Christopher Krebs is the former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). He was appointed by Trump. Then, couple of weeks after the 2020 election, Trump fired him, after Krebs told the world that Donald Trump was just lying about election fraud. Krebs has subsequently had to, like many other American officials both conservative and liberal, deal with the threats to his life and his family’s welfare that are stewed by the continuing attempts by Trump and others to overthrow America’s democracy.
Today, Krebs is in front of Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s newest b.s. tribunal circus, supposedly looking at the irregularities of the 2020 election. The entire project is one that hopes to endear those angry Trump cult members to the Republican Party that is trying to drop him while also figuring out ways to undermine the Biden administration and our democracy. It’s real dirty stuff. Johnson and other Republicans are trying to thread a strange needle with Krebs, a Trump appointee who is not a bleeding heart liberal by any means. They want to both say that they respect him and believe he did a great job in securing our elections while also pretending he didn’t secure our elections. Republicans have tried to stay away from talking to or directing their questions directly to Krebs since he is the only person with actual intimate knowledge and expertise in the field.
Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada reserved the final two minutes of her time to allow Krebs a chance to speak to anything he felt was missed during this hearing. Krebs did not waste a word.
CHRISTOPHER KREBS: Thank you for that courtesy. Look, I could not be more proud of my team at CISA for the work they did. Not just protecting the 2020 election but in getting through the last nine months of all the stresses that COVID placed on the work force, and come into work each day. Whether they're sitting at home, out in the field, or the limited folks that came into the office. That's point one. Point two was I firmly believe that this Protect 20 effort, working with our partners in the federal government, whether it was in the intelligence community or the department of defense, was the single best representation of a unified government effort. Everybody got it. There were no turf wars. There was no parochialism. Everybody was on the same page. So we were defending democracy.
The last thing I’ll say is that the real heroes here are the state and local election workers across the country. The hundreds of thousands of election workers that risked their lives. And that's not a joke, right? There is a global pandemic. There is COVID spreading across the country. They went to work so that you and I could go vote and cast our decision here—contribute to this process. They had to deal with incredible adversity. Then, at the end of it, risking their lives, they get death threats—for doing their jobs, for standing up, speaking truth to power, putting country over party—that's got to end
We're going to have to move past this somehow. I've said before that democracy, yeah, we survived this, I think. It was strong enough to survive, but democracy in general is fragile. It requires commitment and follow-through on both sides. If a party fails to participate in the process and instead undermines the process, we risk losing that democracy. We have to come back together as a country.
Krebs impromptu speech shows a passion for democracy that the entire Republican Party seems to have lost the thread of a long, long time ago—if they ever had it to begin with.