Trump attorney issues call for violence against truth-telling former election cybersecurity official
An attorney for the Trump campaign on Monday issued a call for violence against Chris Krebs, a former cybersecurity official who was unceremoniously ousted from his post by President Donald Trump after he rejected the President’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
Joe diGenova, an attorney for Trump’s campaign, said during an appearance on “The Howie Carr Show“: “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
A source familiar with Trump’s election challenges said diGenova is believed to still be helping Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, in challenging the presidential election results.
CNN has reached out to the White House and the Trump campaign for comment.
DiGenova and Carr did not immediately response to requests for comment.
The remarks from diGenova, though much more extreme than others made by officials in the White House during Trump’s time in office, underscore the administration’s crusade against whistleblowers and others who have spoken out in opposition during the President’s term and refuse to adopt his conspiratorial view of the election.
DiGenova’s remarks were swiftly condemned on Monday by the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower group that warned that such threats could have a chilling effect on officials seeking to expose wrongdoing.
“Threats like these trigger an avalanche of them. They terrorize other whistleblowers into silence. It’s behavior befitting a mob attorney,” Louis Clark, the group’s executive director and chief executive officer, said in a blistering statement on Monday.
Trump announced earlier in November that Krebs would be “terminated” from his job running the cyber arm of the Department of Homeland Security “effective immediately” because Krebs’ recent statement — in which he had rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud — was “highly inaccurate.” CNN reported ahead of Krebs’ firing that he had expected the move.
The statement from Krebs’ agency, along with state and private election officials, had read: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. … There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
In the lead-up to the election, Krebs had often quietly disputed the President’s repeated false claims about mail-in ballots but went out of his way to not get drawn into criticizing his boss for spreading lies.
But in the days that followed, Krebs had adopted a more forceful approach, regularly posting on Twitter — often with blaring red siren emojis — fact checks of the claims and conspiracy theories being pushed by Trump, his allies and supporters around the country.
Despite states certifying their results and awarding electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden ahead of the Electoral College meeting on December 14, Trump has not conceded the election. Instead, he has continued to falsely claim that he won.
