That July 2019 call - on which Trump asked his counterpart to investigate Biden and his son Hunter - became the basis of Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who went on to work in the Trump White House, was involved in the placement ofa reconstructed transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into a classified computer system, The Associated Press reported. 20, Biden's first day in office, his administration placed Ellis on administrative leave while his transfer to the agency from his previous role at the Trump White House was reviewed by an inspector general for the Department of Defense.Įllis, a former staffer for Rep. The Trump administration conversion that caused the most concern, the congressional aide and numerous experts said, was Michael Ellis, a Trump loyalist who, one day before Biden took office last month, was sworn in as the top lawyer for the National Security Agency. Some agencies aren’t required to report conversions, and some agencies never announced their new hires, making it difficult for the Biden administration to truly know the extent of the reach of Trump loyalists.Ī spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
The number of requested conversions for the last quarter of 2020 - the final months of Trump’s presidency - won’t be released to Congress until March. The OPM tracks such conversion requests on a quarterly basis and subsequently provides the information to members of Congress. According to the aide, 15 were approved, 14 were denied, declined or withdrawn, and another 20 were still pending. Trump political appointees petitioned the Office of Personnel Management 49 times for conversion to civil service jobs from January 2020 through September 2020, a congressional aide with knowledge of the matter told NBC News. “Not to be hyperbolic, but the damage some of these people could do is enormous,” said Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight. In a statement to NBC News, a Biden White House official said the administration “is conducting a thorough review of several councils, commissions, and advisory boards,” adding that “as part of that review, we may remove individuals whose continued membership on the board would not serve the public interest.”īut experts warned that countless others are likely peppered throughout the federal government and that it would be difficult for Biden to identify and remove all of them. Seeking to cut off any potential such damage, the Biden administration has in recent weeks terminated or placed on leave several government employees placed into their jobs by Trump in the waning days of his presidency, including the top lawyer at the National Security Agency and several members on Pentagon advisory boards. Rohde called that effort, if it had proceeded unfettered, “an existential threat to democracy.” “Under the guise of stopping a 'deep state' coup that never existed, Trump appears to have tried to create a deep state of his own,” said David Rohde, the author of the 2020 book “In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America's 'Deep State'” and the executive editor of. Those allies retain access to lawmakers, decision-making processes and information that could ultimately make its way back to the former president. (Civil service workers have protections that political appointees do not, and are harder for new administrations to fire.)īut good-government advocates, government watchdogs and experts on the federal bureaucracy, including one member of Congress, said that Trump’s "burrowers" were both more plentiful, and more dangerous, than usual.įurther, these experts pointed to moves by Trump, in the final days of his presidency, to place allies in unusual positions like little-known advisory boards with close ties to decision-makers at key agencies, and low-level unpaid jobs on prestigious boards. There was nothing new about Trump’s attempts to convert political appointees to civil service employees, a process called “burrowing” by some government watchers outgoing presidents have done it for years. Now, President Joe Biden’s administration is trying to root out some of those government employees, seeking to rid the broader federal bureaucracy of Trump loyalists who could hinder his agenda.
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