Team Trump has not submitted a legally required ethics plan, stating he will avoid conflicts of interest — so the transition process hasn’t moved forward.
Why anyone believes he’ll follow it if he did is beyond me.
Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act.
While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
Since Mr. Trump created his transition team in August, it has refused to participate in the normal handoff process, which typically begins months before the election.
It has missed multiple deadlines for signing required agreements governing the process. That has prevented Mr. Trump’s transition team from participating in national security briefings or gaining access to federal agencies to begin the complicated work of preparing to take control of the government on Jan. 20, 2025.
As Raw Story reported:
Max Stier, who is the head of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service (which assists the presidential transition process), told Bensinger that this “could leave the country vulnerable at a critical moment.”
“The consequences are severe,” Stier told the Times. “It would not be possible to be ready to govern on Day 1.”
Trump’s own conflicts of interest are staggering, with the anti-corruption watchdog group Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) identifying approximately 3,400 such conflicts from Trump’s first administration. This includes him hosting members of foreign governments at his privately owned properties, like the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC prior to its sale in 2022.
Stier’s concerns seem to pale in comparison to the fact that the biggest threat to our national security right now is the fact that Trump is being allowed to step foot in the White House again.
As The New York Times also reported:
On Thursday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said that President Biden’s chief of staff had reached out to the Trump transition team and that its officials “say they have an intent” to sign the agreements, but gave no indication of timing.
[…]
In 2019, Congress amended that law to require candidates to create and publicly post an ethics plan before the election and to “include information on how eligible presidential candidates will address their own conflicts of interest during a presidential term.”
How quaint of them to believe Trump would actually follow the law.
