Re: Christopher C. Krebs v. Joseph E. diGenova; Donald J. Tr
Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2020 4:59 amSecuring the Election
produced by Rachael Morehouse
60 Minutes
November 29, 2020
[Transcribed from the Youtube video by Tara Carreon]
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
[Scott Pelley] Though the transition has begun, President Trump remains largely holed up in the White House tweeting false accusations of a rigged election from behind a crumbling wall of lawsuits. No legal challenge, no recount, no audit has changed the outcome in any state.
Mr. Trump’s claim that millions of votes were deleted, or switched, is denied by the official he chose to secure the nation’s election systems. Christopher Krebs called the 2020 vote “the most secure in American history,” which promptly got him fired. Tonight, in his first interview since he was dismissed, Krebs tells us why he believes the vote was accurate, and why saying otherwise puts the country in danger.
[Christopher Krebs] I have confidence in the security of this election because I know the work that we’ve done for four years in support of our state and local partners. I know the work that the intelligence community has done, the Department of Defense has done, that the FBI has done, that my team has done. I know that these systems are more secure. I know, based on what we have seen that any attacks on the election were not successful.
[Scott Pelley] Two years ago President Trump put Christopher Krebs in charge of the new Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs, a lifelong Republican, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate.
His agency, known by its acronym CISA helped secure computer systems anywhere that a security breach could be catastrophic. Nuclear power plants, for example. And the election hardware in all 50 states.
[To Christopher Krebs] Why are you speaking to us?
[Christopher Krebs] I’m not a public servant anymore, but I feel that I’ve still got some public service in me. And you know, it’s hard once you take that oath to uphold and defend the Constitution from threats foreign and domestic, it’s hard to walk away from that. And if I can reinforce or confirm for one person that the vote was secure, the election was secure, then I feel like I’ve done my job.
[Scott Pelley] Krebs, who is 43, worked on cybersecurity in the Bush administration. He became director of cybersecurity policy at Microsoft, and joined the Trump Department of Homeland Security in 2017. His priority was to stop anyone from repeating Russia’s 2016 election hacking, and disinformation.
[Christopher Krebs] So we spent something on the order of 3-1/2 years of gaming out every possible scenario for how a foreign actor could interfere with an election. Countless, countless scenarios.
[Scott Pelley] So back in 2017 as you’re looking ahead to the election in 2018 and then ultimately the election in 2020, you have a to-do list, and the to-do list includes what?
[Christopher Krebs] Paper ballots. Paper ballots give you the ability to audit, to go back and check the tape and make sure you got the count right. And that’s really one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election. 95% of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it. Compared with 2016, about 82%.
[Scott Pelley] And with a paper record, you can go back and verify what the machine is saying by physically counting the paper.
[Christopher Krebs] That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote. And just look at what happened in Georgia. Georgia has machines that tabulate the vote. They then held a hand recount, and the outcome was consistent with the machine vote.
[Scott Pelley] And that tells you what?
[Christopher Krebs] That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count outside. And so that pretty thoroughly, in my opinion, debunks some of these sensational claims out there that I’ve called “nonsense” and “a hoax,” that there was some hacking of these election vendors and their software in their systems across the country. It’s just “nonsense.”
[Scott Pelley] Before the election, as the President called mail-in ballots a fraud, Krebs’ team released a report highlighting the safeguards built in to mail-in voting. His agency knocked down rumors and exposed an Iranian plot to intimidate voters.
On election day, Krebs assembled a team in his command center to defend the vote.
[Christopher Krebs] We had the Department of Defense Cybercommand. We had the National Security Agency. We had the FBI. We had the Secret Service. We also had representatives from The Elections Assistance Commission which is the federal independent agency that supports the actual administration of elections. We had representatives from some of the vendors, some of the election equipment vendors, and they are critical, because they are the ones out there that know what’s going on on the ground if there’s any sort of issue with some of their systems. And we had representatives from state and local governments.
[Scott Pelley] How did the day go?
[Christopher Krebs] It was quiet, and there was no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking, or compromise of election systems on, before, or after November 3rd.
[Scott Pelley] And yet, this was the President November 5th.
[President Trump] And this is a case where they are trying to steal an election; they are trying to rig an election.
