Trump Admin Fires Senior DHS Cyber Official on Same Day Agency Concludes ‘No Evidence’ of Fraud in 2020 Election
A senior official in the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was asked to resign on Thursday — and the head of the agency said he expects to be fired — the same day that CISA concluded there was “no evidence” that any voting system was compromised in the 2020 election. That conclusion notably contradicts President Donald Trump, who has pushed numerous false claims and unhinged conspiracy theories to explain away his loss to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
According to a Reuters report, Bryan Ware, CISA’s Assistant Director for Cybersecurity was pushed out on Thursday. One U.S. official told the wire service that the White House had asked for Ware to step down earlier in the week. In a follow-up Reuters story, CISA chief, Christopher Krebs, said he expects to be asked to leave the agency by the Trump White House in the coming days.
Krebs has run afoul of the White House, Reuters’ Chris Bing reports, by actively debunking conspiracy theories on its “Rumor Control” website. In particular, one of the false claims that CISA singled out involved a purported supercomputer hacking of the voting systems, which some Trump surrogates have pushed as evidence that the election was stolen.
CISA drew the ire of the Trump White House over a website run by the agency dubbed “Rumor Control” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
updated: https://t.co/30GfVnWhbH
— Chris Bing (@Bing_Chris) November 12, 2020
updated: “In particular, one person said, the White House was angry about a CISA post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claims an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes” https://t.co/QxKysnJoZb
— Chris Bing (@Bing_Chris) November 12, 2020
Bing went on to note that the White House has pressured CISA to remove or edit some of its fact-checks about the election on the “Rumor Control” site. The agency has refused those requests.
This comes at the same time that a CISA press release, published on Thursday, unequivocally concluded that the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history” and free from digital hacking or fraud. In notably bold letters, the agency said: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
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