President Trump puts politics above national security
EVA VITANOVEC: President Trump’s continued denial of President-elect Biden’s victory in the election this month has halted the presidential transition process and has kept Biden’s team out of the loop on many key issues facing America, including national security. The unusually chaotic transition between administrations poses a threat to both the health security of Americans as vaccines for COVID-19 are looking like a reality in 2021, as well as endangering the security of the country as a whole by excluding Biden and his team from essential up-to-date information about the U.S, it’s allies and its enemies.
Excluded from the Trump administration’s daily national security briefings, an abnormal occurrence during the months of a transition from one administration to the next, Biden has taken steps to be sure that he is well prepared and informed on issues of national security without the aid of the current administration. In a virtual meeting on Tuesday, Biden gathered elite members of the national security community to brief him on national intelligence issues. These experts, many of whom served under president Obama and are expected to be named again to serve under the Biden administration, gathered intelligence from news reports, informal contacts, and their collective experience in the area. Biden is also relying on the console of Vice President-elect Harris who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is important to note that although these experts are good at what they do, Biden is still not privy to the kind of classified information a man who will be running the free world in three months should know – Trump is injudiciously keeping this information under lock and key.
In keeping with the laws that govern a presidential transition, until the head of the General Services Administration ascertains the winner of the election, neither health nor national security officials within the Trump Administration can provide classified intelligence to the Biden team. Although Biden has been working around this setback, this blocking of current, classified information has the potential to cause serious harm. So much so that a bipartisan group of former national security officials wrote a letter to the head of the GSA to recognize President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris as the winners of the election because further postponement of the transition “poses a further risk to our national security.” As further evidence, the authors look to recent history, citing the finding of the 2002 9/11 Commission.
Although the circumstances around this election are not the same as they were in 2000, fingers are pointing to how a delay in presidential transition can have unexpected – or expected – dire consequences regarding national security. According to U.S. News and World Report, “The bipartisan 9/11 Commission in 2002 identified the delayed presidential transition at the beginning of the previous year as one of the causes behind what amounted to the most consequential terrorist attack this century.” They found that just a month's delay in presidential transition due to the Florida recount snowballed into a six-month delay of fully staffing the national security branch. A shortcoming that, as the commission found, was responsible for an insufficiently informed and quick response to the most egregious attack on American soil. Relating this information to today, in a virtual forum hosted by the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chetoff said that the staffing issue spread even to the Department of Justice, and he condemned the current inadequate transition, saying that it “is a security risk not to have the process go right away, because there are so many threats out there.”
Specifically, in an interview with NPR, Congressman Roger Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat who represents the 8th District of Illinois and serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said that even though Biden has excellent non-White House personnel briefing him currently, he is just not getting essential intelligenceon “current covert operations or developing threats,” and it will take “that much more time for them to understand the threat posture that they're going to encounter.” He went on to say that “we're basically inviting our adversaries to target us during this transition period. And this chaos and confusion that the president is creating really hurts our ability to protect ourselves.”
Surprisingly, one voice was absent from the letter sent to the head of the GSA from top national security officials, a bipartisan coalition also praised by Congressman Krishnamoorthi in his interview. This was Susan Rice, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under Obama and then as United States National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017, and who many think will be tapped for the role of Secretary of State by Biden. Instead, Rice told her story about navigating multiple presidential transitions in an op-ed in the New York Times, where she condemns Trump as “determined to take a final wrecking ball to our democracy and national security on his inevitable way out the door.” Although Biden may be, as she calls, “the most experienced President-elect ever to take office,” Trump’s refusal to commence a smooth transition could cost us American lives. “Without access to critical threat information,” she states, “no incoming team can counter what it can’t see coming.”
This unfortunate consequence is the result of Trump's withholding of a concession call to congratulate Biden. The delay is due to baseless claims of election fraud by Trump, even when the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called this election “the most secure in American history” – a comment that resulted in his recent firing. The more time Trump spends pursuing these fraudulent claims, the more time is wasted preparing the incoming Biden Administration for the coming challenges, in terms of both COVID and national security, in 2021 and beyond. It is clear that, even amid global pandemic, President Trump is ignorant of the fact that a seamless transition is essential for the safety of American lives both at home and abroad.
Eva Vitanovec is a sophomore in the College from Chicago, IL. Studying Government, she enjoys reporting on exciting happenings in the political world for On the Record and staying involved with GU Politics.