Newly appointed White House chief of staff for President-elect Joe Biden's forthcoming administration, Ron Klain, expressed worries regarding the Trump administration's refusal to acknowledge Biden's presidential victory, Politico reported.
According to Politico, Klain stated that this denial could interfere with the president-elect team's transitional preparation on crucial matters, such as the distribution of a coronavirus vaccine, or the restart of some Obama initiatives dropped out during the Trump-era - even if the preparations for the transfer are still underway within legal limits.
"The American people saw this in public this week, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris doing their jobs. But as time passes, the need to get the full access we are entitled to, the full access that the American people want us to have, it grows each day," Klain said.
As long as the General Services Administration (GSA) doesn't recognize Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, his team is legally prohibited from accessing federal resources to start the presidential transition as well as contacting federal agencies, reported Politico.
"As time passes, the unreasonable position" of the GSA "to refuse to ascertain that Joe Biden is the apparent winner of the election, as the statute requires, will have an impact," claimed Klain.
"I hope that people in both parties — but particularly some of our Republican friends — got the message of this election, which is Joe Biden ran avowedly openly of working across party lines to get some things done, to get the people's business done, to deal with the crisis we're facing in the country," Klain said.Klain, who is Jewish, was raised in Indianapolis, attended Harvard Law School and was a law clerk for Supreme Court justice Byron White. He is one of Biden’s closest confidants. He first worked for him in 1989 when Biden was a senator. He served as his chief of staff from 2009-2011 when Biden was vice president and was chief of staff for vice president Al Gore in 1995. He was the Ebola response coordinator in the Obama administration.
A growing number of Republican senators, including John Cornyn, Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, urged Trump's administration to allow Biden access to presidential daily intelligence briefings, in a tacit acknowledgement the Democrat will soon occupy the White House despite the president's refusal to concede.However, most Republican officials and lawmakers have publicly supported so far Trump's effort to overturn the election results via a series of lawsuits filed in individual states, following the president's unfounded claims of widespread voting fraud.
The president-elect traditionally receives such briefings from the intelligence community to learn of threats facing the United States before taking office.