When Donald Trump takes the presidential oath of office on Friday, he will assume control of the same intelligence agencies he has been feuding with for several weeks. For national security, the transition is shaping up to be a rocky one.
Unlike President Barack Obama, who came to office with a relatively experienced national security team and allowed several of George W. Bush’s key personnel to stay on until his own choices were confirmed, Trump’s administration has reportedly demanded that many of Obama’s choices, including ambassadors, leave immediately. The Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security have all named interim successors who will run their agencies until Trump’s appointments are confirmed. They are Robert Work, Michael P. Dempsey, and Chip Fulghum, respectively.
The CIA says it has a similar arrangement in place for a person to run the agency should Trump’s nominee, Rep. Mike Pompeo not be confirmed by Friday, but it declined to say who. “The Agency obviously has contingency plans,” wrote Dean Boyd, a CIA spokesperson, in an email late Wednesday. “That’s all we can offer you.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the director of the CIA, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) is sworn in at his confirmation hearing before the Senate (Select) Intelligence Committee on Jan.12, 2017 in Washington.
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Politico this week also reported on unfilled positions and a murky hiring process at State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council, which saw Monica Crowley withdraw from a senior appointment after reports that portions of a book she had authored were plagiarized.
According to one senior administration official, the transition is shaping up to be especially difficult at Department of Homeland Security. It appears likely that Trump will dismiss most or all of sixteen senior positions that require Senate confirmation. These include the heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The transition has not yet named anyone to replace them.
“It is troublesome in the extreme that there is no designated successor for senior staff across DHS,” said the official, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak about the process. “If there were, current staff have been disallowed from communicating with them.”
The assistant secretaries’ portfolios will pass to unconfirmed advisers, but that could still be problematic.
“None of them [the advisers] have security clearances,” said the official. “They’ll have to lean very heavily on career civil servants to run the department.”
Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, spoke Thursday morning about these unconfirmed advisers at a press conference held at the transition office. He called them “beachhead team members,” and said the Trump administration would be sending more than 500 of them into federal agencies.
More than 50 Obama-appointed officials, including Robert Work at Defense and Adam Szubin at Treasury, would remain in place, Spicer said. That leaves more than 600 unfilled senior positions.
On Wednesday, Gordon Trowbridge, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary under Obama, said that the Department of Defense had nothing to announce on the question of whether assistant secretaries would be kept on until their successors were confirmed. Trowbridge was not answering his phone on Thursday afternoon; a colleague in the Pentagon’s press office said that it was the deputy press secretary’s last day of work.
Trowbridge, an appointee, had been asked to leave the building by the end of the day.
Top photo: A seat is reserved with a sign at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Trump if you “reorganize” those that rule in secret, careful King of Kings they play rough. More likely they will just turn their back on their own intel and let a major attack occur on your watch. No big conspiracy theory just them not doing their job, just like 911. If this happens to save you own political ass you must use this crisis, do not waste the lives they sacrificed for their own purpose. Do a very effective and open bipartisan investigation, offer big reward and immunity for any that revile the crime. Use the crisis as a big stick to beat the crap and truth out of them. On the upside many do not trust of like secret government, but this would be FOR REAL if you take this path. If sedition can be stopped and Constitutional law restored without much blood you will be remembered a good if not a great president.
“WHEN DONALD TRUMP takes the presidential oath of office on Friday, he will assume control of the .. intelligence agencies”
That would be a first for a president to control these out-of-control monsters, but will he be allowed to?
Usually, it is the other way around. The president, in recent memory, is serving those assassins, or, in best case scenario, finding some kind of compromise.
I can’t wait to hear the sound of the door whacking those Democrat traitors in the face. The party is over-and so is their run at turning the US into a gulag, or a bolshevik body pile.
The next sound I wait for is the sound of all the weeping and gnashing of teeth as their operatives are picked off one by one and soundly harassed with all the new surveillance toys they turned on Americans who still remember that we are a democracy, despite the Israelobuck$ pouring in to our leaky system.
Holes can be patched- but traitors are irreparable.
And isn’t it funny how-suddenly- Democrats remember the prison’s need fixing, and women’s rights don’t just begin and end at who has a vag1na?
Hahahahaha. Your Queen took a king sized shit all over the party, and corrupted every fiber of our laws meaning an intent.
Little late, but thanks for playin’!
One would have to cut deep to purge the cancer at the highest levels of the spook gangs.
Will Trump do it? Probably not. But just maybe yes.
What is certain is that Clinton would not.
Where’s Ashton Carter going, then? Back to Raytheon? Off to commune with the ghost of Edward “Strangelove” Teller? Here’s why getting rid of the current national security establishment is such a good idea:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/09/the-military-industrial-complex-gets-its-man/
See also his revolving-door history via google [pogo ashton carter]
“Mardi Gras for Defense Contractors,” “Takes Revolving Door to New Level”
These clowns can’t be shown the door soon enough.
Remember. There’s no law that says you must always say “President Trump”. It’s not illegal to say fuck CNN live on CNN air. Finally, a thought from the late great Rod Serling. In 1968, he was offered a college lecture gig and a nice fee IF he first signed a loyalty oath. Being the smart person that he was, he refused to sign the oath, waived the fee (on a principle) and gave the talk for free.
