Chris Krebs

On July 16, 2026, President Trump delivered an Address to the Nation on Election Reforms. Referring to officials who knew of foreign election-interference intelligence, he said: “They did not disclose to me, as President, or to anyone else. And to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress. In fact, all they kept saying is, ‘This is the most secure election in the history of our country’—a standard, very pat line that was divvied out to say.” The address as transcribed by the American Presidency Project does not name Krebs. On July 17, 2026, the White House published “Setting the Record Straight,” stating the President had declassified intelligence on foreign election interference and directed the DNI, DOJ, FBI and CIA to investigate; it says the President “did not make a claim about past elections” and does not mention Krebs or CISA. The White House election-integrity page says: “For years Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure.” On July 19, 2026, introduced as a CBS News contributor on Face the Nation, Krebs was asked whether the disclosures shook his confidence in 2020.

The President’s address is a speech, not a finding, and the White House materials cited here do not accuse Krebs by name. The investigations the President directed were ongoing as of the release; no public result naming Krebs was located as of Sep 28, 2026.

On April 9, 2025, President Trump signed a memorandum titled “Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship.” It calls Krebs a “significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority,” says “CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop,” and says “Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.” It directs agencies to “revoke any active security clearance held by Christopher Krebs” and to “suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at entities associated with Krebs, including SentinelOne, pending a review.” It directs the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to review “Krebs’ activities as a Government employee, including his leadership of CISA,” including whether his conduct “involved the unauthorized dissemination of classified information” or ran contrary to Executive Order 14149 (Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship), and to evaluate “all of CISA’s activities over the last 6 years,” with a joint report to the President. SentinelOne announced in November 2023 that Krebs had joined as its Chief Intelligence and Public Policy Officer. On April 16, 2025, Krebs posted on LinkedIn that he was stepping away from SentinelOne.

A presidential memorandum is an order to executive agencies, not a court finding or a criminal charge. As of Sep 28, 2026, we located no public AG/DHS joint report, no public confirmation that the revocation was carried out, no criminal charge, and no lawsuit by Krebs challenging the memorandum. SentinelOne’s SEC filings located do not mention his departure.

Four weeks after he was fired, Krebs submitted written testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He wrote that he led CISA and its predecessor “from August 2017 until last month,” that “On November 12, 2020, I approved CISA’s publication of a joint statement,” and that “I stand by the statement.” He wrote that “this was not a CISA statement,” that “I did not write or edit the statement, but I did have an opportunity to review it prior to release, and I authorized CISA’s publication of it,” and that he “amplified the statement via my official Twitter account.” He wrote that the statement “does not address voter fraud, which is not within this group’s ambit,” and that CISA “had no role—and never claimed to have a role—in investigating or mitigating election-related” fraud. In the same testimony he disclosed that in fall 2020, “In two cases, the Russians gained access to election-related systems, and they succeeded in extracting information about voters from one of those systems—although the data was publicly available from other sources.” He called claims of machine manipulation baseless and wrote that officials “have a duty to reinforce to the American people that these claims are false.”

Written testimony by a former official. It is his account, not a committee finding. By his own terms the statement he approved addressed hacking and manipulation of election systems, not voter fraud.

On November 12, 2020, CISA published a “Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees.” The CISA member listed on the statement is Assistant Director Bob Kolasky, not Krebs. The statement said: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.” It also said: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” That evening, Krebs posted from his official account: “Election Infrastructure Subsector - SCC/GCC Joint Statement on the 2020 Election. TLDR: America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too. #Protect2020.” On November 17, 2020 (7:07 PM ET), President Trump posted that “the recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate” and that “effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”

The statement was issued by election-sector councils and published by CISA; Krebs approved publication and amplified it. It spoke to voting systems, not to fraud. The President removed him from office. There was no finding about Krebs’s conduct.

A November 6, 2023 House Judiciary staff report quotes a February 20, 2020 email inviting the Stanford Internet Observatory to a meeting hosted by CISA Director Krebs “to discuss disinformation and the 2020 Elections,” with agenda items including “How should we be thinking about domestic vs foreign interference?” and “Any low hanging fruit we can work with platforms on?” It says Microsoft notes of a March 2020 call record Krebs identifying “Monitoring disinformation” as one of four “core lines of effort.” The report says Stanford’s Alex Stamos, asked whether he consulted Krebs about the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in summer 2020, answered “I probably did, yes,” while Krebs told the Committee he did not “recall any conversations with Alex.” It quotes a September 25, 2020 CISA email: “Evidently Director Krebs personally reached out to [SIO head] Stamos asking what had happened around this event around the time the content was taken down,” and an Atlantic Council email stating that “Krebs CISA is texting Stamos with some regularity.” It quotes a November 4, 2020 email from a CISA policy lead to an individual at the Alliance for Securing Democracy asking whether anything was “worth elevating to Director Krebs. Are you still seeing #stopthesteal popping up?” and a November 10, 2020 email from CISA’s Brian Scully to Facebook: “Director Krebs is particularly concerned about the hammer and scorecard narrative.” The report says Krebs testified “EIP’s establishment was independent of CISA,” while an Atlantic Council email from July 2020 described the EIP as “set up . . . at the request of DHS/CISA.” It states that Krebs “created the Krebs Stamos Group with Alex Stamos, the head of the EIP and the SIO, in January 2021.” The June 26, 2023 staff report says CISA, CIS and the EI-ISAC “all served as ‘external stakeholders’” of the EIP.

These are majority staff reports quoting documents and transcripts the Committee holds; the underlying interview transcript and emails are not public. A staff report is not a finding of law. The staff emails describe what staff said about Krebs, not his own words.

In its July 4, 2023 memorandum ruling granting a preliminary injunction, the federal district court in Missouri v. Biden recited that on September 4, 2019, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter met with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, ODNI and CISA, attended by “Director Krebs, Masterson, and Scully,” to discuss “disinformation.” It described “switchboarding,” in which CISA relayed reports of alleged misinformation to platforms, and recited that the EIP “held its first meeting with CISA to present the EIP concept on July 9, 2020, and EIP was officially formed on July 26, 2020, ‘in consultation with CISA.’” It gave the example of a report forwarded while “switchboarding for CISA” because a user had claimed “mail-in voting is insecure.” It found that “no investigation was made to determine whether the censored information was foreign or produced by U.S. citizens,” and held that plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claim against the CISA Defendants for ‘significantly encouraging’ social-media companies to suppress protected free speech.” On October 3, 2023, the Fifth Circuit held that “CISA also likely violated the First Amendment,” noting that “CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had ‘switchboarded’ was true or false.” On June 26, 2024, the Supreme Court held that “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant,” reversed and remanded, and stated: “Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action.” It noted that CISA “stopped switchboarding in mid-2022.”

Preliminary-injunction rulings about CISA as an agency, covering conduct from 2020 through 2022; Krebs was not a defendant. The Supreme Court reversed on standing and did not decide whether CISA violated the First Amendment. No court found Krebs personally liable.