Thirteen dozen former national security officials, who served President Trump and predecessors of both parties, warned Thursday that a "serious risk to national security" has been created by the administration's refusal to formally recognize Joe Biden as president-elect.
Their declaration was the latest escalation of apprehension about the tenuous state of American democracy on the fifth day since election returns made clear Trump has been defeated.
Biden is on course to win 306 electoral votes and a popular vote margin above 5.3 million — at 51 percent, the biggest share for a candidate challenging an incumbent since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover 88 years ago. Far from conceding defeat, though, Trump is holed up in the White House, helping raise money for a sprawling courthouse campaign in five swing states hoping to stall if not reverse the inevitable — so far, without offering any credible evidence he's a victim of significant election fraud.
Meantime, he has told administration officials to refuse all cooperation with the Biden transition. That has included the head of the General Services Administration, who has declined to follow her predecessors after all previous clearcut elections and sign the paperwork permitting the mechanics of the transfer of power to get started.
The former officials told GSA Administrator Emily Murphy to do so right away so Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris can see information "needed to address pressing national security issues, such as the President's Daily Briefing and pending decisions on possible uses of military force."
The signatories include former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden; retired Gen. Wesley Clark and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Several of Trump's former ambassadors, National Security Council officials and Department of Homeland Security political appointees also signed.
Known colloquially as the PDB, the President's Daily Brief is a classified document compiled each morning for the president and his senior advisers by the director of national intelligence to assess the day's top national security threats and global hot spots. While Biden could not act, for the next 10 weeks, on anything he saw, it would inform his public statements and perhaps his national security appointments — and would allow him to be up to speed as soon as the decision-making falls to him.
The GSA administrator at the end of Bill Clinton's administration, David Barram, similarly declined to "ascertain" the 2000 winner until the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of George W. Bush — but Clinton allowed Bush to read the PDB throughout the six-week standoff over the tiny margin in Florida.
"In this moment of uncertainty, we must put politics aside," the letter to Murphy said. "Further delaying the Biden team's ability to access the President's Daily Briefing and other national security information and resources compromises the continuity and readiness of our national leadership, with immense national security stakes hanging in the balance."
By Thursday afternoon, at least five senior Republican senators had called separately for Biden to be given access to the intelligence briefings even while Trump continues to fight the election: Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Jim Lankford of Oklahoma
"It's probably the most important part of the transition," said Collins, a member of the Intelligence Committee.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.