John P Burke. Presidential Studies Quarterly. Volume 48, Issue 4. December 2018.
Planning for a potential presidency while still a candidate campaigning for the office is a necessary foundation to a successful presidency. Even under the best of circumstances, the roughly 75 days between Election Day and inauguration on January 20 pose constraints in vetting and selecting key personnel, developing early legislative initiatives, and shifting from a campaigning mode to one of governance, among other immediate tasks. Successful efforts in national security are most crucial.
Indeed, the transition activities during the postelection period are not only challenging in their own right but require significant prior preparation, often before the electoral outcome is settled. Transition personnel must be quickly selected, a legal affairs staff put in place as part of the vetting and ethics clearance processes, policy and personnel teams need to be established for each federal department and agency, as do teams to coordinate with the outgoing administration.
It is an unfinished job in fact. While most White House positions are usually in place by Inauguration Day, presidential appointments to subcabinet positions remain thin in new administrations. In some departments nearly half remain unfilled by the time Congress returns from its summer recess in the first year. Of some 591 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, by early September Obama had 310 confirmed while Bush had 294. As it turned out, Trump would lag considerably behind this with only 117, less than 20 percent, confirmed (Washington Post 2017).
Not only must presidents-elect undertake successful transition planning, presidential candidates must begin planning for a possible presidential transition. Although some modern presidents made rudimentary plans before Election Day for a possible presidency (e.g., Kennedy more so, Eisenhower and Nixon less so), it is only starting with Jimmy Carter in 1976 that a more organized effort has taken place (Burke 2000, 17-25). However, until recently, planning for a possible presidency while still a candidate was fraught with difficulty. There was no federal support for the effort, and it was usually undertaken discreetly, lest it appear that the candidate was prematurely and too eagerly measuring the White House drapes. Indeed, in October 2008, Republican candidate John McCain, then lagging in the polls, made precisely that charge when news stories appeared concerning Obama’s transition planning. Ironically, McCain was also doing the same, but it was Obama who caught media attention.
2016: A Seemingly Opportune Preelection Effort
Trump was uniquely positioned to undertake transition planning before Election Day given several pieces of federal legislation that provided, at last, crucial logistical and other support during the preelection period for transition work. The first, which Obama benefited from in 2008, were provisions in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 mandating that the candidates be provided, shortly after their official nomination, a list of positions subject to presidential appointment. More importantly, the act also permitted candidates to submit, early on, the names of those involved in transition activities so that their security clearances might be expedited and even completed the day after the November election, thus allowing them immediate access to vital and classified material.
The second piece of legislation, the Pre-Election Transition Act of 2010, specifically sought to bolster transition planning by the candidates before Election Day, as its title clearly emphasized. It mandated that the General Services Administration (GSA), which historically has been in charge of postelection support of the transition, provide the candidates after their official party nomination with office space, computer and communications support, briefings, and training assistance. It also set clearer obligations for the outgoing administration to provide information and support for transition activities during this period. The latter was modeled on the activities the G. W. Bush administration had undertaken in 2008 (Kumar 2015, 44-47). In 2012, the Mitt Romney campaign was the first to take advantage of this preelection support (see Liddell, Kroese, and Campbell 2013). According to a statement by the sponsors of the bill, it addressed “the historical reluctance of presidential candidates to initiate early transition activities, as well as to ensure incumbent administrations continue to make transition planning a priority” (Jochum 2010, emphasis added).
The third piece of legislation was enacted in 2015. It placed greater responsibility on the outgoing administration to assist transition planning, particularly in the preelection period, by mandating the creation of a White House Transitions Council and a separate Agency Directors Council to facilitate planning between the federal government and the presidential candidates by May of the election year. It also mandated, also by May, that each federal agency and department designate a senior official to oversee transition activities and that, before Election Day, the White House develop a memorandum of understanding with the presidential candidates on transition activities.
