This week, Human Events has taken a look at Joe Biden’s picks for some of the most important positions in the land, revealing that many such choices raise the red flags of corporate cronyism concerns. Perhaps even more troubling than Big Business influence seeping into health and finance positions, is the potential for political and economic stakeholders to influence our country’s National Security and Domestic policy officials. In addition to their highly progressive political proclivities, and general competency concerns, some of Biden’s selections raise questions as to what the priorities of our nations’ relations will be.
Susan Rice -- Director of the Domestic Policy Council
Biden has announced that Rice will “coordinate the formulation and implementation of President-elect Biden’s domestic policy agenda to build back better.” During Rice’s history serving the Obama administration, she was often accused of peddling falsehoods and treating her role as a performative one.
In 2012 appearances on Sunday morning talk shows, UN Ambassador Susan Rice blamed the Benghazi attacks on an anti-muslim YouTube video and characterized them as spontaneous.
“She saw this as a great opportunity to go out and close the stature gap. She was focused on the performance, not the content,” said an unidentified colleague of the incident at the time.
Rice was caught relaying false accounts on multiple occasions about the nature of the Obama administration’s contact with various foreign entities.
In 2013, just eight months after the Boston Marathon bombing, Rice told 60 Minutes that “The fact that we have not had a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11 should not be diminished.”
Alejandro Mayorkas -- Secretary of Homeland Security
Biden boasts that Mayorkas would be the “first immigrant and Latino to lead the Department of Homeland Security.” During his time as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Obama, he led the implementation of the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrival program, which defers deportation for an estimated 690,000 to 800,000 illegal immigrants.
But Mayorkas also found himself in hot water when he was accused of using his position to ensure special accommodations for green card requests coming from wealthy foreign investors likely to fund American business that would promote a progressive agenda.
The EB-5 visa program allows foreign investors to invest large sums of money in American businesses in exchange for green cards. According to a 2015 report from the Office of the Inspector General, employees were concerned that Mayorkas was favoring EB-5 applicants that were investing in businesses aligned with a Democratic political agenda. This reportedly “created significant resentment” among U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staff.
“I do regret the perceptions that my activities created and I take responsibility for those perceptions,” Mayorkas said at the time.
The OIG reported that Mayorkas was involved in many such cases that would have been “decided differently” without his intervention, including applications from investors with connections to Hillary Clinton’s brother Anthony Rodham, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.
Avril Haines -- Director of National Intelligence
Within days of Biden’s announcement that he had selected Haines as his spy chief, her affiliation with the highly-controversial data mining company Palantir mysteriously disappeared from her Brookings Institute bio. The institute had previously listed Haines as being a consultant to the firm, which has been criticized for its ethically questionable role in supplying government agencies with unthinkable amounts of individuals’ personal data and technologies for tracking such forms of data. Palantir currently holds about $1.5 billion in federal government contracts.
Haines has also been accused of being virulently anti-Israel, having signed a letter earlier this year calling on Democrats to criticize the country, and calling for “a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and affirming a “clear opposition to ongoing occupation, settlement expansion and any form of unilateral annexation of territory in the West Bank.”
