According to a new report, President-elect Joe Biden has turned to individuals who once served in the outgoing Trump administration to guide national security threats.
The Biden-Kamala Harris team faces unprecedented obstacles in obtaining necessary transition information from a lame-duck President who continues to bellyache, moan and refuse to accept his Electoral College blowout defeat.
Biden received a record 80 million-plus votes, outdistancing Trump by more than six million. Additionally, Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College advantage will not be subverted despite the baseless and allegedly racist attacks criticizing the legitimacy of the vote.
“The incoming national security team deserves to have the full support of a transition to ensure the seamless transfer of power without incurring any unnecessary risk to our nation’s security,” Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official who briefed the transition team, told ABC News. “I am supporting the incoming transition team because it is the right thing to do.”
Mulroy described his participation in the transition process as a patriotic duty – not a political calculation, ABC News reported.
As the only obstacle between President-elect Joe Biden and the formal start of the presidential transition, CNN reported that General Services Administrator Emily Murphy is struggling with the weight of the presidential election being dropped on her shoulders, feeling like she’s been put in a no-win situation, according to people who have spoken to her recently.
As one of the government officials charged with signing off on the election result, Murphy’s job has been thrown into the middle of a political firestorm because of Trump’s refusal to concede.
Daniel I. Weiner, the deputy director of Election Reform Program at Brennan Center for Justice in Northwest, explained on the center’s website that “a peaceful transfer of power — particularly from one political party to another — is, in my mind, the ultimate expression of the rule of law and of a society governed by the law, not by individual rulers.”
“Say other things that you want about him but it was George Washington’s great contribution to the American political tradition when he voluntarily gave up the presidency,” Weiner remarked.
“It established an unbroken tradition of presidents yielding power, including to their bitter political opponents.
“Even on the cusp of the Civil War, for example, James Buchanan never suggested that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t entitled to become president after he won the election.”
Weiner continued:
“That’s what’s so unprecedented with the current transition process. There is no legal path for Donald Trump to remain President. None. The spectacle of an incumbent president behaving this way is something we haven’t seen before and is deeply corrosive to our democracy.”
The Presidential Transition Act, initially passed in 1963, sets forth specific processes and requirements that govern both before and — if a new president is coming to power — after the election.
The General Services Administration manages the overall process, Weiner further added.
The most important provision is the one that appears to leave it to the GSA administrator to “ascertain” whether a new president and vice president have been elected, which is the key to unlocking resources and access to federal agencies, including the all-important national security briefings.
“Since the administrator was appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the incumbent president, there is an obvious conflict of interest,” he said. “Again, though, until now, no GSA administrator has ever tried to delay a transition in the wake of an election whose result was clear.”