TRUMP’S
DEFENSE CHIEF SUDDENLY CUT OFF ALL OF BIDEN’S BRIEFINGS
And right after a massive cyberattack on
multiple government agencies, including the department that oversees America’s
stockpile of nuclear weapons.
BY ERIC LUTZ
DECEMBER
18, 2020
The American people overwhelmingly chose Joe Biden over Donald
Trump. The Electoral College this week made those results official. Even Mitch McConnell thinks it’s time to move on. But Trump still won’t
let it go, not even pretending to perform the duties of the job he's fighting
to keep. Maddeningly, he’s still finding people to go along with his desperate
coup attempt, and it’s not just MAGA true believers and House Republicans
like Mo Brooks.
According to Axios Friday, Chris
Miller, Trump’s acting Pentagon chief, has ordered the Defense Department
to stop cooperating with
the Biden team, canceling transition meetings with the president-elect just a
month before he becomes the commander-in-chief. It’s a stunning move, and
Pentagon officials were “shocked” by the Thursday night directive, senior
members of the administration told the outlet. The reasoning behind the order
was not reported, but it comes as people around Trump encourage him to take
even more dramatic and authoritarian steps to maintain his grip on power, and
as the country faces what appears to be a historic national security threat.
It was discovered last week that multiple
government departments, including the agency that
oversees America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, had fallen prey to a massive cyberattack believed to have been
carried out by Russia. “Our nation is under assault,” Representative Jason
Crow wrote Friday. “This
cyberattack could be the largest in our history.” Trump has been silent and
instead occupied himself with more inane matters, revenge, and his continued assault on the democratic process.
As that effort to overturn his loss grows more and more desperate, some of his
allies have gone as far as to suggest he implement martial law and
enlist the United States military to “re-run the election” in swing states he
lost, as former national security adviser Michael Flynn called
for in a Newsmax interview Thursday. “No,” Republican Congressman Adam
Kinzinger, a veteran and an outspoken critic of Trump’s autocratic campaign
to undermine the integrity of the election, wrote of Flynn’s
suggestion. “The military will not be ‘deployed’ to re-run an election. It’s
time for this to be shut down, and now.”
Unfortunately, Kinzinger is an outlier in his
party, and a majority of Republicans have shrugged at or actively gone along
with Trump’s attempted power-grab. It’s bad enough when GOP lawmakers endorse
the president’s garbage, but for Miller, who Trump installed after firing Mark
Esper for insufficient loyalty, to draw the Pentagon into it is even
more beyond the pale. Some Defense officials pushed back on Axios’ reporting,
suggesting that transition activities hadn’t been shut down, but had instead
been delayed “until after the new year.” “With the holidays we are taking a
knee for two weeks,” a top Pentagon official told Jonathan Swan.
“We are still committed to a productive transition.” But Swan said his
reporting suggested there was “nothing routine” about the decision, which he
said was discussed at the White House. “Senior Trump officials have been
furious at the Biden team,” Swan reported.
Trump’s refusal to accept the election results
already led to a delay in the transition process, with General Services
Administrator Emily Murphy dragging her feet last month to
officially recognize Biden as the president-elect. It’s not yet entirely clear
what’s going on at the Pentagon, but one thing is: As the president takes his
refusal to concede into darker and darker terrain, and the government facing an
unprecedented breach in cybersecurity, the U.S. needs officials to unmistakably
put the interests of the country over Trump's.
