But the people involved in the transition, both from the Biden team and the Pentagon, gave POLITICO a more detailed picture of what was denied, saying that briefings on urgent defense issues never happened, were delayed until the last minute or were checked by authoritarian supervisors on the Trump administration side.
“Defense has traditionally been a bipartisan business among professionals, and this is a terrible prospect for anyone who wants to copy that stinginess in the future,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The effort to block the transition of key national security information is “a useless, inappropriate 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 arose almost as soon as the General Services Administration authorized the transition to begin in late November, after an initial delay after the election. While the military side of the house – the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the combatant geographic commanders – were more cooperative, the civilian side blocked the roads at every corner.
“They really shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. It is completely irresponsible and indefensible, ”said a transition officer. “Making politics with the national security of the country is really unacceptable.”
Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has publicly stated that he is committed to ensuring a smooth transfer of power, and Department of Defense officials say the Pentagon has been working hard to respond to Biden’s team requests for information and interviews on condition. challenging due to the pandemic and hyperpartisan environment.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough said it is “understandable” that there are limits to the classified and classified information the department can provide to incoming staff, including those related to future military operations. She also advocated the presence of career civil lawyers as “observers” during meetings with the Biden team, saying that the lawyers’ participation ensures that the information is “properly handled”.
“Transition officials are not government officials and therefore are limited to some extent to what they can receive,” said Gough. “Being a member of a transition team alone is not a license to access confidential, privileged or classified government information.”
But people with the transition said that the conduct of the exit team went well beyond the norm and pointed to the White House loyalists as the main reason for the obstruction. Pentagon officials under President Donald Trump refused to provide information on current operations, especially in the field of special operations, because they are “pre-decision-making”. This means that the Biden team now has limited visibility into key operational issues, including which counterterrorism missions are ongoing.
In one incident, the Pentagon abruptly canceled the transition team meeting with General Scott Miller, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, which was scheduled for before Christmas. At the time, the interim defense secretary said that both teams agreed to reschedule all non-Covid meetings until after the new year, but Biden officials publicly denied that statement.
The downturn in Afghanistan, where American troops are expected to leave the country this spring under an agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban, is one of the most pressing issues facing Biden’s national security team in his young presidency.
The team managed to speak to the general in January. But with the Trump administration reduced to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and on track to reach zero in May, “having a delay of several weeks to gain access to General Miller was not good,” said the first transition officer.
Another area where the transition felt it lacked adequate access was Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccines. The Pentagon initially rejected the transition request to meet with General Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Warp Speed.
Perna attended a meeting between the Pentagon transition and Health and Human Services teams in mid-December, but did not answer any questions. It was not until last week that the DoD transition team met with Perna in a smaller setting.
Transition officials said the delay in getting answers about Warp Speed will undermine the Biden government’s plan to dramatically increase the country’s vaccine distribution effort over the next three months.
Gough backed down on the characterization that the DoD did not cooperate with Warp Speed, noting that the department conducted 64 interviews or briefings with the Biden transition team where Covid-19 was on the agenda or was an important point of discussion and completed 59 Covid- requests for related information.
Overall, Gough said the department had sent the Biden team 277 responses to requests for information.
But across the department, even when the transition team met with DoD officials, both civilian and military, they used to be silent, as if they were given explicit guidance on what they could and could not talk about. These suspicions were confirmed when the first transition officer ran into a “senior” military officer a week after the meeting, and the officer apologized for his short responses.
“We were alone and he said to me, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything more, but I received very strict instructions,'” said the transition officer.
In another interview with a combatant commander, Biden’s team asked detailed questions about urgent national security issues and received “very simple answers”.
Part of this reticence may have been due to the fact that in almost all transition meetings, “escorts” from the Department of Defense General Council office were present and often cut off civilian Pentagon officers, citing “pre-decisive operational issues” .
At a recent meeting, Brig retired. General Anthony Tata, who served as acting Pentagon chief policy officer until last week, often looked at the general council representative as if asking for permission to discuss a particular topic.
In the meantime, all requests for information that Biden’s team filed had to be analyzed by the General Counsel’s office, and many were eliminated from all useful information. Many requests were never answered and those who came back were totally “sanitized”.
Biden’s team had particularly poor visibility of special operations and the low-intensity conflict portfolio. Although Trump’s political appointees in that position were allowed to meet with the transition, many of the career officers were kept “at a distance,” said a defense official, calling the effort unprecedented.
“We were not marginalized that way,” said the person.
The first transition officer agreed with these concerns, saying that the team met with “a chief of staff who looked very young and looked quite new in his portfolio”. The person remembers asking detailed questions about the changes the Trump administration made in the approval process of a mission – under former President Barack Obama, most missions had to be approved by the White House – but he was unable to get answers. clear.
The team is particularly concerned that they do not have sufficient visibility about what is happening in Africa, whether it be secret missions for special operations across the continent or Trump. withdrawal from Somalia.
Biden’s team was also frustrated by the lack of cooperation around the next budget request, a concern that Biden himself cited in December and which a second transition official called “laughable”. In particular, the Biden team struggled to get details about the Trump administration’s efforts to divert resources from military construction projects to the border wall and funding for the Covid-19 response.
Mike McCord, leader of the Pentagon’s transition to budget issues, finally managed to meet with representatives of the armed forces to discuss the budget request last week, but the delay until a few days before the inauguration caused heartburn.
The Pentagon also rejected the transition’s efforts to obtain information about 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 important details about how confidential information about the jet would be protected and what concerns were raised by Israel, which also operates its own F-35s and initially opposed the deal.
Some Trump defense officials called the Biden team’s allegations of obstructionism “exaggerated”, blaming their frustrations for the delay in certifying the election, downsizing due to Covid-19 restrictions and more than normal orders information and interviews from the transition team.
“In fact, I think the incoming staff is overwhelming the department (political and professional) with requests,” said a second defense official.
On Friday, the transition team met with more than 400 Defense Department political appointees and more than 180 career officials, said a third defense officer, noting that the department has not “denied the [agency review] team anybody they asked for. “
A fourth defense official who is leaving with the Trump team and participated in part of the transition planning said he “saw no effort to hide anything” from Biden’s team.
But he said he believed that some of the nominees for senior positions in the government’s last few months did not have the institution’s best interests in mind and were obsessed with political vendetta.
Trump, he said, “hired all the wrong people. And he paid a price for it. There was not much we could do. “
And the acrimony went both ways. At the last minute, Biden’s team denied Miller office space and resources for his transition out of office, a courtesy normally provided to the leaving team. POLITICO confirmed the change, which was first reported by Bloomberg.
The transition chose not to extend that specific “privilege” to Miller, given his role as an actor and the reduced capacity in the Pentagon due to the pandemic, said another transition officer, noting that retired general Lloyd Austin, appointed as secretary of defense, also chose to do all of their home transition planning for these reasons.