In the spirit of keeping campaign-promises President-elect Donald Trump tapped Mike Pence to help purge lobbyists from official roles in the Trump transition team. According to sources who spoke to FoxNews on Tuesday, Pence is now vetting candidates for the new Trump administration with a careful eye.
The decision to remove lobbyists "makes good on [Trump's] vision of how he wants his government constructed," one of the sources said. Fox adds:
Tuesday evening, Pence formally signed a memorandum of understanding putting him in charge of the transition team. A similar document had been signed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who spent months running transition operations before his demotion last week.
The switch slowed Trump's ability to coordinate the transfer of power with the Obama administration. White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine told the Associated Press the administration was waiting on more documents required by law before agencies could begin sharing information with the transition team.
Pence ignored questions from reporters Tuesday, both as he entered Trump Tower with a thick binder tucked under his arm, and as he left six hours later.
A person familiar with the transition efforts told AP different factions in Trump's team "are fighting for power."
"That organization right now is not designed to work," according to the person close to the efforts, who like others involved in the transition, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the internal process.
The group organized by Christie had featured a litany of lobbyists, former bureaucrats, academics and corporate lawyers. That caused consternation from Trump, who won cheers on the campaign trail for his repeated promises to "drain the swamp" in Washington.
Of course leftists like Sen. Elizabeth Warren latched on to the notion that Trump might stack his cabinet with precisely the types of people he said he wouldn't, saying that if Trump did not replace people connected with Wall Street on his transition team, "I will oppose you, every step of the way, for the next four years."
Not that Warren's threats would or should serve as a catalyst for Trump, but it's still nice to continue to prove leftists wrong.
Fox notes that several people connected with Wall Street are now out of Trump's transition team, including Christie-recruit former Rep. Mike Rogers.
Even people like GOP national security official Eliot Cohen, who routinely opposed Trump, has now come around to working with the new administration and says he's "changed his recommendations" accordingly.
