While the Trump transition team has agreed to work with the Biden White House in the transfer of power, it wants nothing to do with the slimy General Services Administration (GSA) — and for good reason.
Susie Wiles, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming chief of staff, confirmed this week that the transition team had signed a memorandum of understanding with the current regime, Politico reported. The standard agreement forges the way for the incoming administration to coordinate with the federal agencies it will be leading.
Politico and other corporate media outlets have pumped up the drama meter, raising alarms about team Trump’s “unprecedented delay” in signing the agreement.
Wiles, co-manager of Trump’s successful presidential campaign, has signaled that the transition team will not sign a similar agreement with GSA, eschewing taxpayer funds and instead privately covering the cost of facilities and using its own cybersecurity operations.
Trump’s reluctance to work with the federal government’s procurement and real estate leviathan is understandable. The GSA and the FBI have a history of duplicitous conduct related to the 45th — and soon-to-be-47th — president.
Enemy of the Deep State
In their 2020 report, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., exposed how the GSA “secretly handed over the first Trump team’s privileged and confidential information to the FBI” (Federal Bureau of Investigation), even as the FBI played political games with the infamous and unfounded counterintelligence probe into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Grassley at the time served as chairman of the Senate’s Finance Committee. Johnson led the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The report, titled “Don’t Brief the Trump Team: How the GSA and the FBI Secretly Shared Trump Transition Team Records,” details how the FBI and then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office trampled all over the transition team’s private property rights.
“Even after the Trump transition team learned about the FBI’s secret preservation request, the GSA nevertheless refused to immediately provide the Trump transition team copies of its own records,” a joint press release from the senators stated at the time. “Instead, after denying the Trump transition team its basic legal rights to control its own information, including the opportunity to protect privileged or confidential information, the GSA turned over records for current and former administration officials to the Special Counsel without requiring any legal process, such as a subpoena or warrant.”
Sound familiar? These are the kind of political games the deep state has been playing for years to thwart a duly elected president who has campaigned on “draining the swamp.”
The 25-page report, among other charges, asserts that “the GSA intentionally withheld notification from Trump for America of its decision to preserve transition records in violation of the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding.”
As the report’s executive summary notes, “The United States is renowned for its peaceful transitions of power.” In furtherance of that cause, successful “presidential candidates have received government assistance in forming and administering their transition teams.” But it’s clear that the deep state players from the beginning saw the incoming president as a threat, as an enemy of the state.
‘Disparate Treatment’
Denise Turner Roth, an Obama appointee, served as GSA administrator at the time of Trump’s transition into the White House in late 2016. Roth and her successors were very accommodating to the FBI. On Feb. 15, 2017, after Trump’s national security advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned his post amid phony Russian collusion allegations, “GSA officials proactively contacted the FBI (through the GSA’s Office of the Inspector General) to ask if they should preserve the Trump transition team records,” the report states. Yes, please, the FBI quickly responded. In violation of the memorandum, GSA decided to preserve all transition records despite the absence of a subpoena.
By August, the special counsel had obtained all of the transition team records for 13 Trump for America officials, including then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, then-national security advisor to the vice president Keith Kellogg, and Jared Kushner.
On Dec. 19, 2017, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee received a letter from Trump for America general counsel Kory Langhofer. In the letter, Langhofer stated that “the GSA provided Trump for America’s records to the special counsel without giving prior notice, obtaining its consent, or providing it an opportunity to review the records for privilege or relevance.” The committee reviewed and confirmed the information.
Tellingly, as the report’s footnotes detail:
Over the course of this investigation, the GSA produced thousands of lightly redacted pages that were responsive to requests made by both Committees. In contrast, the FBI produced heavily redacted documents, including some of the same documents that the GSA produced with no or minimal redactions. For this reason, the Committees had little insight into the internal communications at the FBI about this matter, especially as compared to GSA.
The report describes the government’s double-dealing as “yet another example of the disparate treatment the Trump campaign and administration received from the federal bureaucracy.”
“For example, the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General’s report about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign described the FBI’s use of a transition team briefings as an opportunity to investigate the campaign itself,” the report states. “Similarly, rather than provide the Trump campaign a defensive briefing about its counterintelligence concerns, as the FBI did for the [Hillary] Clinton campaign, the FBI quickly dismissed and never reconsidered that possibility.”
“Instead the FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and deployed, among other investigative techniques, confidential human sources, and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants targeting Trump campaign officials.”
The rest is infamous history in one of the darkest chapters of government abuse in U.S. history.
‘No Surprise’
GSA’s creepy conduct led to the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Johnson that requires advance notice if either party intends to deviate from the memorandum of understanding. Trump signed the bill into law in March 2020.
None of that important background and context is included in the Politico piece and other corporate media accounts. Instead, the news outlets rely on unidentified Biden White House officials and Obama Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to warn about what they deem the dangers of the Trump transition team not playing ball with government agencies that employed all manner of unethical and illegal tactics to undermine the first Trump administration.
“Stealing records and sharing the victim’s private information isn’t any way to build up trust — especially when that victim happens to be the president-elect,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement to The Federalist. “It’s no surprise the Trump transition team is skipping out on GSA.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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