The acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the department stands by the statement it released in mid-November that concluded there was no evidence that voting systems were compromised in the 2020 election, the same statement that got his predecessor fired.
Brandon Wales, however, took what was likely an attempt to be a bit more careful than the former chief in an interview with the Aspen Institute on Thursday, specifying that the statement stopped short of saying that no fraud took place.
“There are times that our statement has kind of been misconstrued to say that there were no problems with the election and that it was fraud-free, and that’s just not the case,” he said. “We do believe that it was secure from external interference, which is our mandate, and we’re proud of the work we did to get to that point.”
The Nov. 12 statement had the following sentence written in bold: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Just days after the statement was issued, the president fired Chris Krebs, then the director of CISA.
“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud,” President Trump said in a tweet.
He added: “Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”
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…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2020
Krebs found out about his dismissal from that very tweet, according to CNN.
Wales added on Thursday, “A lot of the claims that are out there have to do with election fraud, which is beyond the scope of the work that we do here in CISA.”
He added that the statement was not issued by CISA alone but in partnership with other relevant parties.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the White House for comment on Wales’s interview.
