President-elect Trump’s Cabinet picks are skating through their confirmation process without filing as much background information as previous appointees, according to Secretary of State John Kerry.
“I’m stepping beyond my bailiwick, but it’s quite amazing to me when I think of the hoops I had to jump through with respect to papers submitted and documentation and tax returns and a whole bunch of things,” the outgoing secretary of state said Tuesday at the United States Institute of Peace. “Suddenly, that’s gone ‘poof’ and it’s not as important.”
Kerry was amplifying a complaint leveled by Senate Democrats, who sought to delay some of the confirmation hearings taking place this week on the grounds that the nominees had not completed their FBI background checks or other ethics agreements. But Kerry put it within a broader complaint that Trump, like other leaders around the world, could have the opportunity to act without “accountability” in a fractured media environment.
“If policy is going to be made in 140 characters on Twitter and every reasonable measurement of accountability is being bypassed and people don’t care about it, we have a problem,” Kerry said in a clear reference to the president-elect.
Kerry’s shots might seem at odds with the goal of a “smooth transition” that President Obama promised, but he revealed that there’s little collaboration between his team and the Trump team at the State Department. “Well, it’s going pretty smoothly because there’s not an enormous amount of it,” he said. “There are some people who have been in the building for a period of time; but, quite candidly, I think there has not been a lot of high-level exchanges at this point in time.”
“In fairness,” he allowed, “there is automatically a focus on hearings and that’s a pretty internal process, so there’s time yet for ample debriefing.”
Whenever he does talk with Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson and the rest of the incoming State Department team, there will be a focus on defending the major agreements he negotiated in recent years, such as the Iran deal and the Paris climate accord.
“We won’t lead by walking away from the Iran deal and walking away from China, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain,” Kerry said. “That will not be leadership. We will not lead if we abandon a 186-nation climate change agreement.”
