President Fucktard Trump has an incurable mental illness problem and he's a stupid fucking asshole.

Wall Street Journal

POLITICS

ELECTION 2020

Biden Names Senior White House Staff as Transition Standoff Continues

Some Pentagon officials said they would be willing to meet off site with members of Biden team should standoff extend into December.

By Sabrina Siddiqui and Eliza Collins

November 17, 2020

WASHINGTON—President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday named several White House staff members amid a continued standoff with the Trump administration over cooperating with his transition effort.

President Trump hasn’t conceded he lost the election, and parts of the government including the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are withholding resources and briefings from the president-elect’s team. In lieu of official classified briefings, Mr. Biden met Tuesday in Wilmington, Del., with outside diplomatic and intelligence experts.

“You know that I’ve been unable to get the briefings that ordinarily would have come by now…And, to state the obvious, there’s no presidential responsibility more important than protecting the American people,” Mr. Biden said at Tuesday’s meeting.

The transition delays have prompted some U.S. national-security officials to consider unofficially meeting at off-site locations with members of Mr. Biden’s team.

Pentagon officials said Tuesday they hadn’t formally begun the transition process, but have started providing unclassified briefing material, as they are allowed to do.

Some officials at the Pentagon said they would be willing to meet off site with members of the Biden team should the standoff extend into December. The officials said that waiting past mid-December and into the holiday season wouldn’t give the incoming team enough time to learn about jobs that could affect the safety of deployed U.S. service members.

“January is too late,” one defense official said.

In that scenario, officials still couldn’t share classified information with the transition team. And the transition process would be inconsistent, the officials warned, as it would be determined by the willingness of individual current officials to share information with his or her successor.

Mr. Biden hasn’t named his top national-security aides, but did name several other White House advisers Tuesday. Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, will serve as his deputy chief of staff. Mike Donilon, a chief strategist on the campaign, will be a senior adviser to the president. Steve Ricchetti, Mr. Biden’s campaign chairman, will join the West Wing as a counselor to the president.

The announcement also formally confirmed that Rep. Cedric Richmond, a national co-chair of Mr. Biden’s campaign, will leave Congress to serve as a senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Mr. Richmond, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is expected to be one of the highest-ranking Black officials in Mr. Biden’s White House.

Mr. Biden also named Dana Remus as counsel to the president. Ms. Remus served as a top lawyer in Mr. Biden’s campaign and was deputy White House counsel during the Obama administration. Julie Rodriguez, one of Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign managers, will head the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Ms. Rodriguez was previously a top aide to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign.

Annie Tomasini, the traveling chief of staff during Mr. Biden’s campaign, will be director of Oval Office Operations.

Mr. Biden’s team also named some of Jill Biden’s senior staff members. Julissa Reynoso Pantaleon, a former U.S. ambassador to Uruguay, will be the incoming first lady’s chief of staff. Anthony Bernal, who was Mrs. Biden’s chief of staff during the campaign, was named as a senior adviser.

Ms. O’Malley Dillon, a top former Obama campaign aide, took over Mr. Biden’s campaign in March as the election was upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Ricchetti was in the lobbying business for a decade. His clients included pharmaceutical companies, the American Hospital Association and AT&T Inc.

Before joining the vice president’s office as Mr. Biden’s chief of staff during President Obama’s second term, Mr. Ricchetti sold his stake in the lobbying firm he had co-founded with his brother in 2001, according to a spokesman for Mr. Ricchetti. Jeff Ricchetti remains a lobbyist and has picked up new clients, mostly drugmakers, this year. He hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

Last week, Mr. Biden appointed longtime adviser Ron Klain as his chief of staff. Mr. Biden has been meeting with transition advisers daily and is expected to make other senior staff announcements in the coming weeks, as well as nominations to his cabinet. He hasn’t put together a communications team or name national-security aides.