[Scott Pelley] Nine days after election day, Mr. Trump tweeted falsely that machines from Dominion Voting Systems deleted millions of votes. Krebs couldn’t remain silent. His agency and its election security partners answered with a public statement.
[To Christopher Krebs] To quote from the November 12th statement that CISA and its partners put out: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, or changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
[Christopher Krebs] Yeah, I stand by that.
[Scott Pelley] The President tweeted out after that statement, “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 election was highly inaccurate in that there were massive improprieties and fraud.” Do you remember what the President said at the end of that tweet?
[Christopher Krebs] Oh, I was terminated? Is that – yes. I recall that.
[Scott Pelley] Were you surprised?
[Christopher Krebs] I don’t know if I was necessarily surprised. It’s not how I wanted to go out. I think I – the thing that upsets me the most about that is I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my team. And I’d worked with them for 3-1/2 years in the trenches, building an agency, putting CISA on the national stage. And I loved that team. And I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. So that’s what I’m most upset about.
[Scott Pelley] Since he was fired, about a dozen Republican senators have vouched for Krebs’ work.
[To Christopher Krebs] The President is essentially saying in that tweet, that you did a lousy job, that you and your team blew it, and allowed massive fraud all across the country.
[Christopher Krebs] We did a good job. We did it right. I would do it a thousand times over.
[Scott Pelley] Still, the President’s lawyers have filed at least a dozen suits…
and spun conjecture without evidence.
[To Christopher Krebs] As you watched Rudy Giuliani’s news conference at the Republican National Committee Headquarters, what were you thinking?
[Christopher Krebs] It was upsetting, because what I saw was a apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election; to confuse people; to scare people. It’s not me. It’s not just CISA. It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working non-stop, 18-hour days, for months, that are getting death-threats for trying to carry out one of our core, democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that, it didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.
[Scott Pelley] Let me ask for your reaction to some of the vote fraud that the President and his team have been alleging. “Votes tabulated in foreign countries.”
[Christopher Krebs] So, [expostulates] all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. I don’t, I don’t understand this claim; all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.
[Scott Pelley] “Voting machines corrupted by mysterious actors in Venezuela.”
[Christopher Krebs] So, again, there’s no evidence that any machine that I’m aware of has been manipulated by a foreign power. Period.
[Scott Pelley] “Communist money from China and Cuba used to influence the election.”
[Christopher Krebs] Look, I think we can go on and on with all the farcical claims alleging interference in the 2020 election, but the proof is in the ballots. The recounts are consistent with the initial count, and to me that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected, and the American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.
[Scott Pelley] In a news conference, a lawyer who was representing the President at the time, Sidney Powell, said specifically, that the Dominion Company’s voting machines,
[Christopher Krebs] Votes were cast in Georgia, for instance, again, on paper. They were counted by a machine. They were subsequently recounted by hand. The outcomes of that count were consistent. If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes, or changing votes, it didn’t work! I think the more likely explanation though is that there was no algorithm, that the systems performed as intended, that the series of security controls before, during and after an election, protected those systems from any sort of misbehavior.
[Scott Pelley] Most elections are run by each state’s Secretary of State. But not one of them, Democrat or Republican, has reported ballot rigging that would change the election. Some are paying a price for integrity.
[Christopher Krebs] And it’s, in my view, a travesty what’s happening right now with all these death threats to election officials and secretaries of state. I want everybody to look at Secretary Boockvar of Pennsylvania, Secretary Benson in Michigan, Secretary Cegavske of Nevada, Secretary Hobbs in Arizona – all strong women that are standing up, that are under attack from all sides, and they are defending democracy. They are doing their jobs. Look at Secretary Raffensperger in Georgia, a lifelong Republican. He put country before party and is holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There’s some real patriots.
[Scott Pelley] At the Capitol, the stage is going up for inauguration day, January 20th. Well before that, on December 14th, the presidential electors will cast their ballots, which should settle the election. Christopher Krebs told us it’s ironic that the disruption and disinformation he feared from abroad came instead from Pennsylvania Avenue.
[To Christopher Krebs] The President says you’re dead wrong about election security, and to him you say what?
