Biden's inside man in Trump land

From: POLITICO West Wing Playbook - Friday Oct 07,2022 10:16 pm

Oct 07, 2022

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In the spring of 2020, JOE BIDEN’s transition team viewed CHRIS LIDDELL skeptically.

As a deputy chief of staff to DONALD TRUMP, Liddell would be the one in charge of planning the government hand-off if Biden won.

But, “no one thought that we’d get cooperation at the level that Liddell was,” former Sen. TED KAUFMAN, who led Biden’s transition, told West Wing Playbook.

DAVID MARCHICK, the then-head of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership of Public Service who was working closely with the Biden team, vouched for Liddell after having met him earlier that year. “Liddell wanted Trump to win,” Marchick recalled in an interview ahead of the release of his new book, “The Peaceful Transfer of Power.” But Liddell “also recognized that there was a responsibility to implement the law and to plan for the possibility that Trump lost,” he said.

Marchick ultimately became a central backchannel for communication between the Trump White House and the Biden transition team throughout that year and helped establish communication between the senior officials after the General Services Administration recognized that Biden had won the 2020 election. He did so, Kaufman said, at some risk.

“David deserves a lot of credit for it,” said Kaufman. “No one knew we were working with Liddell — like half a dozen people — as a protection to him. It was very closely held.”

Most of the Biden team came to share Marchick’s assessment that Liddell was earnestly trying to prepare for a transition.

Marchick disrupted that quiet communication in September of 2020, however, when he praised Liddell for “doing a good job” in preparing for a potential Biden handover. Longtime Biden confidante JEFF PECK huffed in an email to top Biden aides — with Marchick accidentally copied — that “Marchick knows better than this,” according to the new book. There was fear that Liddell’s cover had been blown. And, afterward, Liddell himself quipped to Marchick that he would “avoid the Oval Office for a few days.”

Things came to a head on Jan. 6, 2021, when Liddell considered resigning after the riot at the Capitol. There was fear that if he did so, the transition of power would lose a key cog and be disrupted.

“We had a text chain with Chris, [GEORGE W. BUSH chief of staff] JOSH BOLTEN and me. And then I called Josh, and said ‘We got to talk Chris off the ledge,’” Marchick recalled in his interview. Liddell, who declined to speak for this piece, decided to stay.

Marchick later joined the Biden administration as chief operating officer of the International Development Finance Corporation, a role he left earlier this year. His book is full of praise for the Biden transition, which “by many measures we must regard as the most effective presidential transition yet.” He believes it will likely be studied by future campaigns as presidential transition efforts become bigger, start earlier, and grow more complicated.

Marchick credits the Biden team with focusing on political appointee positions rather than Senate confirmable ones. As a result, the new administration was able to swear in about 1,100 political appointees on Day One — reflecting an unprecedented feat of vetting and organization for a presidential transition.

The Senate confirmation process, however, hampered Biden’s first year. By day 100 of his presidency, only 44 top officials had been confirmed out of around 1,200 who require Senate approval.

That created its own issues. “I think that one of the consequences of having a lot of non-Senate confirmed people in place is once the Senate confirmed people are in place, they don't get the chance to bring their own people in,” he said. “There's a trade off."

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POTUS PUZZLER

This one is from Allie. Which president started riding a mechanical horse after the Secret Service made him give up riding real ones?

(Answer at the bottom.)

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The Oval

BOEHNER APPROVED: Former House Speaker JOHN BOEHNER (R-Ohio), who has become a weed advocate in his post-congressional life, offered his approval of Biden’s announcement Thursday that he would pardon those convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law and push for an expeditious review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.

Boehner was not consulted on the announcements, his spokesman DAVE SCHNITTGER told our SAM STEIN. “But he welcomes the president's action and believes it is a significant one for the country. His hope is that it helps clear a path for congressional action by the end of the year on other cannabis policy reforms such as the SAFE Banking Act and CLIMB Act that have bipartisan support and are very much needed.”

RELATEDLY: We got this dispatch from the pool today, which followed Biden as he walked into the bookstore on the campus of University of Pennsylvania.

“Many onlookers noticed the commotion and hung around to see what was up,” the report read. “A couple yelled in the direction of POTUS, ‘Yo Joe! Legalize that weed!’”

