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Trump’s team that blocked the peaceful transfer of power is back
Networks broadcast Jan 6 insurrection — the obstruction of the transition happened elsewhere
While television cameras tracked rioters storming the Capitol, in private, Trump-appointed officials were busy blocking the incoming White House. “The administration was incredibly obstructionist, as much or more so than it was ever reported in the media,” said one person involved in the Biden-Harris presidential transition.
What most people remember about Jan 6 are the brutal images and sounds from the Capitol. The signs that read “Stop the Steal”. The mass of people overwhelming Capitol Hill police. The mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
For that reason, much of the insurrection to disrupt the transfer of power remains in what everyone observed on television and social media.
Other aspects of this organized resistance happened without cameras around. The coordinated plan to block the peaceful transition for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was, nevertheless, just as real. Four years later, many of the same people who executed the plan to prevent the Biden-Harris transition from proceeding are now readying to return to government.
That fall of 2020, Trump officials — like John Ratcliffe, Russ Vought, and Kash Patel — too often refused to help the incoming administration, breaking a longstanding tradition of cooperation to insure the seamless hand-off of power as well as the safety and security of the country.
Their refusals happened off-camera, but when I interviewed people for a recent book who were in the rooms where the transition happened, they told me exactly what occurred.
Much of the work of the incoming transition team focused on the massive federal budget. The new President’s first budget proposal is due to Congress within weeks of taking office, meaning the preparation of the budget starts during the transition period. Since the 1950s, this has been aided by the career staff at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as honorable political appointees.
In 2020, Russell (Russ) Vought, the director of the OMB at the time, had a different plan.
“Russ Vought had figured out how valuable OMB staff were, and that he could withhold this resource without real recourse,” said one person I talked to on the Biden-Harris transition team.
That person clarified “it’s not like no transitioning happened…but a lot of the serious work that we would have been doing like working together, working on the budget, working together on other things, we just couldn’t. We couldn’t work together in the traditional way.”
“It was just bananas,” the person said.
That was because “[Vought] knew how helpful OMB could be” and he realized “he could use two or three months…to effectively delay us.” This included refusing to provide budget information to the transition team and keeping the career staff busy sending meaningless budget requests to Congress. As a result, President Biden’s first budget proposal to Congress was severely delayed.
In other parts of government, sharing budget information wasn’t much better. Another person explained to me that “there were lawyers and political minders in every meeting. They were definitely preventing any specifics on the budget, which is very harmful.”
Careful budgeting planning couldn’t happen because “they finally shared some specific budget data the day before President Biden took office.” This person didn’t believe it was agency appointees who wanted to drag their feet. Instead “there was definite intervention from the White House that stifled the conversation and what what would be shared and what could be learned,” concluded that person.
Knowing Vought’s prominent role during the 2020 transition, shortly after the 2024 election, President-elect Trump nominated Russ Vought to return to his old job as the director of the OMB.
The budget wasn’t the only area where the outgoing Trump administration failed to cooperate, and it wasn’t even the most critical. In the intelligence arena — where even a day of slippage between the two teams could be disastrous — cooperation was spotty at best.
In some areas, it was business as usual, such as for the transition at the Central Intelligence Agency. “My very strong impression is that the level of cooperation with CIA was very good,” concluded one person on the Biden-Harris team. As was tradition, the CIA prepared briefing books and also made staff available for discussing important intelligence issues. That was, in part, because of the message sent by senior leadership in the agency. “CIA was very good because [CIA Director] Gina Haspel,” concluded one person on the Biden-Harris team.
While the CIA was cooperating closely, other areas of intelligence weren’t. “With the director of National Intelligence [John Ratcliffe] it was not as great,” said one person on the team. At the time, Ratcliffe was a former member of Congress from Texas and had just been named the Director of National Intelligence by President Trump earlier in 2020.
“[Ratcliffe] was making it difficult,” said the the person on the Biden-Harris transition, and, though that person indicated that “cooperation did occur,” they had the impression that “it was more grudging.”
This November, President-elect Trump nominated Ratcliffe to become the next director of the CIA.
The transition at the Pentagon is nearly as important as in the area of intelligence. In 2020, days after the Election, Kash Patel had just been installed in the Defense Secretary’s office, and he was in charge of coordinating with the Biden-Harris transition team. It also was Patel who news reports at the time credited with blocking cooperation with the Biden-Harris transition.
The people I talked to involved in the Defense Department transition explained exactly how this happened. “It was what they had been ordered or permitted to do by the administration…They impeded the process,” said one person.
At large meetings between the outgoing administration and the Biden-Harris team, the person told me: “they had a political minder in every single meeting, and that person would interrupt and stop the government employees from saying things.”
The consequence of this was “those meetings ended up being less forthright than they should have been.” And the actual information shared, often was out of date. “They would give you a briefing that was two months old and not the newest version,” the Biden-Harris transition official said.
Ultimately, this harmed President Biden’s ability to implement defense policy, a great irony, since the person I talked to said the Biden policy was largely consistent with Trump’s. The obstruction “definitely limited what the first year Biden team could do in terms of adjusting the strategy or adjusting the budget to reflect what they saw as the key priorities which actually was in line with Trump’s strategy.”
On November 30, President-elect Trump nominated Kash Patel to become the next director of the FBI.
With Patel, Ratcliffe, and Vought likely to be confirmed by the Senate in the next few weeks, Trump’s team is back. Instead of searching for a brand new set of appointees, the ones who were there in the final days of the last administration have been promoted. Rather than a demerit, participating in the obstruction seems to have been an positive indicia seen favorably by the Trump transition team.
The public, though, could not see this behind-the-scenes foot-dragging and uncooperativeness. The result is all attention is on the Capitol today, when the real readying the country for the next four years is happening elsewhere. That attention is wise, but may miss the lessons that haven’t been learned about the deeper threats to democracy that remain hidden from the public.
