Biden Taps Former CIA, Obama Officials To Handle ‘Pre-Transition’

Former Vice President Joe Biden has assembled a transition team for a smooth return to the White House, should he beat President Trump in the November election.

Leading the team is former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE), who filled Biden’s senate seat when he became VP – and led Biden’s 2008 and 2009 transition team, according to Fox News.

Kauffman says they’re in the “very early stages of pre-transition planning” after hiring around six people – including “Obama Administration and Capitol Hill veterans,” according to the report. There’s also a former CIA official.

Yohannes Abraham, a longtime senior White House staffer in the Obama administration and former COO of the Obama Foundation, will manage day-to-day operations. Avril Haines, former principal deputy national security advisor and deputy director of the CIA, will manage the transition’s national security and foreign policy efforts.

Other staffers will include Gautam Raghavan, chief of staff to Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Angela Ramirez, chief of staff to Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico; Evan Ryan, a senior advisor to Biden during the Obama administration, and Julie Siegel, who worked for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as senior counsel for economic policy. –Fox News

“The next president will confront an ongoing global health pandemic and inherit an economy in its worst shape since the Great Depression,” he said in a statement. “No one will have taken office facing such daunting obstacles since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Joe Biden is prepared to meet these urgent challenges on the day he is sworn in as president, and begin the hard work of addressing the public health crisis and rebuilding an economy that puts working families first.”

According to team Biden, the timing of the transition staffing coincides with the “Edward “Ted” Kaufman and Michael Leavitt Presidential Transitions Improvement Act of 2015″ which requires that campaigns begin initial transition work six months before an election.