Just after midnight Wednesday (Dec. 23), the Defense Department issued a statement calling the Biden team’s allegations “patently false” in response to his team’s complaints about a poor transition with the Defense Department.
The Washington Times reported that senior Pentagon officials said bluntly in the statement that both teams had agreed to a leave of absence, so they would resume formal meetings with the Biden transition team in early January. The Biden team denied agreeing to a leave of absence.
On Friday, officials were shocked by media reports that Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller had ordered the Pentagon to suspend “transition handover” cooperation with the Biden team.
The Defense Department later explained that some 20 meetings on Friday had indeed been rescheduled because both sides had agreed to take a Christmas break, and insisted that the Defense Department had been cooperating with the transition.
But the Biden team took the opposite view, with Yohannes Abraham, executive director of its transition team, telling the press, “Let me make this clear: We did not agree (with the Trump team) on a furlough.”
Abraham also told Reuters by phone that some Defense Department officials have now stopped working with them and “our concern is that there will be a sudden break in what is already limited cooperation.”
On Tuesday Biden himself said that the Defense Department was not even briefing them on key issues, including the massive hacking of the federal government. Biden also said his team was not receiving cooperation from the Defense Department and that the extent to which its work was “compromised is unclear.”
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