Saturday, October 12, 2024
Friday, October 11, 2024
Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon take heavy toll on civilians
Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon take heavy toll on civilians
“The airstrikes are reviving criticism of Israel over its apparent tolerance for high civilian casualties in pursuit of military goals, rights groups say.
SIDON, Lebanon — Zahra Assi sat in her hospital bed last week, wounded in both legs by an Israeli airstrike, struggling with pain but spared by her family, momentarily, from worse: the 7-year old had not been told that the strike had killed her mother, a brother and four other members of her family, one of her surviving brothers said.
As Israel expands a ferocious air campaign in Lebanon that it says targets Hezbollah with precision, the civilian toll is soaring — reviving critical questions about the consideration Israel gives to noncombatants when it carries out the strikes.
The bombing that injured Zahra targeted a residential building in the southern town of Ain Aldelb, where she was staying with her family and dozens of other civilians. Multiple Israeli munitions struck the building Sept. 29, causing it to collapse, survivors said.
At least 45 people were killed, making it one of the deadliest single attacks of the war, health officials said. Days before, another Israeli bombing on a building in the Bekaa Valley killed 15 people, all but one from the same extended family, relatives said.
In response to questions about the strike in Ain Aldelb, about three miles east of Sidon, the Israeli military said it had “eliminated the commander of Hezbollah’s Sidon compound along with several other operatives” after “the execution of evacuation procedures.” It did not name the commander, say how many other operatives were killed or disclose how people were warned to evacuate.
The military did not respond to questions on the Bekaa Valley attack.
As in Gaza — where Israel’s military offensive against Hamas has killed tens of thousands of people over the last year, many of them women and children — rights groups say the scale and intensity of the strikes in Lebanon mean large numbers of civilians are likely to be killed here, too.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled as much in a recorded video message that he released Tuesday, when he warned Lebanon against falling “into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
The strikes in Gaza and now in Lebanon “raise serious concerns about the tolerance for civilian casualties,” said Richard Weir, a researcher in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, who noted that the group has previously documented in Gaza “apparent war crimes by Israeli forces, including airstrikes that have caused massive casualties.”
While Weir said the Israeli military has demonstrated it can be “extremely precise in terms of the damage caused” by its airpower — taking out single cars or individual floors of apartment buildings in targeted strikes on militant leaders — other attacks have been “extremely destructive,” he said. “In some cases, it’s difficult to identify what the target of an individual strike has been — or how they assess the military advantage against expected civilian harm.”
In the three weeks since Israel began its military escalation with attacks on pagers used by Hezbollah, more than 1,500 people have been killed, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians but says at least 333 women and children were among the dead between Sept. 16 and Oct.3.
On Sept. 23 alone, the first day of stepped-up bombing, when Israel carried out more than 1,300 strikes, some 569 people were killed, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said. “The vast majority of those who fell were unarmed people who were in their homes,” he said a day later.
Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said during a visit to Beirut on Sunday that there had been “many instances of violations of international humanitarian law in the way the airstrikes are conducted that have destroyed or damaged civilian infrastructure” or killed civilians.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in support of its ally Hamas, setting off a low-level conflict that displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border. From the beginning of the conflict through Sept. 21, Hezbollah conducted at least 1,758 air or drone attacks against Israel, according to data compiled by the ACLED, an organization that collects data on conflicts. In the same period, Israel carried nearly 9,000 airstrikes, the group said.
Twenty-eight civilians in Israel have been killed by Hezbollah attacks, the Israeli military said Thursday.
Israel has characterized its ground invasion of southern Lebanon as “limited” and “localized” — aimed at pushing Hezbollah fighters away from the border and returning displaced Israelis to their homes in the north — but its aerial campaign is only growing.
Israeli strikes have devastated large swaths of the country’s south, thud daily into Beirut’s southern suburbs and have started to creep toward central areas in the capital and new areas in Lebanon’s north. On Monday, Israel unleashed a barrage of dozens of strikes, on towns around the southern city of Tyre.
Adding to the public anxiety are Israeli warnings to avoid Hezbollah “infrastructure” — orders seen as both untenable and dangerously vague. Supporters of the militant group, which is also the country’s most powerful political party, are spread across Lebanon. So are the facilities used in its expansive social services network, including hospitals and schools.
