Edited by: TJVNews.com
It would appear that even more enigmatic happenings are going on in our nation’s capital than we even thought possible. On Friday, Axios reported that acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller ordered the Pentagon to cancel meetings with the Biden transition team. It was revealed that a Pentagon official said that staff involved in the transition felt “overwhelmed.”
A Business Insider report indicated that a defense official said that the Pentagon and the Biden transition team agreed to a break and that the canceled transition meetings are being rescheduled for after the holidays.
The report, however, also indicated that the Biden transition team, however, said it did not agree to any break, adding that they have encountered some “resistance” in the Pentagon and were “concerned” by the “abrupt halt” to transition meetings.
Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said that the Department of Defense “will continue with the transition and rescheduled meetings” after a “mutually-agreed upon holiday pause.” He stressed that the Pentagon will fulfill its departmental transition obligations because “this is what our nation expects.”
“The DoD will deliver AS IT ALWAYS HAS,” he said.
CNN reported that Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the Biden transition, told reporters that “There was no mutually agreed upon holiday break. In fact, we think it’s important that briefings and other engagements continue during this period, as there’s no time to spare.”
A Department of Defense spokesperson said that the Pentagon was “working to reschedule approximately 20 interviews with 40 officials until after January 1,” according to the CNN report.
The Biden team learned of the delay on Thursday, Abraham said in a briefing call with reporters, where he urged Pentagon officials to resume the meetings and information-sharing critical to national security and continuity of government, as was reported by CNN.
“In terms of when meetings will resume, meetings and requests for information, which are substantively interchangeable, it’s our hope and expectation that that will happen immediately,” Abraham said.
“We had fewer than two dozen remaining meetings on the schedule today and next week,” a Pentagon official told Axios, explaining that the Department of Defense is “taking a knee” for a couple of weeks rather than having those meetings but is “still committed to a productive transition.”
Shortly after the election, the Pentagon experienced a major upheaval as the secretary of defense and his chief of staff, as well as the top policy and intelligence officials, departed, leaving vacant posts for the Trump administration to fill with loyalists.
Talking to Insider about the newcomers, a former Pentagon official said late last month that “the individuals being installed do not have the level of experience their predecessors did to assist with the transition.”
The former official said that the transition process would potentially be “hampered because you will have new people that don’t have that experience.”
