Former top U.S. election official Chris Krebs said his lawyers are considering legal action against President Trump’s team after one of the president’s legal advisers called for Krebs to be “taken out and shot.”
“It’s certainly more dangerous language, more dangerous behavior,” Krebs told NBC’s Today host Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday. “And the way I look at it is that we are a nation of laws. And I plan to take advantage of those laws. I’ve got an exceptional team of lawyers that win in court, and I think they’re probably going to be busy. … They can know that there are things coming up.”
Joe diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who is serving on Trump’s election legal team, said in an interview Monday night that the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director ought to be be “taken out and shot.”
“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs,” diGenova told radio host Howie Carr when asked about Krebs’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday night. “That guy is a Class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot.”
Krebs would not reveal whether he is worried about his or his family’s safety following the comment.
Trump announced in a tweet last month that he had fired Krebs for not overseeing a secure election after CISA declared it the most secure in U.S. history. Krebs defended his assertion about elections security to Guthrie, pointing out that more than 90% of votes cast in November had a “voter verifiable paper audit trail.”
In the four weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign has sued several states for alleged irregularities that the president has described as a Democratic effort to “steal” the election. The campaign and White House have not proven these claims. In the days following the election, CISA launched a “Rumor Control” page that denounced “disinformation” that includes White House messaging. Krebs has been outspoken on Twitter, retweeting an election organization director’s message from the public not to share “baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.” Whatever the president’s views, this did not endear Krebs to some Trump administration officials who claimed he was part of the “deep state.”
When asked by Guthrie if he was part of an internal effort “working behind the scenes to undermine” Trump, Krebs said that he is a “lifelong Republican” who was loyal to the Constitution.
“When you enter federal service, you pledge and oath to uphold and defend the Constitution from foreign and domestic, country over party,” said Krebs. “That’s what we did. We approached it in a nonpartisan way.”
Krebs, a former top official at Microsoft, joined the Trump administration as senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security in March 2017. He then was nominated and later confirmed as undersecretary for national protection and programs at the DHS. That office was replaced by the CISA, and Krebs was made its director of operations, assisting 8,000 election systems nationwide to secure the 2020 vote.
Author: Anna Giaritelli
Source: Washington Examiner: Krebs mulling legal action after Trump lawyer says he should be ‘taken out and shot’
