(Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Wednesday with Marco Rubio, the senator chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to succeed him as top US diplomat, a small step toward managing a transition between the two administrations that has been unconventional at best.
“Secretary Blinken had an opportunity this morning to sit down with Senator Rubio,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said, adding that the two spoke for a “good chunk of time.”
“We have long said that we want to be as helpful as possible,” he said.
The meeting was a glimmer of normalcy in what so far has been an unusual transition from the Biden administration to the second Trump term.
Trump’s transition operation has deployed what’s known as an “agency review team” — a group of staffers who will work from offices at the State Department and help make sure Rubio and his people can get started working the day Trump takes office. The Senate must confirm Rubio’s nomination as the top US diplomat, although his Senate colleagues are fully expected to give their assent.
Most of the collaboration between the Biden and Trump teams on foreign policy has been concentrated at the White House’s National Security Council, though other officials including Blinken have communicated with their counterparts.
The unconventional nature of Trump’s transition apparatus — based in Florida and shunning customary resources from office space to government email addresses — has drawn criticism and raised concerns about potential security lapses.
The Trump transition team declined to comment on the size or composition of the State Department agency review team, or the meeting between Blinken and Rubio.
“The White House is receiving the names of those serving on landing teams. The landing team members are connecting with their counterparts at the departments and agencies,” said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the transition.
Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, cited accounts of agency personnel being targeted by “phishing efforts from outside operatives purporting to be the transition team, which is exactly why having government email addresses can be such a valuable asset.”
The incoming administration should rely on the career workforce, Stier said, particularly where a cabinet secretary may lack a firm grounding in the work of the department he or she leads. This may be a tough sell for Trump, who has expressed doubts about the loyalty of career public servants and pledged on the campaign trail to root out members of the “deep state” who could seek to derail his agenda.
Over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump assailed President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record. But officials also say the two sides have been talking on pressing policy issues.
Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Representative Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for the position, are in regular contact about a range of issues.
“There is a deep conviction on the part of the incoming national security team that we are dealing with” and “on our part, directed from President Biden, that it is our job, on behalf of the American people, to make sure this is a smooth transition,” Sullivan said at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Dec. 8.
In a previous Fox News appearance, Waltz said the two sides were working “hand in glove.”
The Biden administration has also chafed against Trump’s repeated conversations with foreign leaders, while informal advisers and some of the people appointed as his envoys have already held meetings on the issues they’re handling. Although such pre-inaugural contacts aren’t unheard-of, this level of engagement is a departure from the old saying that there’s only one president at a time.
Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, plans to travel to Kyiv next month as well as stops in London, Paris and Rome, according to a person familiar with the situation. He’s also open to traveling to Moscow if invited, according to the person, who asked not to be identified discussing internal plans.
“It shows that we are executing at a rapid tempo before the inauguration and then post-inauguration, because it’s kind of an attitude of — we’re on Trump time, and we want to get stuff done in a hurry,” Kellogg said in an interview on Fox Business.
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