Former Cybersecurity Czar Fired by Trump Holds Up Champagne Bottle on MSNBC to Celebrate Intel Reports Vindicating Him
Former cybersecurity czar Chris Krebs enjoyed a point of personal privilege on Tuesday — in what amounted to yet another rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Krebs jokingly held up a bottle of brut champagne in response to host Nicolle Wallace asking his reaction to two new declassified intel reports on foreign interference in the 2020 election. Notably, both of these intelligence assessments — one from the ODNI, the other from the Justice and Homeland Security departments — directly contradict the false narrative Trump was trying to push in the wake of his election loss: to wit, that China was surreptitiously working to assist Joe Biden and that Russia played no real role in interfering with the 2020 campaign.
“Do I open this now or later? When do we open this?” Krebs deadpanned while holding up the champagne bottle on screen after Wallace’s first question.
Breaking into a wide smile, Wallace responded: “If you’re going to do that, I’m going to do this. Let me show you the lies told about the job you did. Let me show you some of the disinformation.” She then played a supercut of Trump legal advocates Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell pushing absurdly deranged claims about all manner of outside meddling as having stolen the election from Trump.
Krebs, who was the chief of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division in the Trump administration, had very conspicuously shot down then-President Trump’s election fraud conspiracies in the weeks after the election, dismissing them as “unsubstantiated” and “incoherent.” Within hours of those inconveniently true comments, Trump publicly insulted and fired Krebs via Twitter, sparking widespread outrage over the president’s obvious attempt at retribution.
“It’s great to see that, in the black and white terms,” Krebs said, now serious. “The 1-a report that has the intelligence analysis of any sort of interference attempts, that 1-b report was by DOJ and the FBI and DHS and SISA, and it measured effectively any impacts on the election and as you said, and as that report clearly states, there was no vote flipping. There was no Kraken. There was no hammer. There was no scorecard. I could go on and on.”
“These are the things that we were saying in October, November, and December,” Krebs continued “And yet, the cacophony of voices from the right and the former president’s supporters that led up ultimately to January 6th, they were flat out — that was fake news.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
