‘Really quite shocking’: Inside the ugly transition at the Pentagon
The Pentagon blocked members of President Joe Biden’s incoming administration from gaining access to critical information about current operations, including the troop drawdown in Afghanistan, upcoming special operations missions in Africa and the Covid-19 vaccine distribution program, according to new details provided by transition and defense officials.
The effort to obstruct the Biden team, led by senior White House appointees at the Pentagon, is unprecedented in modern presidential transitions and will hobble the new administration on key national security matters as it takes over positions in the Defense Department on Wednesday, the officials said.
Biden openly decried the treatment his aides were receiving at the Pentagon in December, calling it “nothing short, in my view, of irresponsibility” after meetings were canceled ahead of Christmas. He said his people were denied information on the SolarWinds hack, and said his team “needs a clear picture of our force posture around the world and our operations to deter our enemies.”
But people involved with the transition, both on the Biden team and the Pentagon side, gave POLITICO a more detailed picture of what was denied, saying briefings on pressing defense matters never happened, were delayed to the last minute, or were controlled by overbearing minders from the Trump administration's side.
“Defense has traditionally been a bipartisan business between and among professionals, and this is terrible optics for those who want to copy this pettiness in the future,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The effort to block the transition from key national security information is “useless, poor form, and horrible precedent.”
This story is based on conversations with 10 Pentagon and Biden officials involved in the transition, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.
Tensions between the Pentagon and the Biden agency landing team emerged almost the moment the General Services Administration authorized the transition to begin in late November after an initial delay following the election. While the military side of the house — the Joint Staff and the geographic combatant commanders — were more cooperative, the civilian side set up roadblocks at every turn.
“They really should not be allowed to get away with this. It’s just completely irresponsible and indefensible,” said one transition official. “To play politics with the country’s national security is just really unacceptable.”
Outgoing acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has maintained publicly that he is committed to ensuring a smooth transfer of power, and Defense Department officials say the Pentagon has worked hard to complete the Biden team’s requests for information and interviews in challenging conditions due to the pandemic and a hyper-partisan environment.
Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough said it is “understandable” for there to be limits on what sensitive and classified information the department can provide to the incoming team, including related to future military operations. She also defended the presence of career civilian counsel as “observers” during meetings with the Biden team, saying the lawyers’ participation ensures that the information is “properly handled.”
Transition “personnel are not government employees and thus limited to some extent on what they can receive,” Gough said. “Membership on a transition team alone is not a license to access confidential, privileged or classified government information.”
But people with the transition said the outgoing team’s conduct went far beyond the norm and pointed to loyalists installed by the White House as the main reason for the obstruction. Pentagon officials under President Donald Trump refused to provide information about current operations, particularly in the special operations realm, because they are “predecisional.” That means the Biden team now has limited visibility into key operational issues, including what counterterrorism missions are in the works.
In one incident, the Pentagon abruptly canceled the transition team’s meeting with Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which had been scheduled for just before Christmas. At the time, the acting defense secretary said both teams had agreed to reschedule all non-Covid related meetings until after the new year, but Biden officials publicly denied that claim.
The drawdown in Afghanistan, where American troops are expected to leave the country this spring under a deal between the Trump administration and the Taliban, is one of the most pressing issues Biden’s national security team will have to confront in his young presidency.
The team was eventually able to speak with the general in January. But with the Trump administration down to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and on a path to reach zero by May, “having a multiple-week delay in gaining access to Gen. Miller was not good,” the first transition official said.
Another area where the transition felt they did not have adequate access was Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccines. The Pentagon initially rebuffed the transition’s request to meet with Gen. Gustave Perna, Warp Speed’s chief operating officer.
Perna was present at a meeting between the Pentagon and Health and Human Services transition teams in mid-December, but he did not answer any questions. It wasn’t until last week that the DoD transition team got to meet with Perna in a smaller setting.