In 2016, the teams for each presidential candidate were thus able to openly and without fear of political backlash begin the crucial process of planning for a new administration with all of this increased federal assistance. Indeed, beginning in early August, the Trump and Clinton transition planners worked in adjacent quarters provided by the GSA at 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just a block west of the White House complex. While Obama had utilized the expedited security clearances sanctioned by the 2004 bill and candidate Romney had taken advantage of the transition support described in the 2010 act, Donald Trump was the first president-elect to potentially benefit from all three of these major changes in transition legislation, especially as they encouraged and assisted planning before Election Day. How did he and his team fare?
The Christie Preelection Effort: Opportunities Seem Possible
Trump’s efforts appeared initially headed on a positive track. In early May, he asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to begin putting together a transition team, working with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager at the time, and campaign strategist Paul Manafort (Parker 2016). Several days later, Trump picked Chris Christie, a seasoned if controversial governor of New Jersey and former rival for the GOP nomination, as head of his preelection team. That Kushner, Lewandowski, and Manafort—and eventually and perhaps most importantly candidate Trump—were all involved in his selection is notable given what later transpired. While Kushner reportedly had reservations about Christie, Trump made the final call in his favor.
Christie’s team included members of his gubernatorial inner circle and a number of Washington insiders with previous transition experience. He tapped key participants in Romney’s presidential planning prior to the 2012 election, most notably Mike Leavitt, G. W. Bush’s former Health and Human Services Secretary and a three-term former governor of Utah, who had headed up the Romney preelection effort in 2012. Indeed, Congress had honored Leavitt the year before. One of the new pieces of transitions legislation bore his name: the “Edward (Ted) Kaufman and Michael Leavitt Presidential Transitions Improvement Act of 2015.” Another key figure Christie brought on board was William Hagerty, a former economic advisor in the George H. W. Bush administration, who was tasked with heading up the appointments process, the same position that he occupied for the Romney effort in 2012. John Rader, counsel to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Corker (R-TN) was selected as Hagerty’s deputy for personnel. Former Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) was another prominent member of the team. Rogers had been chair of the House Intelligence Committee and was brought on board to head up national security matters.
Christie had assembled an experienced group, but one not likely to sit well with the insular Trump loyalists of family and campaign aides after Election Day. Some of those Christie tapped were individuals closely linked to him rather than the Trump campaign or inner circle. These included Richard Bagger, Christie’s former chief of staff, as executive director in charge of the day-to-day operations of the transition. Bagger had also served in both houses of the New Jersey state legislature and was a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Another Christie associate was William Palatucci as the transition’s general legal counsel. Palatucci was a prominent New Jersey attorney who had served as the state’s member of the Republican National Committee.
Experienced hands in planning for a possible Trump presidency were especially needed. The Trump inner circle was noticeably deficient in prior political or governmental experience, particularly the Trump family members such as Ivanka and Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric—all of whom ostensibly oversaw Christie’s work from Trump Tower. The same was true for campaign aides Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Hope Hicks; none had served in government before. The only members of the Trump inner circle with government experience were Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Trump’s running mate Mike Pence (governor of Indiana and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives).
There was also retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn on national security matters (an area that Representative Rogers, not Flynn, was in charge of during the preelection phase). Flynn had been a top military intelligence official in Iraq and Afghanistan and then served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 2012 to 2014 before being forced to step down. At the time, the Washington Post noted: “Critics said that his management style could be chaotic and that the scope of his plans met resistance from both superiors and subordinates.” “His vision in DIA was seen as disruptive,” according to one Pentagon official who had worked closely with him (Miller and Goldman 2014). In a July 2016 e-mail, Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and NSC advisor, said that sources in the DIA told him that Flynn had been forced out because he was “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since” (Lamothe 2016). According to then-deputy NSC advisor Ben Rhodes, the director of national intelligence, James “Clapper had gotten rid of him because he was destroying morale at the agency.” Obama “had no role in it” (Rhodes 2018, 408-09).
