A lawyer for President Trump’s reelection campaign has resigned from a Washington, D.C.-based journalistic organization after saying the nation’s former cybersecurity chief should be “shot.”
The president of the Gridiron Club, Craig Gilbert, said the 135-year-old organization asked Joseph diGenova to step down following the attorney’s comments on “The Howie Carr Show.”
“We were dismayed by his comments and we felt that they were, on top of everything else, just antithetical to what the club is about,” Gilbert, who serves as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington bureau chief, said, according to The Washington Post.
“It’s a social club — we’re all about fellowship and good will,” Gilbert added.
DiGenova made the remarks after Christopher Krebs was fired following his assertion that the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history.
“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs … he should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said on the radio show.
DiGenova has since claimed the comment was “in jest.”
He told the Post he meant the comment as a joke.
“I, of course, wish Mr. Krebs no harm. This was hyperbole in a political discourse,” diGenova said, adding that he has “no ill will” toward the club.
“I was happy to be a member,” he added. “It’s their club, and we’re at a strange time in American history, and I guess I was canceled.”
Krebs has suggested he is exploring legal options against diGenova for the comment.
“We are a nation of laws, and I plan to take advantage of those laws,” Krebs told NBC’s “Today” Tuesday. “I’ve got an exceptional team of lawyers that win in court, and I think they’re probably going to be busy.”
In the same interview, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency defended his assertion about the security of the election. President Trump and allies, who have frequently spread false and unproven conspiracy theories about the election since President-elect Joe Biden was projected the winner, have continually contradicted Krebs’s claims.
“We did a good job. We did it right. I’d do it a thousand times over,” he said.