Pentagon HALTS Biden transition briefings – [UPDATED]

by The Right Scoop

The acting replacement for former SecDef Mark Esper has just halted defense briefings with Team Biden:

AXIOS – Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Biden, shocking officials across the Defense Department, senior administration officials tell Axios.

Meetings between President Trump’s team and the Biden team are going on throughout the government, after a delayed start as the administration dragged its feet on officially recognizing Biden as president-elect.

Then on Thursday night, Miller — who was appointed Nov. 9, when Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper right after the election — ordered officials throughout the building to cancel scheduled transition meetings.

The Pentagon official said that officials were just too overwhelmed with the number of meetings:

A senior Defense Department official sought to downplay the move, calling it “a simple delay of the last few scheduled meetings until after the new year.”

“We had fewer than two dozen remaining meetings on the schedule today and next week,” the official said, adding that “the DoD staff working the meetings were overwhelmed by the number of meetings.”

“These same senior leaders needed to do their day jobs and were being consumed by transition activities. … With the holidays we are taking a knee for two weeks. We are still committed to a productive transition.”

So it sounds like it’s just a delay so that people can get their jobs done and start back with briefings at the beginning of the year. It sounds like nothing really to see here, but I’m sure the media will make hay out of the Trump administration refusing to brief Biden’s transition team or something.

 
UPDATE: Former DNI Richard Grenell says this report isn’t true, that there have already been more pentagon briefings than there were in 2016. He calls this story by Axios ‘clickbait’:


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