As part of its work, the Christie group began to assemble a list of over 100 potential candidates for key White House, cabinet-level, and other senior positions. This was only a portion of some 30 binders of materials presented to Trump after Election Day. They covered a wide array of recommendations for further postelection transition activities as well as a blueprint for the substance and rollout of the Trump policy agenda after he was inaugurated.
For purposes of this article, what was most notable was that Flynn’s name was absent among those recommended to fill the NSC advisor slot, a striking omission given Flynn’s role in the 2016 campaign and Trump inner circle. General James Mattis, who would end up as defense secretary, was listed as a possibility, as were several other former members of the military, including General Peter Pace, who served as JCS chairman under G. W. Bush; Admiral William McRaven, who led the raid against Osama bin Laden; and K. T. McFarland, who would eventually end up as Flynn’s deputy. According to one account, “Flynn was penciled in as a possible director of national intelligence, for which transition officials believed he was better suited than national security adviser.” According to another account, Christie and his team had “deep reservations about Flynn” and feared he “suffered from poor judgment and espoused far-out ideas on foreign policy” (Cook 2017).
Christie was wary of Flynn from the start and, according to reports, “told associates as early as August 2016 that Flynn would be a disaster in the administration and someone who he did not even want around the transition.” Moreover, with reference to the latter, he “complained to associates that Flynn behaved unprofessionally in classified briefings by interrupting the expert briefers, telling them they were wrong, and questioning them, according to two people familiar with the transition” (Cook 2017).
Christie and his team were also concerned that Flynn might encounter difficulties if chosen for a position requiring Senate confirmation “after being forced out of his perch as the head of the [DIA] in 2014 over questions surrounding his temperament and management of the agency” (Cook 2017). (Of course, the NSC post does not require Senate confirmation; here preelection counsel might have inadvertently helped Flynn secure that position.)
Former Representative Rogers personally solicited Flynn’s views on candidates for national security positions. However, according to one account, Flynn’s recommendations were largely seen “as a group of fringe characters, the sources added.” “We were concerned about him being in a leadership position. We were active in the effort to stymie his advances,” said a former transition official. “But Trump liked him. It seemed to me that they were going to take care of him” (Cook 2017).
More generally, Trump also clearly figures in here. His lack of attention to what Christie and the preelection team were doing was problematic but not a surprise given his likely unfamiliarity with the process and needed preparations as a “Washington outsider.” According to the Washington Post,
Throughout the campaign, Trump took a hands-off approach to transition preparations. It was bad karma, he believed, to start planning a presidency before he won the election. Once elected, he decided to run things his own way. “It went off the rails almost immediately after the election,” said one knowledgeable person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. (Balz 2017, emphasis added)
The Christie Team Purge: Opportunities Lost
After Election Day, Trump took charge. Christie and many in his group were fired shortly thereafter on November 11. Vice President-Elect Pence replaced him as head of the transition effort, although Christie remained nominally involved as one of 13 “vice chairs”; the number of them had increased after Election Day. Palatucci and Bagger were also dismissed, as was Representative Rogers a few days later. Rick Dearborn, an aide to then-Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) replaced Bagger as executive director. It was not a smooth change: Bagger, the executive director, was surprised to find that he was suddenly locked out of transition headquarters (Isenstadt 2016).
Trump was apparently concerned that Christie had mismanaged the transition, especially in bringing a number of New Jersey associates and Washington lobbyists on board. Christie’s increasing political liabilities, stemming from the “Bridgegate” scandal and recent conviction of two of his aides, were also apparently figured in (Isenstadt 2016).
That Christie had been the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted and sent to jail Jared Kushner’s father was perhaps another factor. In a November 2017 interview, Christie revealed that he had asked Bannon if Kushner was behind his removal. “Oh, I asked [Bannon],” Christie said. “He didn’t answer. But [based on] subsequent conversations I’ve had with the president, I just don’t believe this was the president’s decision” (Dawsey 2017). According to Christie, Trump has “offered me two different Cabinet positions and three other really senior positions in the administration, and I’ve turned them all down because they weren’t stuff I was interested in” (Dawsey 2017).
