US House Republicans are giving Democrats a taste of their own medicine by scrutinising President-elect Joe Biden's cabinet picks, in an echo of bids to block US President Donald Trump's nominees.
Members of the Oversight and Reform Committee, led by ranking member James Comer have written to Biden's chief of staff nominee, Ron Klain, demanding answers to their concerns about four nominees.
The four are Biden designates for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and office of management and budget head Neera Tanden. To take up those posts, all will need the approval of the Senate which looks like it could remain under Republican control.
Antony Blinken and Avril Haines
Committee members questioned whether Blinken's work for WestExec Advisors, a Beltway consulting firm he founded with other former officials he worked with in the administration of US President Barack Obama, was a “disqualifying conflicts of interest.” Haines worked at the company until July.
The GOP representatives asked if the firm, whose slogan is “bringing the situation room to the board room”, took any work related to China or other foreign governments and if it had any financial connections with the Asian power. They addressed the same questions to Blinken and four other executives at the company.
WestExec recently removed references on its website to helping universities qualify for Defence Department research grants while simultaneously cooperating with foreign research bodies, taking foreign donations and accepting foreign students.
The company said it no longer offered those services to universities, which it claimed were “to help them avoid inadvertently becoming involved with the Chinese government.”
WestExec's website describes the firm as an "unrivaled, bipartisan team of senior national security leaders with the most recent experience and unmatched networks in defense, foreign policy, intelligence, economics, cybersecurity, data privacy, and strategic communications." Blinken is said to have been one of the architects and cheerleaders of Obama's sponsorship of conflicts across the Middle East, including Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Alejandro Mayorkas
The GOP committee members also pressed Biden's transition team on a critical 2015 report by the Inspector-General's Office into Mayorkas, then director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services under Obama. The report found Mayorkas had wielded “improper influence” over the EB-5 immigration programme in three instances to aid applicants.
The EB-5 programme, set up in 1990, grants lawful permanent resident or 'green card' status to businesspeople who invest at least $900,000 in the US. It has been the subject of controversy, including several major fraud operations targeting prospective candidates and applicants suspected of being fugitives or linked to Iranian and Chinese intelligence services. That led to an unsuccessful 2017 bipartisan attempt in Congress to end the programme.
A spokesperson for Mayorkas insisted that, despite the Inspector-General's criticism, the report did not find that he broke any laws.
Neera Tanden
Republican congress members claim that Tanden has an "unsettling" background, including “bullying, outing a victim of sexual harassment, making viciously partisan statements, and overall, exhibiting poor leadership.”
Tanden, who is of Indian descent and would be the first ethnic-minority holder of the post, is currently president and chief executive of liberal think-tank The Center for American Progress (CAP), whose founder and former president is Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Tanden's office described her 2018 naming of a sexual assault victim who worked at CAP as a "mistake."
The committee members also homed in on Tanden's deletion of over 1,000 of her past Twitter posts after Biden nominated her for the job.
“Have any of these potential nominees deleted social media material either two weeks prior to the November 3, 2020, election or since the election? If so, why?” they asked Klain.
CAP strongly advocated in 2016 for close ties with the powerful Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two leading members of the coalition fighting the US-supported war in Yemen, but has also been accused of hostility toward Washington's main Mideast ally Israel.
In 2019, the organisation sacked two staff members after an internal probe into a leak of emails discussing how it should officially react to the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi attackers in the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul.
Khashoggi, a royal insider and fierce critic of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Sultan, was murdered when he visited the Saudi consulate in Turkey to obtain a marriage license. His assassins cut his body into small pieces which were then flushed down a toilet.
The Saudi monarchy denied a role in the journalist's killing. In December 2019, a Saudi court sentenced five suspects said to be involved in the murder to death and jailed another three for 24 years.
In Kavanaugh's case, Democrats presented four separate allegations of sexual assault dating back to his teenage years in the 1980s, which had never been reported to authorities.