Evacuation orders have been issued by Israel for villages across southern Lebanon, including warnings to avoid driving cars in the region — one of the few means of escape for most people. Other recent warnings to civilians, to avoid buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs, have been posted on social media by an Israel Defense Forces spokesman in the middle of the night.
The strikes have battered Shiite Muslim-majority towns in the increasingly depopulated south, including those where residents said people were largely supportive of Hezbollah but not involved in its operations. And neighboring Christian communities or towns with diverse populations have not been spared.
Witnesses and survivors of the strike in Ain Aldelb said all they knew for sure about the attack was that the building was filled with civilians.
Hisham al-Baba, 59, lives in Berlin and was visiting his 40-year-old sister, Donize. He was in the bathroom at the time of the strike and somehow that saved him, he said from his hospital bed at the Labib Medical Center in the city of Sidon. He was stuck under the rubble for nine hours before being rescued, he said.
Donize; her husband, Moyheldin el-Rawas, 50; and their children Ali, 16, and Nermine, 21, were killed in the strike. Nermine was engaged to be married. Moyheldin was found hugging his children, Baba said.
“We lost. A big loss,” he said. “Catastrophe.”
Downstairs in the same hospital, Zahra’s older brother, Ali Assi, 18, said his family was among the displaced people sheltering in the same building. They had relocated from their home near the southern city of Tyre because of heavy bombing, he said, including an airstrike in front of their home. Zahra’s left thigh had what the doctors called a severe crushing wound that had exposed the bone, and lacerations on her right leg.
One of Ali’s fingers, struck by shrapnel, had to be partially amputated. He was looking after his sister in the hospital while their father, who also survived, had gone back to their village — to bury his wife and the rest of the family.
The attack also killed all nine members of a family that had just fled from the village of Aitaroun, said Osama Saad, a parliament member from Sidon. Others in the building had been displaced from similarly small communities along the border: “So they came to this building fleeing from their towns, they came to their relatives who live in this building,” Saad said.
“The Israeli army usually says they hit a place because of this and that, but this time they did not say anything,” he added, referring to the Israeli military’s public silence for more than a week about the target of the strike. “They killed all these people, but they didn’t say why they hit this place. This is a war crime.”
In the bed next to Zahra, also watching cartoons, was Ziyad Kharaiss, 10, the survivor of a different strike Sunday on his family’s home in the southern town of Khiam. His face was blistered and bruised with what the doctors called “head and ear trauma.”
Among his family, he had the sharpest recollection of what had befallen them — recalling the day and the time the strike occurred, as his mother sometimes sobbed and struggled for words. A Syrian couple and another man were killed in the strike.
The neighborhood was “civilian,” said Rabiah Kharaiss, Ziyad’s father. “We were shocked. Shocked.”
Another son, Ali, 24, was upstairs in the intensive care unit, healing from injuries including the loss of his right eye. Ali and his father were mechanics, the father said. “We are 100 percent defenseless people. We are not affiliated with anyone,” he said.
Another strike, days earlier in the Bekaa Valley, killed 15 people, including extended members of the Shuaib family. The attack sent cars flying and destroyed the building where the family lived in separate apartments, as well as a neighboring house, relatives said.
One relative said most of the adults who were killed worked as teachers, including one who worked in a private school network run by Hezbollah.
The dead included Ali Shuaib, 16, who left behind a bereft principal at his school in the nearby town of Zahleh, two grieving cousins next door and half a dozen chickens he had been raising. They wandered around the rubble after he was gone.
Ali played football and basketball, and “loved to go hiking,” said one of the cousins, a 16-year old also named Ali, as he stood with his brother looking down on the massive heap of concrete and cushions and metal and books.
“It feels unreal,” said Rakan Shuaib, another relative and retired Lebanese army soldier who lived next door. “The town here was supposed to be safe, so a lot of people are coming over to ask us for help finding them a shelter or place to stay.” The bombing blew out walls in his building too. He remained in the house, “because there is no other choice.”
The vast majority of the strikes, he contended, were on people who are “not related to the environment of Hezbollah.” The bombing he said, was “barbaric.”