But also a likely reason for Christie’s removal: the insider crew at Trump Tower, plus Trump himself, had now decided to run things their way. This included picking the NSC advisor. In December 2017, a year later, Christie told a slightly different story to a group of New Jersey reporters: rather than Kushner as the culprit, his concerns about Flynn were “a significant reason” for his “early departure from the transition.” “Suffice to say that I had serious misgivings which I think have been confirmed by the fact that he pled guilty to a felony in federal court,” Christie added (Arco 2017; Hutchins 2017).
It is not unusual in recent transitions for a shift in leadership to occur after Election Day. In some cases a more senior figure steps in to take charge. This was the case in 2000, for example, when Vice-President-Elect Dick Cheney took over leadership of the postelection transition from long-time G. W. Bush associate Clay Johnson who had headed up the preelection effort. Johnson, however, stayed on in the crucial role of the transition’s executive director and later held key White House positions. The same pattern occurred in 2008 when Christopher Lu, Obama’s Senate chief of staff, handled preelection planning but then became executive director of the transition after Election Day. John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett, and Peter Rouse were brought on board as co-chairs of the Obama transition at that point.
In other transitions, however, concerns about the preelection effort resulted in a complete and often divisive changeover. This occurred in 1992, during the Clinton transition, when Mickey Kantor was forced out due to rivalries with the campaign staff and was replaced by Vernon Jordan and Warren Christopher after the election (see Burke 2000, 285-87). In 2016, the Clinton (not the Bush) scenario occurred: it was clear that President-Elect Trump had essentially fired Christie, his preelection transition leader. Christie stayed on as one of 13 vice chairs, but the executive director position went to Rick Dearborn, Senator Sessions’ former chief of staff.
Consequences: A Problematic National Security Advisor and System Put in Place
On November 17, less than a week after Christie was removed, Trump tapped Flynn for the NSC advisor post. According to one account, Ivanka and Eric Trump were especially keen on Flynn having a senior appointment. Ivanka had even invited him to a meeting of the transition’s executive team (on which both she and Eric had seats), without informing Christie (who was then still on board). During the course of the meeting, she apparently asked Flynn what job he wanted in the new administration. He reportedly expressed interest in serving as either secretary of state or defense, but he also was willing to serve as NSC advisor (Cook 2017; Mayer 2017).
Hours later, Christie was fired. Vetting of Flynn for the NSC post seems to have been problematic as Vice President Pence now took charge of the transition (see Mayer 2017). Even before his appointment was announced, websites such as Daily Caller reported that Flynn had undertaken lobbying for Turkish interests, which he had failed to disclose (Graham 2017). His ill-fated contacts with Russia’s ambassador emerged later.
Following Christie’s firing, Flynn and Bannon, according to several accounts, “celebrated by tossing binders full of potential personnel picks, culled by Christie’s team, into trash bins with a sense of ceremonial glee” (Cook 2017; see also Mayer 2017, 67). Thrush and Haberman (2017b) referred simply to a “senior Trump aide” as the dumper. In late 2017, Christie recounted that throwing away his transition group’s work was “a big mistake.” One reporter asked him what he would have done had he not been forced out. “The governor laughed, then joked the answer is ‘in about four volumes of books’ that were tossed in the trash the ‘day I was terminated. I think what folks who were involved in that transition have now painfully learned at the expense of the country is that experience matters. You cannot run a transition as an outsider’” (Arco 2017).
Change clearly occurred after Christie was fired, but it would prove problematic. Flynn now had major say in NSC staffing. This is standard transition practice. But Flynn’s selections were ones that would come back to haunt once the Trump administration was up and running. Many were eventually replaced by Flynn’s successor as NSC advisor, H. R. McMaster.
