Ex-Trump cyber official hits Trump team with major conspiracy lawsuit
It’s tough being a principled officeholder in a totally corrupt administration.
Chris Krebs, the former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, found out the hard way.
Krebs thought he would be commended for the job that he helped supervise that ensured that the 2020 U.S. presidential race was “the most secure in American history,” as he described it, much to the extreme chagrin of Donald Trump who was so incensed over losing to Democrat Joe Biden that he embarked on a seditious campaign to blame that ego-destroying loss on non-existent election fraud and didn’t want to hear any assurances to the contrary.
Instead of a hearty pat on the back and approbation for a job well done, Krebs was summarily fired by Trump and became the target of such frightening threats from the defeated president’s more despicable followers that he was forced to move his family out of their home.
An even worse threat came from one of Trump’s own legal team, Joseph diGenova, who publicly called for Krebs’ execution on a program broadcast on Trump’s latest right-wing extremist media ally, Newsmax.
“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity,” diGenova said on Newsmax’s The Howie Carr Show. “That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
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Now Krebs is suing diGenova, Newsmax, and the Trump campaign for conducting “a calculated and pernicious conspiracy” to retaliate against Republican party members who fail to get on board with the president’s evidence-free claims of election manipulation.
Saying that Krebs “faces a genuine risk of imminent harm,” the lawsuit accuses diGenova of issuing “an unlawful and inflammatory ‘call to action’ for” Krebs to “suffer the fate of a convicted traitor” and is seeking damages for defamation and infliction of emotional distress caused diGenova’s call for violence in service of the Trump campaign’s “conspiracy to undermine Americans’ confidence in the election through false information.”
It’s hard to imagine that Krebs’ legal action will be unsuccessful, particularly when he recounts how he received multiple threats by tweet, email, and text in the wake of diGenova’s lynching call and how his 10-year-old child asked him if “Daddy’s going to get executed?”.
In addition to helping him to reclaim his damaged reputation, Krebs says that his suit is intended to encourage other Republicans not to be “intimidated into silence.”
“We need to make it clear that these behaviors are not acceptable in a civil society,” he told The New York Times‘ Alan Feuer.
While awaiting the trial and the resolution of Kreb’s complaint, you can read the entirety of his lawsuit here:
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Original reporting by Alan Feuer at The New York Times.
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