Thursday, October 10, 2024
WATCH LIVE: Obama makes appearance for Harris campaign in Pittsburgh
Extremist who trained GOP poll workers will speak at Washington event with two rightwingers
Extremist who trained GOP poll workers will speak at Washington event with two rightwingers
“Steve Sailer to appear alongside a ‘proponent of scientific racism’ and a law professor suspended for ‘racist’ remarks
A rightwing activist who last month trained poll workers for the Republican National Committee will speak in Washington DC on Thursday night alongside an extremist writer who is a “proponent of scientific racism” and a law professor who was suspended after allegedly making “racist, sexist and homophobic”remarks and inviting a white nationalist to address her class.
Jack Posobiec, Steve Sailer and Amy Wax will appear together at the event, which will take place at the presidential suite at Washington DC’s Union Station, according to ticketing information obtained by the Guardian.
The event has been promoted by Sailer’s far-right publisher Passage Press, and was originally scheduled to take place after Sailer’s speaking date at New College of Florida (NCF), which the Guardian reported on last month.
The Florida event has now been postponed until next year according to the NCF spokesperson Nathan March, who said that the NCF campus has been evacuated in advance of the expected arrival of Hurricane Milton.
The event and Posobiec’s position as an influential pro-Donald Trump operative raise questions about the further penetration of openly racist politics into the Republican party. The Guardian emailed Events at Union Station and the Republican National Committee but received no response.
Sailer’s publisher, Passage Press, is marketing the event as a leg of his book tour, Noticing.
Last month, the Guardian reported on the contents of that book. In it Sailer claims that Black Americans are inherently more prone to criminal behavior on average; that liberal attitudes to race allows the purported criminal tendencies of Black people to go unchecked; that Black people around the world are on average less intelligent than white people; and that Black people are prone to “primitive” beliefs and behaviors.
Earlier this year, the Guardian identified Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind Passage Press and the influential “New Right” Twitter/X account “L0m3z”.
Posobiec’s history as a pro-Trump influencer has been extensively reported in the Guardian and other outlets. Posobiec has been prominent since 2016 in promoting disinformation on social media and on fringe, partisan news outlets including Rebel News and One America News Network.
The Guardian last year outlined Posobiec’s role in promoting conspiracy theories including “#Pizzagate” and claims about Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Posobiec has used X, where his account now has 2.7 million followers, to “promote Russian military intelligence operations, pushed false claims of election fraud and collaborated with white nationalists, Proud Boys and neo-Nazis”.
But this has not hindered Posobiec’s rise in the Trump-era Republican party. Last year Semafor reported that Posobiec was seen by Republican strategists as the influencer with “the most clout with Republican voters” and Posobiec has used this influence to promote false narratives about elections.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extremist file on Posobiec, he spread falsehoods about primary and general elections under the “#StoptheSteal” banner in 2016, 2018 and 2020, with the latter campaign preceding the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Posobiec has also spread misinformation in this election season, posting unsourced and unverified information about the election itself, about Haitian immigrants, and hurricane flooding in Appalachia.
Posobiec’s work as an author has so far drawn little scrutiny from reporters. Since 2017 he has published five books, including one children’s book, with a sixth title scheduled for publication later this month.
The Guardian has reviewed a selection of his extant books.
From 2018, 4D Warfare offers rightwingers “a new way of waging the culture wars–and winning!”, promotes tactics including “disinformation” (defined as “the dissemination of false, half-true, and misleading information”) and “large-scale deception programs”, and counsels: “Deception helps you to achieve your goals by confusing your adversaries about what they truly are.”
Last July, Posobiec released Unhumans, whose title is a characterization of Posobiec’s perceived enemies, including “communists in the twentieth century and progressives of our own day”.
The book comes with blurbs by rightwing luminaries including Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr and his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance. The latter wrote: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.”
Posobiec writes of the titular “unhumans”: “They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty, and property – and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.”
The book praises murderous dictators including Francisco Franco and Chiang Kai-shek for their opposition to communism, and recommends that “unhumans” in the US be subject to targeted “lawfare” including “RICO lawsuits” against “Soros-affiliated NGOs”, and “well-publicized lists with dossiers” targeting perceived opponents in “education but also in media, throughout the economy, and more”.
His co-writer on Unhumans, Joshua Lisec, has ghostwritten books for other rightwing influencers, and claims on his website to be “the only Certified Ghostwriter and Certified Hypnotist in the world”, marketing his process as “hypnowriting”.
