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“As the president-elect noted yesterday, the Defense Department has continued to refuse to meet with members of our agency review team,” said Ned Price, spokesperson for Biden transition, in a statement to CNN.
“There has been no substantial progress since transition officials spoke of the intransigence of the Department’s political leaders late last week,” Price said. “As we said at the time, no department is more essential to our national security than the Department of Defense, and the refusal to work together could have consequences well beyond January 20.”
An unnamed Pentagon official denied the allegations in a statement, saying Biden’s claim that the Defense Department failed to notify his team was “patently false.”
Tensions between Biden’s transition and those appointed by President Donald Trump to the Pentagon have simmered for weeks, but this latest exchange marked a significant escalation, with unnamed Pentagon officials essentially accusing Biden of lying as he argued of the cyber breach with reporters on Tuesday and said the Defense Department “won’t even tell us about a lot.”
The Pentagon’s alleged stone wall covers a wide area of defense matters, people familiar with the matter say, including the SolarWinds hack probe assembly.
The Pentagon has asked Biden’s transition team to receive information about the cyberattack from an interagency group, known as the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG). This group, however, is not an entity of the Ministry of Defense. The information Biden’s team sought – unsuccessfully, 28 days before he took office – is a deeper understanding of the Defense Department’s vision on the cyberattack.
A Pentagon spokesperson released a statement from an anonymous senior defense official who said Biden’s remark that the Defense Department did not offer briefings was “patently false.” The official did not directly respond to or contradict the president-elect’s comment that his team is not aware of the hack, which Russia is suspected of having carried out.
“The DOD has conducted 163 interviews and 181 requests for information, which far exceeds what the Biden-Harris team initially requested,” the official said in a statement to reporters.
The senior defense official acknowledged in the statement that briefings paused for two weeks – another point of contention between the Pentagon and Biden’s team, who said they did not agree to a break from this duration when there were so few days left before the president. the inauguration of elected officials.
“The Department will continue to provide the information and meetings necessary to ensure the continuity of government,” the senior defense official said in the statement. “As we said, the meetings will resume in early January, and in fact we have started scheduling them.”
Last week, CNN reported that Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said Biden’s new team agreed to take a two-week vacation from previously scheduled transition talks at the Pentagon.
Biden’s transition team said on Friday it did not agree to a two-week hiatus from critical power transfer talks with Pentagon officials, despite Miller’s claim that the two parties had agreed to take such a “vacation break”.
“There has not been a mutually agreed vacation,” Yohannes Abraham, executive director of Biden Transition, told reporters on Friday. “In fact, we think it’s important that briefings and other engagements continue during this time, because there is no time to waste.”
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