It’s probably fair to say that Christopher Krebs is not a household name, but inside the White House, he’s immediately recognized. Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during Donald Trump’s first term, which meant he was responsible for combatting foreign interference in our elections and preventing attacks.
Krebs earned bipartisan praise for his work, and after the 2020 election cycle, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius noted, “When the history books about this election are written, Krebs will be one of the heroes.”
The day Ignatius’ column was published, Trump fired Krebs — not because he’d done anything wrong but because the president wanted him to go along with his lies about the election results. When Krebs instead told the truth, he was shown the door.
Four and a half years later, Trump issued an order that not only described Krebs as a “significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority” — a baseless claim the president made while abusing his government authority — it also directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate Krebs’ work and activities.
Even by 2025 standards, it was an outrageous abuse, which the White House has struggled to defend.
Three weeks after the president signed a first-of-its-kind executive order targeting a former official for defying him, Time magazine asked Trump a good question: “You recently signed memos calling for an investigation of Chris Krebs, a top cybersecurity official in your first term. Isn’t that, though, what you accused [Joe Biden] of doing to you?” The president responded:
I think Chris Krebs was a disgrace to our country. I think he was — I think he was terrible. By the way, I don’t know him. I’m not — I don’t think I ever met him. … I know very little about Chris Krebs, but I think he was very deficient.
Right off the bat, there’s the obvious problem that Trump thinks the former cybersecurity leader — who, again, did literally nothing wrong during his work in Trump’s own administration — is “a disgrace,” despite the inconvenient detail that the president knows “very little” about him.
But just as notable was the degree to which the president ignored the underlying question that Time magazine was right to ask: For all of Trump’s hysterical conspiracy theories about the Biden administration “weaponizing” federal law enforcement, it was Trump who signed an executive order that directed the Justice Department to go after one of his perceived political foes.
Asked to defend his own tactics, the Republican said his perceived enemy was “a disgrace to our country.” By that reasoning, can any president sic the DOJ after those they hold in contempt? Wouldn’t that necessarily create the kind of conditions that Trump and his party have claimed to be against? As for Krebs himself, the former official has said very little about the president’s executive order, though he has spoken out against the administration’s policy agenda in his area of expertise. As NBC News reported, Krebs received a warm welcome from industry professionals at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, a cybersecurity conference, where he criticized the second Trump administration for its repeated cuts to cybersecurity employees, contractors and programs. “Cybersecurity is national security. We all know that, right? That’s why we’re here. That’s why we get up every morning and do our jobs. We are protecting everyone out there. And right now, to see what’s happening to the cybersecurity community inside the federal government, we should be outraged. Absolutely outraged.” This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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