More immediately, preparation for taking office come Inauguration Day was proving problematic. Due to the changes in transition personnel with the Christie team now gone, appointments took more time. (This is not surprising: divisions in the Clinton 1992 transition stalled work for several weeks, and it was not until mid-December that he named his chief of staff.) As for 2016, the Trump national security group did not even start meeting with their Obama counterparts until November 22. Further problems: in mid-December, the new (post-Christie) designee for NSC chief of staff and transition team leader was replaced by retired General Keith Kellogg, a Flynn associate, which meant even further delay at the very top (Landler 2017).
Flynn met with outgoing Obama NSC advisor Susan Rice on at least four occasions before Inauguration Day. However, lower-level contacts between incoming and outgoing officials may have been sporadic, if they occurred at all. Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s deputy national security advisors, recalls in his memoirs that “I never met any of them [his Trump counterparts] … Nobody on the Trump transition team wanted to talk to me or interact with me in any way, even though I’d spent eight years in the White House” (Rhodes 2018, 407-08).
One problem was that Trump and Flynn’s NSC staff picks often lacked proper security clearances to receive information prepared by their Obama counterparts: some 270 briefing papers and over 1,000 pages of classified material on the most immediate and pressing national security issues. The recent legislation on transitions was designed to alleviate precisely this problem by starting the clearance process before Election Day. However, the firing of Christie and his team and the dumping of their appointment files likely complicated the timing for early clearances and thus access to classified information.
This problem was coupled with an apparent lack of interest in the transition materials the Obama administration had prepared. The Obama NSC staff even prepared briefing materials that excised classified material and could be more widely read (Landler 2017). However, according to deputy NSC advisor Rhodes, “Our NSC had prepared volumes of briefing papers on every possible subject. . . but it was never clear to us who, if anyone, was reading them” (2018, 407-08). Rhodes’ experience was not unique. As Inauguration Day approached, Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, realized that many of the materials they had painstakingly put together had not even been opened: “All the paperwork, all the briefings that had been prepared for their transition team, went unused. Unread. Unreviewed,” he later commented (Whipple 2018, 299).
Problems were further compounded through Trump’s first year in office by delays in making key appointments at the State Department. Here Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pursued a goal of reducing personnel and was slow to act in filling slots. It arguably may have made sense budget wise for that department, but it potentially withered an alternate source of information and advice that might have served as a positive counterweight to deficiencies in NSC staffing resources. He also encountered resistance from the White House on some of the appointments he was willing to make, which also consumed valuable time. Tillerson’s troubled relationship with Trump led to his own dismissal on March 13, 2018. Trump nominated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Michael Pompeo to replace him. Pompeo, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Kansas, enjoyed a closer relationship with the president than did Tillerson and was perceived to be more loyal to Trump’s foreign policy goals.
The overall appointment data in the State Department is troubling, even putting aside Tillerson’s problematic tenure. As of February 25, 2018, over a year since Trump took office, 16 key, top-level positions in the State Department were still awaiting nominees (not simply confirmation, but prior White House nomination). These included three undersecretary of state slots; one was the crucial position of undersecretary for political affairs. Four of the six regional assistant secretary positions had no nominees: African affairs, Near Eastern affairs, South Asian affairs, and Western Hemisphere affairs. Other key positions also had no nominees to date, such as assistant secretary for intelligence and research, assistant secretary for political-military affairs, assistant secretary for conflict and stabilization operations, and the post of coordinator for threat reduction programs, among others (Washington Post 2018).
Overall, according to data collected by Professor Terry Sullivan for the White House Transition Project, as of January 5, 2018, the Trump administration had filled just 56 percent of the key positions in the national security area. By contrast, the Obama administration, at the same point in his presidency, had reached 82 percent filled (Sullivan 2018).
Consequences: NSC Membership Under Scrutiny
Trouble with the NSC system started immediately, a mere week after Trump was inaugurated. Its organizational structure and committee membership generated considerable controversy when it was unveiled on January 28, 2017, with the issuance of National Security Memorandum #2 (#1 was on rebuilding the armed forces). In other presidencies this is a routine document setting out both statutory and discretionary membership for the formal NSC as well as others who are invited to attend. These presidential memos also detail the membership of the Principals Committee, which largely overlaps but is chaired by the NSC advisor in the president’s absence; the lower-level Deputies Committee, chaired by the deputy NSC advisor; and the working groups and task forces that operate below that.