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: The latest jobs numbers. AP’s PAUL WISEMAN reports that job growth has remained solid : “America’s employers slowed their hiring in September but still added 263,000 jobs, a solid figure that will likely keep the Federal Reserve on pace to keep raising interest rates aggressively to fight persistently high inflation. Friday’s government report showed that hiring fell from 315,000 in August to the weakest monthly gain since April 2021. The unemployment rate fell from 3.7% to 3.5%, matching a half-century low.”

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: Anything about the investigation of the president’s son. Fox News’ BROOKE SINGMAN and DAVID SPUNT report that “Attorney General MERRICK GARLAND and Deputy Attorney General LISA MONACO are taking a hands-off approach in the HUNTER BIDEN investigation and leaving charging decisions up to DAVID WEISS, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, tasked with leading the probe. … The investigation is now being conducted by Weiss, a prosecutor appointed by former President DONALD TRUMP.”

WESTWARD BOUND: Biden heads to the other coast next week. He’ll be in California from Oct. 12-14, and then in Oregon through Oct. 15, the White House announced Friday.

…AND THEN TO EGYPT: The president is also slated to go overseas next month to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as the COP27, according to The Washington Post’s TYLER PAGER and MICHAEL BIRNBAUM.

THE BUREAUCRATS

FIRST IN WEST WING PLAYBOOK: KRISTINA COSTA is now deputy assistant to the president for clean energy innovation and implementation, DANIEL LIPPMAN has learned. She most recently was senior adviser and speechwriter to Deputy Secretary of State WENDY SHERMAN and is an alum of the Obama White House and the Center for American Progress.

ASJIA GARNER has been promoted to associate director of communications to JILL BIDEN, Lippman has also learned. She previously was communications coordinator for the first lady.

Agenda Setting

COMMENT CLEANUP: The U.S. military did a bit of cleanup for Biden after he told a group of donors Thursday night in New York that the world was the closest it had been to “Armageddon” since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Our LARA SELIGMAN noted in a piece Friday that the Pentagon said it “still has seen no indications that VLADIMIR PUTIN is planning to launch nuclear weapons,” despite the president’s warning.

Defense Department spokesperson J. TODD BREASSEALE told POLITICO that Biden’s comments reflect how seriously the administration was taking the Russian president’s nuclear threats. “However — and to be clear: we have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor do we have indications that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons,” he said.

BIG DAY FOR DATA PRIVACY: Biden signed an executive order Friday intended to limit the ability of American national security agencies to access people’s personal information. It was part of a transatlantic data sharing agreement with the European Union. The move comes after lengthy negotiations about data privacy between the U.S. and the EU. Our ALFRED NG, VINCENT MANANCOURT and MARK SCOTT have more details .

COVID BOOSTER SLUMP: WaPo’s DAN DIAMOND, MARY BETH GAHAN and MARK JOHNSON report that despite the administration's best efforts to promote the Covid booster rollout, Americans aren’t getting them. About 105 million U.S. adults have received a third Covid shot and even less have received the bivalent booster doses that have been recently made available. The slump in Covid booster shots comes as the colder fall and winter months approach.

What We're Reading

White House Tightens Rules on Counterterrorism Drone Strikes (NYT’s Charlie Savage)

Mayor Adams Declares State of Emergency to Respond to Migrant Crisis (NYT’s Emma G. Fitzsimmons)

A bump and a miss: Saudi oil cut slaps down Biden’s outreach (AP’s Ellen Knickmeyer, Chris Megerian And Kevin Freking)

The Oppo Book

LYNDA TRAN, the Department of Transportation’s director of public engagement and senior adviser, told POLITICO back in 2020 that she’s “terrified of the ocean.”

But she found a way to work on her anxiety. She said she “got scuba certified and learned to surf to face my fears.”

Congrats, Lynda!

POTUS PUZZLER ANSWER

CALVIN COOLIDGE swapped in a mechanical horse for a real one while in office. According to a 2018 article from the Washington Post, it “looked like a barrel with a neck, and it was made of wood, metal and leather. The rider used a saddle, and electricity powered the horse. You pushed a button to vary gaits, from a trot to a gallop.

Coolidge rode three times a day — “first thing in the morning, just after lunch, and when his work was finished. The electric horse was good for the liver and could help its rider lose weight, Coolidge’s doctor asserted,” according to the piece.

A CALL OUT — Do you think you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best one about the presidents with a citation and we may feature it.

Edited by Eun Kyung Kim and Sam Stein.

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