[Christopher Krebs] There’s no foreign power that is flipping votes. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.
produced by Rachael Morehouse
60 Minutes
November 29, 2020
[Transcribed from the Youtube video by Tara Carreon]
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
[Scott Pelley] Though the transition has begun, President Trump remains largely holed up in the White House tweeting false accusations of a rigged election from behind a crumbling wall of lawsuits. No legal challenge, no recount, no audit has changed the outcome in any state.
Mr. Trump’s claim that millions of votes were deleted, or switched, is denied by the official he chose to secure the nation’s election systems. Christopher Krebs called the 2020 vote “the most secure in American history,” which promptly got him fired. Tonight, in his first interview since he was dismissed, Krebs tells us why he believes the vote was accurate, and why saying otherwise puts the country in danger.
[Christopher Krebs] I have confidence in the security of this election because I know the work that we’ve done for four years in support of our state and local partners. I know the work that the intelligence community has done, the Department of Defense has done, that the FBI has done, that my team has done. I know that these systems are more secure. I know, based on what we have seen that any attacks on the election were not successful.
[Scott Pelley] Two years ago President Trump put Christopher Krebs in charge of the new Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs, a lifelong Republican, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate.
His agency, known by its acronym CISA helped secure computer systems anywhere that a security breach could be catastrophic. Nuclear power plants, for example. And the election hardware in all 50 states.
[To Christopher Krebs] Why are you speaking to us?
[Christopher Krebs] I’m not a public servant anymore, but I feel that I’ve still got some public service in me. And you know, it’s hard once you take that oath to uphold and defend the Constitution from threats foreign and domestic, it’s hard to walk away from that. And if I can reinforce or confirm for one person that the vote was secure, the election was secure, then I feel like I’ve done my job.
[Scott Pelley] Krebs, who is 43, worked on cybersecurity in the Bush administration. He became director of cybersecurity policy at Microsoft, and joined the Trump Department of Homeland Security in 2017. His priority was to stop anyone from repeating Russia’s 2016 election hacking, and disinformation.
[Christopher Krebs] So we spent something on the order of 3-1/2 years of gaming out every possible scenario for how a foreign actor could interfere with an election. Countless, countless scenarios.
[Scott Pelley] So back in 2017 as you’re looking ahead to the election in 2018 and then ultimately the election in 2020, you have a to-do list, and the to-do list includes what?
[Christopher Krebs] Paper ballots. Paper ballots give you the ability to audit, to go back and check the tape and make sure you got the count right. And that’s really one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election. 95% of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it. Compared with 2016, about 82%.
[Scott Pelley] And with a paper record, you can go back and verify what the machine is saying by physically counting the paper.
[Christopher Krebs] That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote. And just look at what happened in Georgia. Georgia has machines that tabulate the vote. They then held a hand recount, and the outcome was consistent with the machine vote.
[Scott Pelley] And that tells you what?
[Christopher Krebs] That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count outside. And so that pretty thoroughly, in my opinion, debunks some of these sensational claims out there that I’ve called “nonsense” and “a hoax,” that there was some hacking of these election vendors and their software in their systems across the country. It’s just “nonsense.”
[Scott Pelley] Before the election, as the President called mail-in ballots a fraud, Krebs’ team released a report highlighting the safeguards built in to mail-in voting. His agency knocked down rumors and exposed an Iranian plot to intimidate voters.
On election day, Krebs assembled a team in his command center to defend the vote.
[Christopher Krebs] We had the Department of Defense Cybercommand. We had the National Security Agency. We had the FBI. We had the Secret Service. We also had representatives from The Elections Assistance Commission which is the federal independent agency that supports the actual administration of elections. We had representatives from some of the vendors, some of the election equipment vendors, and they are critical, because they are the ones out there that know what’s going on on the ground if there’s any sort of issue with some of their systems. And we had representatives from state and local governments.
[Scott Pelley] How did the day go?
[Christopher Krebs] It was quiet, and there was no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking, or compromise of election systems on, before, or after November 3rd.
[Scott Pelley] And yet, this was the President November 5th.
[President Trump] And this is a case where they are trying to steal an election; they are trying to rig an election.
[Scott Pelley] Nine days after election day, Mr. Trump tweeted falsely that machines from Dominion Voting Systems deleted millions of votes. Krebs couldn’t remain silent. His agency and its election security partners answered with a public statement.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.” @ChanelRion@OANN
This claim about election fraud is disputed.
