As the Hegseth hearings unfold, I wanted to give you a view into a small part of the story which, while perhaps not terribly consequential in itself, sheds some additional light on the Trump team’s effort to lock down details about Hegseth’s background as well as general press credulity about the same. This morning’s Axios reports that the Trump transition’s “red line” is that only Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) should be briefed on Hegseth’s FBI background check, not the rest of the committee. “The Trump transition team is demanding the president-elect’s nominees be treated the same way they insist Joe Biden’s were,” it reads.
The Axios piece doesn’t say so explicitly, or at least it doesn’t in its current version. But it certainly gives the impression that Biden negotiated this restrictive standard and that it is now being used against Democrats. The Daily Beast, for instance, summarized Axios’ reporting by claiming this rule would follow “a precedent which [Trump transition officials] say was set by Biden’s transition after the last election.” (The Axios piece says it’s been revised. But I wasn’t able to tell whether that language has been changed.)
In any case, what we’re seeing here is that the Trump team is trying to push the idea that this is some kind of binding precedent and one that Biden’s team created. Fair is fair after all. But Senate veterans tell me that’s not the case. This isn’t something the Biden people insisted on or negotiated. It’s just standing practice. Why would the Biden folks do that anyway given their generally squeaky clean nominees? If the Biden transition had pushed for something like that I have little doubt we would have heard about it at the time from Republicans. And we didn’t. Again, longtime Senate hands tell me there’s no rule in any case — just default practice and a question that is treated on a case by case basis. If there’s a problem, more people get to see it. Obviously a senator can say, if you want my vote I want to see more.
What we’re seeing here is that the Trump team is trying to rope in a fairness or grievance issue vis a vis Biden to make their case. Because, as we know, in Trump world everything is about purported grievances and unfairness to Trump. Everything gets put through the Trump grievance machine.
I mentioned up above that whatever this “precedent” is probably isn’t terribly consequential in the big picture. As we’ve learned in recent years, and as this new story by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker makes clear, on a few fronts these FBI background checks aren’t quite all their cracked up to be or what many civilians, including myself, used to assume. They’re fairly cursory and even more cursory if the people requesting them want to keep them that way.