As Mr. Biden adds to his staff, the General Services Administration hasn’t issued a typically routine technical designation that would allow the president-elect and his team to access key resources. Mr. Trump has continued to insist publicly that he won the race and has mounted legal challenges to the election’s outcome, several of which have since been withdrawn or dismissed. No evidence of widespread voter fraud has emerged.

Mr. Biden warned on Monday that delays to his presidential transition could hinder the federal government response to the coronavirus pandemic. “More people may die if we don’t coordinate,” he said at a press conference in Wilmington, Del.

Members of Mr. Biden’s coronavirus task force held a call with reporters Tuesday reiterating the president-elect’s concern about lack of information related to all aspects of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response, including vaccine distribution plans. Mr. Biden’s team has been unable to communicate with career health officials and doesn’t have any access to government data that isn’t publicly available.

“We’ve already lost nearly 250,000 lives to this pandemic, we owe it to the public to work together as closely as possible, as efficiently as possible to develop the best possible plan,” said Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former surgeon general.

“Comments like those and the statements from the former Vice President yesterday are irresponsible and not based on fact,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. “At the direction of the President, we have been working non-stop for months with states, territories, tribes, local public health programs and their partners on distribution plans.”

Without the GSA ascertainment, Mr. Biden has also been unable to receive the same intelligence briefings as the president, according to a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the Democratic nominee, Mr. Biden was given intelligence briefings, but they were not as detailed as the president’s.

The transition team didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about whether Mr. Biden still receives the campaign-level briefings, but on Monday Mr. Biden said he was relying on Ms. Harris’s post in the Senate for intelligence briefings. Ms. Harris attended a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting Tuesday.

“The good news here is my colleague is still on the Intelligence Committee, so she gets the intelligence briefings I don’t any more,” Mr. Biden said. “I am hopeful that the president will be mildly more enlightened before we get to January 20.”

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Tuesday reiterated a statement last week in which agency officials said that the federal Presidential Transition Act requires a GSA designation before supporting a potential presidential transition.

“ODNI would not have contact with any transition team until notified by the GSA administrator,” the ODNI statement said.

Officials at the State and Treasury departments declined to comment on their briefing plans or practices.

A GSA spokesperson said the ascertainment isn’t required for Mr. Biden to receive classified briefings, stating that the agency “does not control access to classified information.”

The GSA ascertainment delay is unusual and has only happened once in recent elections, during the tight race in 2000.

During that time, the Bush campaign had no government resources for a transition and privately funded an effort out of office space in McLean, Va. The election was ultimately ascertained after the Supreme Court suspended the recount effort in Florida and George W. Bush became the president-elect. Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s press secretary who worked on his transition, said President Clinton authorized Mr. Bush to receive the same level intelligence briefing as the president before the election occurred and they continued through the recount.

“He’s the president-elect and he should be getting the same CIA briefing that other president-elects traditionally get, it’s just good government,” Mr. Fleischer said of Mr. Biden.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican, chaired the 9/11 commission, which examined the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and made recommendations to avoid future attacks. During a press briefing Monday, Mr. Kean said broad bipartisan agreement held at the time that the transition period was one of the most vulnerable time for the U.S. government and briefings and vetting were critical to protect the country.

“What we’re asking today is that we move on, that we get together, that we put the national-security people in place, that they are given the briefing they’re entitled to, that the new president is given the security briefings he’s entitled to,” Mr. Kean said.

In addition to the briefings, Mr. Biden’s transition team is limited in the vetting they can do for future cabinet and national-security officials. They are unable to perform FBI background checks for security clearances, and a Biden transition official said that could delay staffing once the Biden administration takes over.

The Biden transition still has access to pre-election services, including government background checks for officials to work on the transition, and is conducting its own vetting for future staff and nominees.

—Nancy A. Youssef, Warren P. Strobel and Julie Bykowicz contributed to this article.

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Appeared in the November 18, 2020, print edition as 'Biden Names Senior White House Staff.'