Transition officials said the delay in getting answers about Warp Speed will hamper the Biden administration’s plan to dramatically scale up the nation’s vaccination distribution effort over the next three months.
Gough pushed back on the characterization that DoD did not cooperate on Warp Speed, noting that the department has held 64 interviews or briefings with the Biden transition team where Covid-19 was on the agenda or a was major discussion point, and completed 59 Covid-related requests for information.
Overall, Gough said the department as of Tuesday had sent the Biden team 277 responses to requests for information.
But across the department, even when the transition team did meet with DoD officials, both civilian and military, they were often tight-lipped, as if they were given explicit guidance about what they could and could not talk about. Those suspicions were confirmed when the first transition official bumped into a “very high-ranking” military official a week after their meeting, and the officer apologized for his clipped answers.
“We were alone, and he told me ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you more, but I was given very strict instructions,’” the transition official said.
In another interview with a combatant commander, the Biden team asked detailed questions about pressing national security matters, and received “very vanilla answers.”
Some of this reticence may have been due to the fact that in nearly every transition meeting, “minders” from the Defense Department General Counsel’s office were present and frequently cut off the civilian Pentagon officials, citing “predecisional operational matters.”
In one recent meeting, retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, who served as acting Pentagon policy chief until last week, frequently looked over at the general counsel representative as if to ask for permission to discuss a particular topic.
Meanwhile, every request for information the Biden team filed had to be reviewed by the general counsel’s office, and many were scrubbed of all useful information. Many requests were never answered, and the ones that did come back were thoroughly “sanitized.”
The Biden team had particularly poor visibility into the special operations and low-intensity conflict portfolio. While Trump political appointees in that office were allowed to meet with the transition, many of the career officials have been kept “at arm’s length,” said one defense official, calling the effort unprecedented.
“We have not been sidelined like this,” the person said.
The first transition official echoed those concerns, saying the team met with “some chief of staff who seemed very young and seemed quite new in his portfolio.” The person recalled asking detailed questions about changes the Trump administration made to the process of approving a mission — under former President Barack Obama, most missions had to be approved by the White House — but could not get clear answers.
The team is particularly concerned that they do not have sufficient visibility into what’s going on in Africa, whether it’s covert special operations missions across the continent or Trump’s withdrawal from Somalia.
The Biden team was also frustrated by the lack of cooperation around the upcoming budget request, a concern Biden himself cited in December and that a second transition official called “laughable.” In particular, the Biden team struggled to get details on the Trump administration’s efforts to siphon resources from military construction projects to the border wall, and funding for the Covid-19 response.
Mike McCord, the transition’s lead for Pentagon budget issues, was finally able to meet with representatives from the armed services to discuss the budget request last week, but the delay until days away from inauguration caused heartburn.
The Pentagon has also rebuffed the transition’s efforts to gain insight into a high-profile arms deal with the United Arab Emirates for the F-35, America’s most advanced fighter jet. This prevented the team from understanding key details about how sensitive information about the jet would be safeguarded, and what concerns have been raised by Israel, which also operates its own F-35s and initially objected to the deal.
Some Trump defense officials called the Biden team’s claims of obstructionism “overblown,” blaming their frustrations on the delay in certifying the election, reduced manning due to Covid-19 restrictions, and a larger-than-usual number of requests for information and interviews from the transition team.
“If anything, I think the incoming folks are overwhelming the department (political and careers alike) with requests,” said a second defense official.
As of Friday, the transition team had met with more than 400 Defense Department political appointees and over 180 career officials, said a third defense official, noting that the department has not “denied the [agency review] team anyone they’ve asked for.”
A fourth defense official who is departing with the Trump team and took part in some of the transition planning said he “saw no effort to conceal anything” from the Biden team.
But he said he believes that some of the appointees to top jobs in the waning months of the administration did not have the best interests of the institution in mind and were obsessed with political vendettas.
Trump, he said, “hired all the wrong people. And he paid a price for it. There wasn’t much we could do.”
