A senior U.S. cybersecurity official resigned Thursday, following a deluge of other resignations of national security posts, Reuters reported.
Bryan Ware, Assistant Director for Cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), resigned after the White House asked him to resign, an official said, according to Reuters.
Christopher Krebs, who heads CISA, has reportedly told associates he also expects to be fired by the White House, Reuters reported Thursday.
CISA Director Chris Krebs, one of the few Trump administration officials with widespread bipartisan credibility, is reportedly telling people that he expects to be fired by the White House.
Krebs has led election security efforts through 2018 and 2020.https://t.co/hrn0hKnsc6
— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) November 12, 2020
President Donald Trump has performed a “near-total decapitation” of civilian leadership within the Department of Defense this week, with speculation flying that the officials disagreed with plans for a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Esper’s chief of staff, top Pentagon policy official Mark Tomb and other senior officials, after rumors that Trump planned to fire Esper after the election, though Esper said it was his plan to resign regardless of the election outcome, according to Time Magazine. (RELATED: Trump Performs ‘Near Total Decapitation’ Of Pentagon Leadership As Speculation Swirls Around Afghanistan)
Esper and Trump had clashed publicly on a number of issues in the lead up to the November 3rd election, including the renaming of military bases currently named after Confederate military figures, as well as the deployment of active duty U.S. troops to cities experiencing unrest this summer.
The resignations have raised concerns that the high level of turnover could harm the transition period.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said Tuesday that it is “hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition,” according to the Hill.
The resignations “could mark the beginning of a process of gutting the DoD – something that should alarm all Americans,” Smith said in a statement released after the Pentagon’s top policy official James Anderson departed, the Hill reported.