The Trump Appointee Blocking Biden’s Transition Is Reportedly Trying to Line Up a New Job for 2021

While Donald Trump is obviously solely responsible for the psychotic and mortifying postelection tantrum he’s been throwing for the past two weeks, a shit fit akin to watching a fellow supermarket shopper ram his cart into a display of Diet Coke and smash a dozen glass jars of pickles on the ground because he was told the store is closing in five minutes and he can’t stay any longer, his enablers aren’t far behind him when it comes to doling about blame for this global embarrassment. Obviously that includes senators like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and other spine-lacking Republicans but also an appointee whose name few people outside government knew as of last week: Emily Murphy.

The administrator of the General Services Administration must sign paperwork officially releasing millions of dollars to the winner of the election, in addition to giving its transition team access to government officials, office space in federal agencies, and taxpayer-funded equipment. In essence, as the Washington Post put it, the letter “amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.” But 13 days after the 2020 election and more than a week after all major media outlets called the race for Joe Biden, with Trump having absolutely no chance of getting a second term, Murphy has refused to acknowledge that Biden won, making it that much more difficult for the president-elect and his team to get a head start on crucial matters like a pandemic that has killed more than 245,000 people in the U.S. so far and stands to kill a lot more if no one does anything about it until January 2021. (“More people may die if we don’t coordinate,” Biden told reporters on Monday, stressing the need for his transition team to get access to the government’s plan for distributing a future COVID-19 vaccine. “A vaccine is important. It’s of little use until you are vaccinated. So how do we get the vaccine, how do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What is the game plan? It is a huge, huge, huge undertaking to get it done,” Biden said. “If we have to wait until January 20 to start that planning, it puts us behind over a month, month and a half. And so, it’s important that it be done, that there be coordination now. Now or as rapidly as we can get that done.”)

And yet, despite the fact that Murphy is fine with effectively f–king over millions of people in deference to Trump, by acting as though he’s legitimately going to have a second term, she’s apparently making sure to line up options for herself when that second term never happens, according to ABC News:

The top General Services Administration official who’s blocking President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition team from accessing government resources ahead of his inauguration appears to be looking for a new job, according to a message obtained by ABC News. Emily Murphy, head of the GSA, recently sent that message to an associate inquiring about employment opportunities in 2021, a move that some in Washington interpreted as at least tacitly acknowledging that the current administration soon will be gone.

Congressional Democrats have accused Murphy of undermining the peaceful transition of power and could subpoena her for testimony on Capitol Hill to explain why she’s doing so. And while it’s true that there’s often a reshuffling of officials after a presidential election, regardless of whether the incumbent returns, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., a senior member of the House Oversight Committee, insisted that Murphy reaching out privately about future employment opportunities “exposes the hypocrisy” of the Trump administration’s position.

“Here’s somebody who refuses to sign the letter of transition but is self-dealing at the same time,” he told ABC News. “That’s a de facto recognition that there’s an incoming administration, and it’s not called Trump—it’s called Biden.”