Lisec is also co-author of the forthcoming Bulletproof, which claims to offer “the truth about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump”.
Posobiec’s history as a conspiracy theorist has apparently not discredited him in the eyes of the current, Trump-aligned Republican establishment.
According to the New York Times, Posobiec told Republican committee volunteers scheduled to monitor polling in Michigan that the key to elections is that “it doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes”.
Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project against Hate and Extremism, said of Posobiec’s place inside the Republican party’s tent meant that “the Republican party has gone over the edge”.
Beirich added: “This Republican party and its officials associate with extremists of seemingly every stripe,” and that the party “is unrecognizable … What the hell happened to Bush’s party, or Reagan’s party?”
Wax, who will share the stage with Sailer and Posobiec, was suspended by the University of Pennsylvania this year after a string of controversial statements stretching back to 2017.
That year she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer claiming: “All cultures are not equal,” and criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants”.
Later that year, Wax said in an interview that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a Black student graduate in the top half of their class at Penn Law, a claim which was later disputed by Penn Law’s then dean, Theodore Ruger.
In 2019, at the National Conservatism conference, Wax said that the US would be “better off with more whites and fewer non-whites”.
In 2022, she told the conservative economist Glenn Loury in an interview that the US would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”, and told Tucker Carlson the same year that “Blacks” and other “non-Western” groups harbor “resentment, shame, and envy” against western people for their “outsized achievements”, and non-white critics of the west know “on some level, their country is a shithole”.
Wax’s Washington appearance comes just over a month before her scheduled appearance at American Renaissance, the annual white nationalist gathering hosted by Jared Taylor. Other advertised speakers there include Martin Sellner, founder of Austrian far-right nationalist group Identitäre Bewegung Österreich.
Wax has invited Taylor to her classroom several times.
Beirich said that Wax is “a flat-out white nationalist with a ton of white nationalist friends. There’s no pussyfooting around her politics.”
A Penn spokesperson told the Guardian: “Last year, a five-member faculty Hearing Board determined that Professor Amy Wax violated the University’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students,” adding: “These findings are now final.”
Wednesday, October 09, 2024
Opinion | The Biden administration’s Israel policies need to change - The Washington Post
Opinion Don’t believe the Netanyahu bashing. The U.S. basically agrees with him.
"The Biden administration’s policies toward the Middle East over the past year are generally cast by the media as well-meaning but ineffective. The president and his team, according to what his aides tell reporters, are pushing hard for a resolution that ends the violence. The president reportedly scolds Benjamin Netanyahu when the two speak privately but can’t get the Israeli prime minister on board with a strategy that would minimize Palestinian casualties.
There is probably some truth to all of that. But a year into a conflict that has now expanded beyond Gaza to the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, I’m increasingly convinced the Biden administration largely agrees with Netanyahu’s strategy, despite sometimes implying otherwise. In many ways, Netanyahu’s policies are America’s policies — and acknowledging that dynamic is a first step to changing it.
America is not all-powerful abroad. But the idea that the United States has little influence with a close ally to whom it’s providing billions of dollars of weapons is hard to believe. After all, foreign governments often bend to the United States’ will. At the Biden administration’s urging, Mexico has made it much harder for migrants traveling from Latin America to enter the United States. Ukrainian leaders have sometimes complained about how many conditions are attached to the U.S. military aid that they get to fight Russia.
And when the United States doesn’t get its way, it’s often quite aggressive in response. Last month, the Justice Department announced it had seized a plane that had been used by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has angered American officials by not relinquishing power despite clear evidence he lost a recent election.
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But over the past year, despite constant reports of tensions between the two nations, the American government has taken few actions to rein in Israel, such as conditioning military aid on reducing civilian casualties. Biden and his top aides have gone out of their way to ignore or downplay Israeli moves that human rights groups, other nations and even career officials within the U.S. government have sharply criticized. Those include Israel blocking humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinian civilians, killing a Hamas leader who was a leading figure in U.S.-led cease-fire talks, and mass detonating pagers used by Hezbollah.
I’m not suggesting that Israel would stop trying to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah simply because the United States asked. Israel views the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed more than 1,200 people as a defining event in its history that must be avenged and prevented from ever happening again.
