My favorite Scott Pelley interview was with then-former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Christopher Krebs.  Pelley must have liked it as well, because, following the interview, and with further elaboration, he posted it online, under the title “Fired director of U.S. cyber agency Chris Krebs explains why President Trump’s claims of election interference are false.”

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In his introduction, Pelley states, “Mr. Trump’s claim that millions of votes were deleted or switched is denied by the official he chose to secure the nation’s election systems.”

This is a misleading and a false statement.  It is misleading because, although Trump did claim that millions of votes were deleted or switched, he was not speaking about “the nation’s election systems,” but about a specific element in it — its computer systems.

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In any election, there are, aside from computer systems, many potential avenues for election fraud, such as

Mail-in ballot fraud (fake ballots, ballot-harvesting, forged signatures)

Voter impersonation (someone voting in another person’s name)

Double-voting (same person voting more than once)

Non-citizen voting

Dead people voting

Ballot-stuffing at polling places or drop boxes

Chain-of-custody violations (lost, destroyed, or added ballots)

Fake registrations or illegal voting by felons in states where prohibited

Obviously, the finding that computer systems (which lend themselves to such evaluation) might not be corrupted does not mean that the foregoing elements have not been corrupted.  For such reason, Pelley’s statement that Krebs’s role was to “secure the nation’s election systems” is plainly false; it was his role, within elections, to secure the integrity of the computer systems.

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That little detail notwithstanding, in the interview itself, Pelley, quoting a prior joint November 12 statement made by CISA and other agencies, read,

The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes or changed votes or was in any way compromised.

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These sentences are a non sequitur.  The first is talking about the election in general; the second is talking about a specific element of that election, but as if it supported the preceding statement.

(Notwithstanding the millions he received annually in salary, Pelley missed or ignored that little detail.)

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Following the joint statement of CISA et al, the president fired Krebs, and justly so.

Following his interview that followed the sly statement and in which he reinforced its deception, however, his employer, CBS, did not fire Pelley.  Until now.  God sees the truth but waits.

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Image via Pixnio.