Christopher Krebs and his team spent years working to build the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and help protect U.S. elections, among other critical infrastructure, before President Trump abruptly fired him over Twitter for putting out a joint statement calling the 2020 election the "most secure in American history." Krebs explained on Sunday's 60 Minutes why he's so sure the election was free from hacking and foreign meddling, and why Trump and his fringy lawyers are wrong to allege otherwise.
"I'm not a public servant anymore, but I feel I still got some public service left in me," Krebs told Scott Pelley, explaining why he's speaking out publicly. "And if I can reinforce or confirm for one person that the vote was secure, the election was secure, then I feel like I've done my job."
Krebs said his biggest priority after gaming out "countless" scenarios for foreign election interference was paper ballots. "Paper ballots give you the ability to audit, to go back and check the tape and make sure you go the count right," he said. "And that's really one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election — 95 percent of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it." You can see how that worked in the Georgia hand recount, he added.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Krebs said he found the efforts from Trump and his lawyers to "undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people" upsetting because it's actively "undermining democracy" but also because the some of the tens of thousands of election workers putting in 18-hour days are now "getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election."
In 60 Minutes Overtime, Krebs explained why he set up the CISA "Rumor Control" site, and why he's especially proud of his explainer on the impossibility of hacking voting results.
Krebs also said he isn't aware of anyone at the White House asking CISA to throw doubt on the integrity of the election, and he explained that his team frequently briefed everyone from local election officials to Cabinet agencies and the White House about CISA's efforts. "Everybody, for the most part, got it," he said.
"I had a job to do, we did it right, I would do it over again 1,000 times," Krebs said. "CISA did the right thing. ... State and local election officials did the right thing."
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.