In the United States of Donald Trump, protecting the right to legitimate elections can get you investigated—if not indicted.         

Case in point: Christopher Krebs, who prevented Russian trolls and hackers from sabotaging the 2020 Presidential election.

During the 2016 Presidential race, Russian propaganda played a major role in convincing millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump. Social media platforms—especially Facebook and Twitter—were flooded with genuinely fake news to sow discord among Americans and create a pathway for Trump’s election.

And where Internet trolls left off, Russian computer hackers took over.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote—65,853,514 to 62,984,828 for Trump. But in the United States, what counts in Presidential elections is the Electoral College vote.

And there Trump won: 304 to 227. 

What put him over the top in the Electoral College was the help he got from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin 

Пресс-служба Президента РФ, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Putin had good reason to assist Trump: Putin wanted the United States to ditch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, which has preserved Western Europe from Russian aggression since World War II. And Trump had often attacked America’s funding of NATO as a drain on the American economy.

As for Trump, he wanted something from Putin: He wanted to be President. For this, Putin could supply monies, Internet trolls to confuse voters with falsified news, and even the hacking of key voting centers.

So notorious was the role played by Russian trolls and hackers in winning Trump the 2016 election that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was determined to prevent a repetition in 2020.

And the point man for this was Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) run by DHS.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1977, Krebs had received a B.A. in environmental sciences from the University of Virginia in 1999, and a J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law in 2007.

Chris Krebs

Krebs had served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Infrastructure Protection, and later worked in the private sector as Director for Cybersecurity Policy for Microsoft.  

In preparation for the 2020 Presidential election, Krebs launched a massive effort to counter lies spread by Russians—and Americans—on social media platforms. As he explained to Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview aired on November 29, 2020: 

“So we spent something on the order of three and a half years of gaming out every possible scenario for how a foreign actor could interfere with an election. Countless, countless scenarios.”   

At his command lay the resources of a series of powerful Federal investigative agencies:

“We had the Department of Defense Cyber Command. We had the National Security Agency. We had the FBI. We had the Secret Service. We also had representatives from the Election Assistance Commission, which is the federal independent agency that supports the actual administration of elections.”

As a result, Krebs was widely praised for revamping the department’s cybersecurity efforts and increasing coordination with state and local governments. 

The November 3, 2020 election went very smoothly. Deprived of his expected support from Russian trolls and hackers, Trump lost. 

On November 12, to counter the growing chorus of lies from Trump and his Right-wing allies that the election had been stolen, Krebs put out the following statement:

“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.” 

On November 17, Trump fired Chris Krebs.

Too cowardly to confront Krebs, Trump fired him by tweet—and accompanied the outrage with yet more lies:

“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud, including dead people voting, poll watchers not allowed into polling locations, glitches in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.”

Five years later, on April 9, 2025, a re-elected Trump issued a MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES.   

Its target: Chris Krebs.   

Among other charges, Trump accused Krebs of suppressing “conservative or dissenting voices and distort[ing] public opinion.”

The two biggest and most influential social media platforms—Twitter (now X) and Facebook—are owned by avowedly Right-wing billionaires: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And they massively supported Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

After he incited a treasonous riot against Congress on January 6, 2021, both platforms briefly banned him from posting. But then both—fearing “retribution” if he became President again—once again gave him access to their audiences. 

Immediately after losing the 2020 Presidential election, Trump began spreading “The Big Lie”: That he had been defeated by massive voter fraud made possible through Dominion Voting Systems.

In this he was backed by a major Right-wing propagandist: The Fox News Network.

On April 18, 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $797 million to avert a wrongful defamation trial. Dominion’s lawsuit would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election—all the while knowing they were lies. 

So much for Trump’s claims of “widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”   

On the evening of July 16, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime television speech on election security—and the dangers of foreign interference. Specifically, he claimed that the country’s voting systems were vulnerable to being “rigged and stolen.”  

But he provided no new evidence of a single fraudulent vote cast in any election:

“For many years I’ve called for bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that, when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure.

“Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.” 

Trump claimed he was declassifying Intelligence documents that included allegations of Chinese efforts to influence American elections, concerns over voting machine security, and that noncitizens are found on certain states’ voter rolls.

“Allegations”—accusations—are not evidence. And the United States has never accused China of tainting or deleting voter records.

Donald Trump

“This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.

“Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people — our beautiful, our great American people.”

Yet “vulnerabilities” are different than actual evidence of election interference. And Trump provided none.

As usual, no Trump speech is complete without a boast of his own greatness:

“in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the US midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself. Separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the US president.

“They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job.”

Toward the end of his speech, Trump gave his reason for giving it:

“But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat. 

“And hopefully there will be no corrupt mail-in ballots, which, if you watched California and so many other places, mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt. So, you would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel if you’re going away on business or vacation.”

All 50 states allow mail-in voting (often referred to as absentee voting). However, the rules and requirements for who can access a mail-in ballot vary significantly by state. There’s no evidence of widespread fraud in mail balloting.

It’s important to remember that, for all Trump’s stated concerns about preserving election integrity, on July 9, he fired the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress to help states administer secure elections. 

The House passed the Save Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) but it does not have the support of all Republicans in the Senate. Thus, it has no chance of becoming law this year.

So why is Trump so fired up about the SAVE Act?  As Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW stated on the July 17 edition of The PBS Newshour:

“He’s very scared about what could happen if Democrats retake the House and retake the Senate. He has said as much on the record. If they take over, I will be investigated. And, quite frankly, there are reasons to investigate him and members of his administration.”

According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, the SAVE Act would:

• Disenfranchise millions of now-eligible—and mostly Democratic—voters. 
• Require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information.
• Require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. 
• Force more than 140 million American citizens to pay for a passport.
• Force up to 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name to obtain a birth certificate matching their legal name.
• Prevent Americans from registering to vote by mail by requiring documentation to be presented in person would prevent Americans from registering to vote by mail.

• Requite voters to appear in person, with original documentation, to even simply update their voter registration information for a change of address or change in party affiliation.
• These restrictions would be especially hard for more than 60 million Americans living in rural areas. (Ironically, millions of Right-wing Trump supporters living in rural areas would also be affected.)
• Drivers licenses—including REAL IDs—and military or tribal IDs would not be sufficient forms of documentation to prove citizenship.

Despite the disastrous changes this legislation would inflict on American elections, leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives—specifically, Speaker Mike Johnson—has declared that passing the SAVE Act is one of their top priorities this year.

So how did Donald Trump reward Chris Krebs, the man who prevented Russian interference in the 2020 Presidential election? 

Trump fired him.