saying there was no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election outcome.