And the acrimony has gone both ways. At the last minute, the Biden team denied Miller office space and resources for his transition out of the role, a courtesy typically provided to the outgoing team. POLITICO confirmed the move, which was first reported by Bloomberg.
The transition elected not to extend Miller that particular “perk” given his acting role and the reduced capacity in the Pentagon due to the pandemic, said another transition official, noting that retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, the nominee to be defense secretary, has also chosen to do all of his transition planning from home for those reasons.
One area where the Biden team said the department has been cooperative was in security surrounding the inauguration, primarily because the Pentagon’s role in the effort has been led by the military side.
In particular, Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist, who Biden has tapped to serve as acting defense secretary until Austin is confirmed, has been helpful.
Joe Francescon, Miller’s deputy chief of staff, reached out to Austin’s incoming chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, directly on Jan. 5. Biden and Trump officials, including Austin, Magsamen, outgoing Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, and Norquist, attended a tabletop training exercise last week. Miller was supposed to attend, but instead opted to go on a domestic trip.
Overall, the first transition official said they would give Trump's Pentagon team a “C- or D+” grade for their cooperation.
“Ultimately the level of information that we were given access to was inadequate, I mean just grossly inadequate, particularly in the context of a historically unprecedented set of challenges that the nation is facing,” the person said. “It’s really quite shocking.”
Tyler Pager contributed to this report.
In first briefing, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki pledges to bring 'truth back to the American government'
WASHINGTON — In the first press briefing of President Biden’s administration, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Wednesday that her goal was to “bring transparency and truth back to the American government.”
That remark was a not-so-subtle jab at the predecessors in the Trump administration, who were known to provide reporters with false and misleading claims from the briefing room podium.
“I have deep respect for a free and independent press in our democracy and for the role that all of you play,” Psaki said. “As I noted earlier, there will be moments when we disagree and there will certainly be days we disagree for extensive parts of the briefing even perhaps. But we have a common goal, which is sharing accurate information with the American people.”
Psaki noted that the administration planned to restore daily weekday briefings, another notable shift. Toward the end of the Trump administration, daily briefings were often canceled or called without warning. Weeks would pass without them, rendering the Brady Briefing Room into little more than a dust-filled (and at times, rat-infested) storage space. The administration went an unprecedented 100 days without briefing the media on camera while boasting that Trump was the most accessible president of all time.
Trump first press secretary Sean Spicer got off on the wrong foot with reporters by falsely claiming that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest in U.S. history. Spicer’s replacements didn’t fare much better, and the briefings given by the likes of Sarah Sanders, Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany often made news simply for the arguments they sparked with an increasingly impatient press corps.
In her debut at the podium, Psaki, a State Department spokesperson during the Obama administration, maintained her composure as she recounted the new president’s busy first day.
Following his inauguration, Biden signed a series of executive orders that sought to roll back policies put in place by Trump, including rejoining the Paris accord and the World Health Organization, reversing a travel ban for some Muslim-majority countries and mandating masks be worn on all federal property.
Psaki was asked about whether Biden worried that Trump’s looming second impeachment trial in the Senate might forestall his ambitious agenda.
“The Senate can also multitask and they can do their constitutional duty while continuing to address the needs of the American people,” she responded.
But Psaki didn’t always offer direct answers during her first briefing.
When a reporter from EWTN on the Global Catholic Network asked Psaki whether Biden would seek to do away with the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits U.S. federal programs from paying for abortions and a Trump administration Mexico City policy to keep tax dollars from going to fund abortions abroad,she demurred.
“Well, I think we’ll have more to say on the Mexico City policy in the coming days. But I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that [Biden] is a devout Catholic and somebody who attends church regularly,” Psaki said.