Fast forward to 2017. Are new members of Congress still being made to sign a loyalty oath to Israel when they’re sworn in?
Purge them! We have seen what they have wrought. Far better to depend on career civil servants than 0Bama’s political appointees in the short term.
And who can forget how the turned the DHS into a racist American Stasi? Or how they put individuals who are “concerned with individual liberty and the constitution” on watchlists??
Whapp! Big door on bigger asses.
This is what happens when you elect a man who ran for purely egotistical reasons.
Who doesn’t want the job, by all obvious measures.
Who wants to erase the last eight years, which, let’s face it were not post GWB’s 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Housing Crises followed by the Wall Street Debacle. (In other words, average non-partisan or non-participating Americans aren’t holding their breaths.)
Agent Orange didn’t take the whole thing seriously enough and since most of these people come from the private sector, where they are unaccountable to few if any people, too many dragged their feet on answering questions and submitting necessary documents to allow the vetting process to proceed apace.
Perhaps they think if they waited it out, somebody would shuffle them all in.
Not an auspicious beginning.
“Agent Orange”
Best one yet Joshua 88…
How about calling him “the oranguturd”? One can only hope that the conflicts between this fresh stinking pile of shit and the old fecal matter he and his minions are replacing leaves the United Snakes weaker in its dealings with the rest of the world.
On this I actually see nothing but good coming out of it. The US security apparatus, including intelligence agencies, were pumped up, inflated, expanded, grown, multiplied, following 9/11 far beyond anything that can be rationally justified as essential to US security and defense. When the USSR collapsed in 1990 taking with it the entire raison d’etre of 90% of US military forces, panic swept through neocon circles (including strongly right-wing Israeli-Americans like Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Abrams, given Israel’s dependence on US military and diplomatic protection) once calls for a peace dividend demanded there be a dismantling of a large proportion of US military forces stationed around the world. As the Pentagon’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance made clear upon its leak to the NYTimes, the Bush’s and Cheney’s of the day weren’t going to go out to pasture quietly. A new rationale, a new justification had to be found that politicians could tell taxpayers why defense spending would remain at Cold War levels despite no threat remaining that could rationally justify it. So irrational fears of WMDs Islamic fascism, and creeping sheria replaced nuclear-tipped ICBMs , and 9/11 saved the US arms industry from suffering what it should have undergone many decades ago.
Just like the regular managers then.
Mr Greenwald you’ve gone off the rails with your obsession about the Deep State. Take a look around at what is happening in plain site. There is hardly a city without hundreds and thousand and even tens of thousands of people in the streets – they aren’t there about DS concerns. Of course it’s a problem, but at this point the current, sane, connected DS is looking reasonable. Stop diddling around with individuals. Wiki is dead. This problem is MUCH bigger (Read: the anguish toward pockets if pending race war.) Except of course the inept FBI chasing its tail…but this can be solved. We are facing an illegitimate presidency and a grossly ignorant GOP congress unable to contain him. Reach for Rubio, Collins even McCain Even Graham – any one with a semblance of rational integrity.
Trump and Tillerson and Chaney (may he survive two more heart transplants) are the biggest risk to our planet.
Please forward to Greenwald?
K
PS Shame on you for crucifying Snowden.
good.
we dont need no bloated bureaucrazy.
Who benefitted from the murder of Seth Rich?
Alex Jones
Skeleton crew? He’s got whole CLOSETS full of skeletons for his cabinet!
Clever.
Well, this is one way to attempt to destroy the government altogether. After all, that has been the goal of the Republicans for a long time now. All but those parts, anyway, that further their agenda of turning the US into a corporate theocracy.
I consider this a good thing, at least somewhat. The last administrations got us into Iraq and Libya and Syria (had it not been for Congress, we’d be in worse) . The new guys are not the best (and certainly not VIPS), but they would not get us into WWIII, and would be on the right side in Syria.
If I could convince myself Trump and the spy state were truly at odds, it would warm the cockles of my heart. “In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, it must be fought by a different kind of evil…”
But I get the feeling this is going to be one of the shortest feuds ever.
Trump seems like the type to hold a grudge and retaliate however he can.
He might actually be able to fulfill JFK’s dream to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind. If I were Trump, I’d avoid convertibles and small planes.
Then again, what Trump thinks and more importantly what he’ll do often wind up being in a quantum superposition. We’ll have to see what actually shakes out when we open the box.
Wnt
The sum of my fears also.
We need to mollify the shrill lumbering and hysterical (D) and lend marginal legitimacy to their pathetically transparent imaginary Russian battlefield to reward and encourage newly minted (CIA approved) reporters early in their careers. PropOrNot?
GERMAN JOURNALIST TELLS THE TRUTH http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-09/german-journalist-blows-whistle-how-cia-controls-media
GERMAN JOURNALIST KEEPS ON TELLING THE TRUTH http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-28/top-german-journalist-admits-mainstream-media-completely-fake-we-all-lie-cia
It reminds us of the incurious Dubya C plus Augustus commencement. Good times!