But if the United States pushed hard, in my view, it could have forced Israel to reduce the suffering of Palestinian civilians who played no role in Oct. 7. And the Israelis have been emboldened to take overly aggressive actions because U.S. support seems unconditional.
Why hasn’t the United States constrained Israel in any real way? Because it doesn’t really want to. I’m sure Biden is saddened by the deaths of Palestinian children and women. But both his public comments and those from other administration officials suggest the U.S. government broadly agrees with Netanyahu’s perspective on the Middle East. Leaders in Israel and the United States cast Israel as a morally good democratic nation surrounded by countries hostile to its existence. They are very wary of Iran gaining power and influence. They imply that almost any Israeli military action is justified both because of the depravity of Oct. 7 and because of the continued threat to Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in particular.
So even if the United States would prefer Israel to do fewer bombings in densely populated areas of Gaza, the two nations are aligned on the fundamental issues.
But what’s happened over the past year — Israel killing civilians en masse, creating roadblocks to cease-fire agreements and escalating the conflict beyond Gaza — can’t go on. The United States needs a new policy toward Israel. But that won’t come just by lecturing Netanyahu or Biden about how many children are dying or starving.
Instead, we have to push them to rethink the core ideas behind this alliance. The United States shouldn’t be getting into long-term cold (and hot) wars with China, Iran or Russia or any other nation but instead condemning specific actions, such as Russia invading Ukraine. Allies, whether Britain or Israel, should be criticized when they act unjustly.
And most important, we must prioritize everyday people, not nations, whose leaders often don’t represent their citizens. Nothing Hamas’s, Hezbollah’s or Iran’s leaders do justifies high numbers of civilian deaths. What Biden and his aides should have been constantly saying the past year is, “Israeli and Palestinian lives matter,” not, “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
The Biden administration and critics of what Israel is doing need to stop whining about Netanyahu. He alone is not the problem. The United States should either admit it basically agrees with the prime minister’s strategy — or take real steps to push him in a less destructive direction."
Trump Holds Up Transition Process, Skirting Ethics and Fund-Raising Rules - The New York Times
Trump Holds Up Transition Process, Skirting Ethics and Fund-Raising Rules
"Donald J. Trump has so far opted out of the official planning for a government handover, a move that allows him to avoid disclosing his donors to his transition effort.
Less than a month before Election Day, Donald J. Trump’s campaign has not yet participated in the government’s official presidential transition process, a significant break from past practice that could threaten the seamless transfer of power should the Republican nominee win election.
Mr. Trump’s team has missed two key deadlines to sign agreements with the administration that are set by federal law and has also failed to sign an ethics plan that is required to jump-start the process of planning for a new administration. Mr. Trump’s representatives did attend a meeting at the White House last month, but they otherwise have had little communication with the Biden administration about the handoff and have skipped the opportunity to receive national security briefings.
Mr. Trump’s approach is a clear, although not wholly unexpected, departure from how previous presidential candidates prepared to take control of the vast federal bureaucracy. It appears to be guided, at least in part, by the candidate’s deep suspicion and mistrust of the government he is running to lead.
Experts note Mr. Trump may also have other incentives. His refusal to sign the documents allows him to circumvent fund-raising rules that put limits on private contributions to the transition effort, as well as ethics rules meant to avoid possible conflicts of interest for the incoming administration.
Representatives of Mr. Trump’s transition team, formally known as Trump Vance 2025 Transition Inc., said its lawyers were still negotiating with the Biden administration over terms of the agreements.
Lawyers for both parties “continue to constructively engage” in talks, Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, the Trump transition co-chairs, said in a statement to The New York Times. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false and intentionally misleading.”
The transition team for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has signed all three documents, according to White House officials.
The formal transition process, which is dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has traditionally been viewed as nonpartisan. Candidates typically begin setting up teams as early as six months before Election Day in order to begin the time-consuming work of vetting and hiring thousands of political appointees and creating policy agendas, while coordinating directly with the current administration to ensure that agencies run smoothly during the turnover.
By delaying that process, Mr. Trump’s team has cut itself off from some government services and, potentially, millions of dollars in funding. It has also, at least for now, prevented aides from getting security clearances required before they can review federal records.