Flynn and his staff presumably had the lead hand in its drafting. Comparison of the Bush and Obama memos to Trump’s indicates few significant structural differences (save that Trump created a Homeland Security Council, separate from the NSC, but this was hardly radical given that Bush had done the same in the aftermath of September 11; the two were recombined under Obama). But there were some differences in committee membership, which immediately proved to be major issues (see Burke 2017, 575-82).
For Trump, a media firestorm emerged when it was discovered that his White House chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, was listed as an invitee to the full NSC. Most media reports got it wrong and assumed that Bannon was now a member of the NSC itself. In fact, he was not listed among the statutory or nonstatutory members. Interestingly, Obama’s White House chief of staff was listed as a nonstatutory member, unlike Bush’s or even Trump’s chiefs of staff. However, this was not noticed by the press in 2009, nor acknowledged later in 2017.
As an invitee to NSC meetings, Bannon was joined on the list by chief of staff Reince Priebus, the White House legal counsel, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the deputy counsel to the NSC advisor. The secretary of commerce, the U.S. trade representative, and the director of the National Economic Council were also invited “when international economic issues are on the agenda of the NSC.” Bannon clearly had an invitation to attend but so too did these others. Moreover, Bannon did not head the enumerated list in the document, rather his name followed that of the chief of staff as well as those invited for meetings on international economic issues. (The pecking order is never a small thing in White House lists.) Still, Bannon even attending NSC meetings became a major news story with a fairly long shelf life.
Bannon’s name was listed as part of the Principals Committee (chaired by the NSC advisor). But so, too, were 22 others as either regular or potential invitees. Bannon’s mere name on the NSC list, whatever the title or role, also did not sit well with the media and generated outcry by some former NSC officials. In April, the White House issued a new NSC memorandum, crafted by NSC advisor H. R. McMaster, which omitted any reference to Bannon as a participant on any NSC committee.
Interestingly, at the time the revised NSC memo was issued, reports (plus Bannon’s own comments) indicated that the reason for Bannon’s potential involvement in NSC matters, especially as a member of the Principals, was to keep an eye on Flynn, which became moot once he had been fired. It was also later revealed that Bannon had only attended one meeting of the Principals during Flynn’s short tenure as NSC advisor (Costa and Phillip 2017). Not much oversight even while Flynn was on the job, and a lot of political angst and distraction in the interim: it was a mess a more experienced and adept White House might have otherwise avoided. It especially reflected another problematic aspect of the Trump transition: problems in putting in place an effective White House communications staff (see Bump 2018).
Consequences: An NSC Advisor is Fired
After Inauguration Day, reports began to surface indicating trouble with Flynn’s performance. Among the problems noted were Flynn’s own “overbearing demeanor” and outspokenness, hardly the ingredients for serving as an honest broker to the NSC process. Moreover, he had “further diminished his internal standing by presiding over a chaotic and opaque N.S.C. transition process that prioritized the hiring of military officials over the civilian experts recommended to him by his own transition team” (Thrush and Haberman 2017a, emphasis added).
The disorder that had begun to be widely noted in the Trump White House also seeped into the NSC. In the past, the NSC system has been largely shielded from problematic early presidencies. The experiences of the early Carter and Clinton presidencies are good examples here: problematic transitions yielding disorganized domestic White House staffs but comparatively crisper NSC systems (see Burke 2000, 82-85, 358-65; Burke 2009, 324-37, 337-55). Not so in this presidency. For example, “[o]fficials said that the absence of an orderly flow of council documents, ultimately the responsibility of Mr. Flynn, explained why Mr. Mattis [the new secretary of defense] and Mike Pompeo, the director of the C.I.A., never saw a number of Mr. Trump’s executive orders before they were issued” (Sanger, Schmitt, and Baker 2017). Executive orders, of course, were an important instrument of presidential power in the early Trump presidency, especially in rescinding those issued by President Obama toward the end of his presidency.
