Fired cybersecurity chief hints at legal action after Trump campaign lawyer says he should be shot

WASHINGTON – Christopher Krebs, who was recently sacked by President Donald Trump as the head of the federal government’s election cybersecurity efforts, suggested on Tuesday that he could take legal action against one of Trump’s lawyers who said that Krebs should be shot.

In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY,” host Savannah Guthrie asked Krebs how concerned he was about the comments from Trump campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova in an interview on Monday in which he said Krebs “is a Class A jerk. He should be drawn and quartered.” Went out at dawn and shot. “

“It’s definitely more dangerous language, more dangerous behavior,” Krebs replied. “And the way I see it is that we are a nation of laws, and I intend to take advantage of those laws. I have an exceptional team of lawyers who are winning in the courts, and I believe that ‘they’re probably going to be busy.

When asked if legal action could be taken as a result of the comments, Krebs said his team was looking at their “available opportunities.”

DiGenova made the comment during an interview with conservative radio show host Howie Carr, whose show also airs on Newsmax, one of the president’s favorite media.

Krebs suggested that his criticisms had failed to scare him. When asked if he was concerned for his safety, Krebs said he “wasn’t going to give them the benefit of knowing how I react to this.” They can know that there are things to come.

In an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Krebs criticized Trump’s campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading misinformation about the election, which Krebs said was safe and not subject. widespread fraud.

Referring to a press conference Giuliani recently held at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, Krebs said: “It was upsetting because what I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the elections, to sow confusion, to scare people. It’s not me, it’s not just CISA. These are the tens of thousands of election workers who have been working non-stop, 18 hours a day, for months. They receive death threats for attempting to run one of our main democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, for me, a press conference that I – it didn’t make sense. What he was actively doing was undermining democracy. And it is dangerous.

Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has been the target of public criticism from Trump on his agency’s Rumor Control blog, which has refuted a list of false allegations of electoral fraud and hacking – many of which the president and his lawyers have promoted as real since losing the election.