While Psaki didn’t offer much detail when asked about how the U.S. might respond to recent Russian hacking of government computers or what steps would be taken to deal with the nuclear threat posed by Iran, she was amused by some of the questions asked during the briefing. When asked whether Biden planned to keep Trump’s color scheme on Air Force One, Psaki responded, “This is such a good question. I have not had the opportunity to dig into that today given the number of executive actions, orders, the inauguration, a few things happening,” Psaki said sarcastically. “I will venture to get you an answer on that and maybe we can talk about it here tomorrow.”
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Biden introduces sweeping immigration reform bill, rolling back Trump orders
Before President Biden was officially sworn in Wednesday, his incoming administration announced several significant immigration-related actions the new president planned to take on his first day in office, signaling the start of what he has promised will be a more welcoming and humane contrast to the hard-line anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era.
Following his inauguration Wednesday, Biden signed the first of many executive orders he plans to issue in the coming days to undo a variety of controversial Trump policies, such as the bans on travel to the U.S. from several mostly Muslim and African countries, and paused the construction of a wall along the southern border.
In addition to rolling back these and other Trump orders via executive action, Biden’s day-one immigration agenda includes the introduction of an ambitious legislative overhaul of the U.S. immigration system.
The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which Biden planned to send to Congress Wednesday, would create an eight-year pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S., expand the use of new screening technologies to bolster border security and provide assistance to Central America as part of an effort to address the root causes of migration from the region.
Among other things, the sweeping reform bill also includes a NO BAN (National Origin-Based Antidiscrimination for Nonimmigrants) Act, prohibiting religious-based discrimination and limiting presidential authority to issue future immigration bans, as well as provisions to expand access to Diversity Visas, refugee admissions and other humanitarian protections, and to improve the asylum system and immigration courts, which have been severely undercut over the last four years.
The announcement of Biden’s plan to introduce this reform bill on Wednesday was viewed by many immigration advocates as a welcome sign that the new president intends to go beyond simply reversing the extreme restrictions imposed under Trump and to work with Congress to pass what advocates argue are much-needed fixes to a broken immigration system — something the Obama administration failed to accomplish.
“The provisions in the U.S. Citizenship Act will strengthen communities, reunite families and harness the creativity and talent of immigrants who want to be a part of the American Dream in a way that has been impossible for decades,” said Benjamin Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Beyond repairing the damage done over the past four years, these executive actions and this bill, combined with longer-term changes, will ensure a brighter and better future for America. We look forward to working with the new administration to bring forth a new vision for this country’s immigration policy.”
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the nonprofit Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, applauded the proposal in a statement Wednesday, highlighting in particular the dedication of funds for effective alternatives to detention for asylum seekers in the United States, as well as increased foreign aid and the establishment of a refugee processing center in Central America.
“President Biden’s immigration plan demonstrates that humane policy is smart policy,” said Vignarajah. “If passed, this legislation will modernize our immigration system, keep families together, expand economic opportunity, address the root causes of migration, and restore United States leadership as a refuge for those fleeing persecution.”
While immigration advocates broadly praised Biden’s day-one immigration agenda, many emphasized that both the immigration reform bill and the executive actions are simply the first of many steps the new administration will need to take to repair the damage caused by four years of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.
“These are welcome first steps after four brutal years of attacks on Black and Brown people. But much more needs to be done,” Manar Waheed, legislative policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Wednesday.
Waheed and others noted that the proposals outlined in Biden’s immigration reform bill, as well as the executive actions he signed Wednesday, represent just part of the immigration-related actions the new president promised to take upon entering the White House, which also include a 100-day freeze on deportations, the reversal of a Trump policy forcing asylum seekers who arrive at the southern border to wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated in U.S. immigration court, and the creation of a task force to reunite families separated at the border.
“We are relieved to see President-elect Biden acting swiftly on his first day in office, and we hope to see these additional bold reforms in the upcoming days,” said Waheed. “The signature of the Trump administration was cruelty towards immigrants and people of color writ large. In order to end this chapter and bring about true justice for immigrants, the Biden-Harris administration will have to continue to act deliberately and aggressively — people deserve to feel safe, today.”
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