The concerns raised by Christie’s preelection team about Flynn proved prophetic. I have elsewhere discussed in more detail the events leading to Flynn’s resignation (Burke 2017, 583-88). But to briefly review, Flynn had telephoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak a number of times in late December 2017, including several calls on December 29, 2017, the very day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for Russian hacking during the 2016 election. Flynn initially denied that anything of foreign policy substance had been discussed, something he reassured both Vice President Pence and chief of staff Priebus. Both publicly defended him when reports of the telephone conversations became public. As it turned out, U.S. intelligence had monitored the conversations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was investigating the incident. While Flynn continued to deny any wrongdoing (later backing off a bit that he could not be certain of his conversations), Justice Department officials informed the Trump White House on January 26, just a week into the new presidency, that matters of substance had indeed been discussed. On February 13, 2017, Flynn resigned.
Flynn’s resignation was only the start of his troubles. Once former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed as special prosecutor to look into Russian tampering with the 2016 elections, Flynn became a target. Mueller’s investigation also delved into financial dealings by Flynn’s consulting firm with interests linked to the Turkish government, which he had also failed to disclose. More importantly, the investigation concluded that Flynn had lied to the FBI concerning the substance of his conversations with the Russian ambassador. On November 30, 2017 a plea agreement was filed indicating Flynn’s admission that he had lied to investigators.
Conclusion
The early travails of the Trump NSC system provide yet another piece of evidence that presidential transitions matter, if not indeed that they are crucial to subsequent success (or failure) of an early presidency. This is especially the case for crucial matters dealing with foreign policy and national security.
Ironically, the Trump transition was uniquely positioned to take early advantage of the legislative changes that facilitated planning before Election Day. Christie’s firing and the general hostility to his team’s efforts on the part of the Trump camp put much of the preelection effort into the trash can, including warning signs about Flynn that had emerged early on.
The postelection transition failed to take advantage of getting the Trump national security system up and running effectively. The inner circle at Trump Tower was a problem and hindrance; foreign and national security policy expertise was lacking and even prior governmental experience was absent. Crucial time was lost in putting both personnel and policy in place. Flynn’s own postelection transition efforts, even putting aside his questionable contacts with the Russian ambassador, were problematic. He did not put together an effective NSC staff: McMaster was forced to replace many of them. Nor did the NSC transition staff benefit fully from the opportunities offered them under the new legislation. Delays in security clearances were a problem in gaining needed knowledge and in getting up to speed. Delay in planning surely resulted.
Also notable was the general lack of concern among some in the Trump transition to take advantage of the work undertaken by the outgoing Obama administration to smooth the way for their successors. Yes, they were likely to pursue a different policy course, but the institutional memory offered is also of great benefit.
The Trump White House and NSC staff who crafted the memorandum on national security organization failed to anticipate reaction, whether in error or by faulty positive assumption, to Bannon’s inclusion as an invitee on the NSC or as a member of the Principals Committee. Sloppy work was undertaken in understanding and making clear the statutory and nonstatutory composition of the NSC and in drafting the document and its list of participants. Poor White House communications hampered explanation and correction, not surprising given that the communications operation was poorly staffed and organized at this point in the Trump administration. The whole incident could have been avoided by better staff work all around, and it created a major distraction in the critical, early days of the new administration.
As for Flynn, he and apparently other members of the transition team failed to understand the import and serious implications of communications with foreign powers on substantive matters, in this case the Russian government, while Trump was still president-elect. Moreover, he dissembled about his actions once they became public. The outcome was a quick resignation, one not unexpected. It was, too, an embarrassing episode that marred Trump’s early days in office.
In filling key positions and in hitting the ground running, the Trump administration lagged behind its predecessors. Errors and failure particularly occurred in the national security area, which has been usually historically immune from problematic transitions. The Trump transition will likely serve as a textbook case in what not to do for his successors.