https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/11/14/npr-as-trump-pushes-election-falsehoods-his-cybersecurity-agency-pushes-back
Christopher Krebs, director of DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, spearheaded an agency campaign to counter rumors about voter fraud and election irregularities.
It was intended primarily to target foreign disinformation but has ended up instead rebutting many of the rumors and baseless allegations about the election being spread by President Trump and his campaign, and it has apparently drawn the ire of the White House.
As of Friday, Krebs was still on the job, and CISA officials held a regularly scheduled meeting with private sector members of a coordinating council set up after the 2016 election to work with the agency to protect U.S. elections against cyberattacks and other disruptions.
That council, along with a separate one representing state and local elections officials, put out a joint statement Thursday calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.” It added, in boldface, that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
According to one council member, the statement, which CISA released, was a direct response to the president’s tweet Thursday morning citing a baseless claim that voting equipment provided by Dominion Voting Systems had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide” and switched hundreds of thousands of other Trump votes to Joe Biden.
Trump on Friday added to the confusion by tweeting that the election was indeed the most secure ever but that it was also “rigged.”
Krebs, the agency’s first director, has worked to build stronger partnerships between the federal government and the states — a tall task after Russia’s interference laid bare the wide differences in how various states run their elections. After 2016, it took months, sometimes years, before the federal government shared intelligence about Russia’s activities with all the relevant state officials.
Those relationships have completely transformed under Krebs, as evidenced on Election Day, when CISA erected a war room for communication between the states, voting machine vendors, social media companies and political parties.