The Big Move is almost upon me. I’ll be taking up residence in my new place on June 1.
I understand the House is going to vote on the debt ceiling deal today. It’s expected to pass, but we’ll see.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report for the New York Times that Jack Smith has subpoenaed some Trump White House aides in regard to the firing of Christopher Krebs (no paywall). You might remember that Krebs was the administration’s cybersecurity expert who judged the 2020 election to have been “the most secure in American history,” which pissed off Trump.
The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”
Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.
The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter. …
…“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” the statement from Mr. Krebs’s agency read.
Five days later, Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Krebs was “terminated” after releasing a “highly inaccurate” statement about the 2020 election.
It gets better.
Within the Presidential Personnel Office, a small group of Trump loyalists, led by Mr. Trump’s former personal aide, John McEntee, were on a mission to find and fire people perceived as disloyal to Mr. Trump within the federal bureaucracy. And they had fingered the outspoken Mr. Krebs, who had been appointed by Mr. Trump himself, as among the ranks of the disloyal.
Staff members within the personnel office had drafted a document about Mr. Krebs that outlined reasons to distrust him. The memo, first reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, detailed a litany of Mr. Krebs’s alleged sins against Mr. Trump, including: “Wife posted a family photo on Facebook with the ‘Biden Harris’ logo watermarked at the bottom.”
Jack Smith is also looking into personnel interactions between the White House and the Justice Department during the time Trump was grasping at anything to overturn the election result.