Trump campaign lawyer says fired cybersecurity chief should be ‘shot’ for declaring election secure

Joe DiGenova’s comments condemned as ‘behaviour befitting a mob attorney’

An attorney working for the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn 3 November’s election result has been condemned for saying that Chris Krebs, the former head of US cybersecurity, should be “shot” for declaring the election secure.

Campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova said during an appearance on The Howie Carr Show that Mr Krebs was an “idiot” and “a class A moron.”

“He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot," he added.

Mr Carr, whose show is broadcast by the conservative radio network Newsmax, did not challenge him on the remarks.

Mr Krebs, a lifelong Republican, was fired as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by Donald Trump on 17 November.

He was sacked after he declared that the 2020 election was among one of the most secure in history, adding: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

President Trump fired Mr Krebs by tweet, while falsely claiming that there had been widespread fraud in the election.

AlthoughJoe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election earlier this month, Mr Trump has yet to concede, despite officially launching the transition process.

The president and his campaign team, led by Rudy Giuliani and including Mr DiGenova, have filed 39 unsuccessful lawsuits in battleground states that Mr Biden won. The Trump team has so far provided no definitive evidence of any voting irregularities.

Mr DiGenova’s comments were criticised on Monday evening by the whistleblower group, the Government Accountability Project.

“Threats like these trigger an avalanche of them. They terrorise other whistleblowers into silence. It's behaviour befitting a mob attorney,” said Louis Clark, the group's executive director and chief executive officer.

On Sunday, Mr Krebs told CBS’ 60 Minutes that Mr Trump is attempting to “undermine democracy … to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people”.

Mr Trump reacted angrily on Twitter after Mr Krebs’ segment aired, writing: “@60Minutes never asked us for a comment about their ridiculous, one sided story on election security, which is an international joke.”

He then falsely claimed: “Our 2020 Election, from poorly rated Dominion to a Country FLOODED with unaccounted for Mail-In ballots, was probably our least secure EVER!”

The Independent has contacted the Trump campaign for comment.