“An effective transition leads to an effective administration. It leads to better staffing, better organization and leads to the country being safer and more secure,” said Heath Brown, a public policy professor at John Jay College who wrote a book on the Biden administration’s transition. “I think the Trump transition team is unsure of how much they want to play by the rules.”
Mr. Trump has broken convention on this front before. In 2016, his campaign organized what appeared to be a standard transition process. But after Election Day, Mr. Trump sharply changed course, firing the leadership of his transition team and cutting off communications with the Obama administration.
Four years later, the Trump administration stuck closely to the standard transition script until immediately after the election, when the General Services Administration — which oversees much of the process — followed President Trump’s lead in refusing to recognize his defeat. For nearly three weeks, his administration froze money meant for the winning candidate and impeded communications between the Biden transition team and the federal agencies.
Given that rocky recent history, the Center for Presidential Transition, a nonpartisan nonprofit, published an open letter in March urging both parties to begin planning early, noting that “the stakes of the next transition are extremely high.”
Mr. Trump did not name the leadership of his transition team until mid-August, months after leading candidates typically do so. Less than a week later, he told the British tabloid The Daily Mail that he would refuse national security briefings, saying he didn’t trust the Biden administration.
“I don’t need that briefing,” Mr. Trump said. “They come in, they give you a briefing, and then two days later, they leak it, and then they say, ‘You leaked it.’”
In 2017, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused the General Services Administration of improperly handing over thousands of emails from the 2016 Trump transition to the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of his investigation into allegations of foreign interference in the election. To address such concerns, the agency this year added new language to its proposed agreements stating that it would not share records from the transition teams with third parties without written consent.
Although the deadline to sign that document, referred to as a memorandum of understanding, was Sept. 1., the Trump team has not signed it. Under its terms, the General Services Administration offers office space, technology support and a variety of other services to both candidates, as well as up to $7.2 million in funding to the president-elect to help cover staffing, travel and other costs.
That assistance comes with a significant string attached: To receive it, each transition team must agree to disclose its private donors and impose a $5,000 limit on contributions from individuals or organizations.
After the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s team disclosed $6.5 million in outside contributions to support its transition. Four years later, the Biden transition revealed that it had raised $22.1 million from private donors.
If a campaign does not sign the General Services Administration agreement, it is not subject to the fund-raising limits or disclosure requirements. And unlike campaign contributions, money donated to the transition is not regulated by the Federal Election Commission.
“They are allowed to raise whatever money they want and they don’t have to say where they got it,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, an emeritus professor of political science at Towson University who has studied presidential transitions.
Last week, the Trump transition team missed a second deadline, this time to sign an agreement with the White House on access to government information. That document determines how classified information can be shared and how transition aides can communicate with government agencies, and it requires security clearances for anyone receiving classified and nonpublic records. The agreement is contingent on the campaigns’ signing an ethics plan, also provided by the White House.
Without those agreements, Ms. Kumar said, it is virtually impossible for the Trump transition to prepare for a transfer of power or, critically, to receive important national security information before the election. “National security is the most worrisome,” she said. “They would be missing a great deal.”
The Trump transition team said its staff was required to sign its own ethics code and conflict of interest statement. It provided copies of those documents to The Times.
The Trump ethics code appears more lenient than the White House version. For example, the White House code requires the transition team to get federal approval before hiring anyone who has represented a foreign government in the past year and prohibits aides from working for a foreign government for one year after leaving the transition. Under the Trump ethics code, staff members are barred from representing a foreign government only during the time they are working for the transition.
The White House plan also prohibits staff members from trying to influence or lobby the agencies that they dealt with on the transition for a full year after their work ends; the Trump code’s cooling-off period is six months.
The Trump transition officials suggested they might still enter an agreement with the Biden administration. Both Ms. Kumar and Mr. Brown said it was possible the Trump transition team could sign the White House proposal on information sharing and ethics, but not the General Services Administration agreement, a move that would allow the transition to move ahead with the most critical aspects of a power transfer without having to limit its fund-raising.
Saloni Sharma, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration was “actively working with the Trump transition team to complete” the agreements. Channing Grate, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, said in a statement that it “is prepared to provide services to the Trump transition team” once a signed agreement is submitted."