11:34 AM, Nov. 12, 2020
[To Christopher Krebs] To quote from the November 12th statement that CISA and its partners put out: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, or changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
[Christopher Krebs] Yeah, I stand by that.
[Scott Pelley] The President tweeted out after that statement, “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 election was highly inaccurate in that there were massive improprieties and fraud.” Do you remember what the President said at the end of that tweet?
[Christopher Krebs] Oh, I was terminated? Is that – yes. I recall that.
[Scott Pelley] Were you surprised?
[Christopher Krebs] I don’t know if I was necessarily surprised. It’s not how I wanted to go out. I think I – the thing that upsets me the most about that is I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my team. And I’d worked with them for 3-1/2 years in the trenches, building an agency, putting CISA on the national stage. And I loved that team. And I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. So that’s what I’m most upset about.
[Scott Pelley] Since he was fired, about a dozen Republican senators have vouched for Krebs’ work.
[To Christopher Krebs] The President is essentially saying in that tweet, that you did a lousy job, that you and your team blew it, and allowed massive fraud all across the country.
[Christopher Krebs] We did a good job. We did it right. I would do it a thousand times over.
[Scott Pelley] Still, the President’s lawyers have filed at least a dozen suits…
[Rudy Giuliani] Wow!
and spun conjecture without evidence.
[Rudy Giuliani] And you should be more astounded by the fact that our votes are counted in Germany, and in Spain.
[To Christopher Krebs] As you watched Rudy Giuliani’s news conference at the Republican National Committee Headquarters, what were you thinking?
[Christopher Krebs] It was upsetting, because what I saw was a apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election; to confuse people; to scare people. It’s not me. It’s not just CISA. It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working non-stop, 18-hour days, for months, that are getting death-threats for trying to carry out one of our core, democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that, it didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.
[Scott Pelley] Let me ask for your reaction to some of the vote fraud that the President and his team have been alleging. “Votes tabulated in foreign countries.”
[Christopher Krebs] So, [expostulates] all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. I don’t, I don’t understand this claim; all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.
[Scott Pelley] “Voting machines corrupted by mysterious actors in Venezuela.”
[Christopher Krebs] So, again, there’s no evidence that any machine that I’m aware of has been manipulated by a foreign power. Period.
[Scott Pelley] “Communist money from China and Cuba used to influence the election.”
[Christopher Krebs] Look, I think we can go on and on with all the farcical claims alleging interference in the 2020 election, but the proof is in the ballots. The recounts are consistent with the initial count, and to me that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected, and the American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.
[Scott Pelley] In a news conference, a lawyer who was representing the President at the time, Sidney Powell, said specifically, that the Dominion Company’s voting machines,
[Sidney Powell] “It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.”
[Christopher Krebs] Votes were cast in Georgia, for instance, again, on paper. They were counted by a machine. They were subsequently recounted by hand. The outcomes of that count were consistent. If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes, or changing votes, it didn’t work! I think the more likely explanation though is that there was no algorithm, that the systems performed as intended, that the series of security controls before, during and after an election, protected those systems from any sort of misbehavior.
[Scott Pelley] Most elections are run by each state’s Secretary of State. But not one of them, Democrat or Republican, has reported ballot rigging that would change the election. Some are paying a price for integrity.
[Christopher Krebs] And it’s, in my view, a travesty what’s happening right now with all these death threats to election officials and secretaries of state. I want everybody to look at Secretary Boockvar of Pennsylvania, Secretary Benson in Michigan, Secretary Cegavske of Nevada, Secretary Hobbs in Arizona – all strong women that are standing up, that are under attack from all sides, and they are defending democracy. They are doing their jobs. Look at Secretary Raffensperger in Georgia, a lifelong Republican. He put country before party and is holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There’s some real patriots.
[Scott Pelley] At the Capitol, the stage is going up for inauguration day, January 20th. Well before that, on December 14th, the presidential electors will cast their ballots, which should settle the election. Christopher Krebs told us it’s ironic that the disruption and disinformation he feared from abroad came instead from Pennsylvania Avenue.
[To Christopher Krebs] The President says you’re dead wrong about election security, and to him you say what?
[Christopher Krebs] There’s no foreign power that is flipping votes. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.