“As the president-elect noted yesterday, the Department of Defense continues to refuse to meet with members of our Agency Review Team,” Ned Price, a spokesman for the Biden transition, said in a statement to CNN.
“There has been no substantial progress since transition officials spoke to the intransigence of the ministry’s political leadership late last week,” said Price. “As we said back then, no department is more critical to our national security than the Department of Defense, and an unwillingness to cooperate could affect well beyond January 20.”
An anonymous Pentagon official denied the allegations in a statement, saying that Biden’s claim that the Department of Defense would not inform his team was “blatantly false.”
Tensions between the Biden transition and President Donald Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon have been simmering for weeks, but this latest exchange marked a significant escalation as unnamed Pentagon officials essentially accused Biden of lying when he Tuesday discussed the cyberbreach with reporters, saying the Department of Defense “will not even inform us about many things”.
The alleged Pentagon blockage covers a wide area of defense topics, say people familiar with the case, including the entire SolarWinds hack probe.
The Pentagon has mandated Biden’s transition team to receive briefings on the cyber attack from an interinstitutional group known as the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG). However, that group is not an entity of the Ministry of Defense. The information Biden’s team is looking for – unsuccessfully, with 28 days before taking office – provides a deeper insight into the Department of Defense’s vision of the cyber attack.
A Pentagon spokesman released a statement by an unnamed senior defense official who said Biden’s statement that the Department of Defense does not offer briefings is “blatantly false.” The official did not directly address or contradict the president-elect’s comment that his team is not notified of the hack, which Russia is suspected of.
“The DOD has conducted 163 interviews and 181 requests for information, far greater than what the Biden-Harris team originally requested,” the official said in the statement to reporters.
The senior defense official acknowledged in the statement that the briefings had already stopped for two weeks – another point of contention between the Pentagon and the Biden team, which said it had not agreed to a break of that length with so few days left for the president – elect’s inauguration.
“The ministry will continue to provide the information and meetings necessary to ensure the continuity of the government,” the senior defense official said in the statement. “As we said, the meetings will start again in early January, and in fact we have started planning for them.”
Last week, CNN reported that acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said the upcoming Biden team had agreed to a two-week vacation in the previously scheduled transition talks at the Pentagon.
The Biden transition team said Friday that they did not agree to a two-week pause in critical discussions of power transfer with Pentagon officials, despite Miller’s claim that both sides had agreed to such a “vacation break.”
“There was no mutually agreed holiday break,” Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the Biden transition, told reporters Friday. “We think it is even important that briefings and other assignments continue during this period, because there is no time left.”