Leaked vetting documents obtained by Axios show that President Donald Trump's transition team knew of, and ignored, red flags of several officials the president eventually hired for high-level positions, including Tom Price, Scott Pruitt and Rex Tillerson.
The documents also show that Trump's team considered it a "red flag" that General David Petraeus is opposed to torture and that Mick Mulvaney concluded that Trump is "not a very good person."
The Republican National Committee was charged with vetting individuals, an unusual move as the FBI, Office of Government Ethics and the president-elect’s political team typically handle the process.
But after Trump fired Chris Christie as head of his transition team two days after the election, the new team outsourced the vetting to the RNC. Christie said the move set Trump up for failure.
"The longer term consequences for the president is that he didn’t have the very best people in front of him to be able to make a full and fair decision about and then he paid the price for that later on with people like Pruitt, Mike Flynn," Christie told Axios. "In the end, this is a monumental staff failure that failed the president and, as a result, failed the country."
An RNC official defended the team’s work.
"It is not abnormal for a presidential transition team to utilize the national party committee as a resource in putting together background briefings on potential nominees and executive branch staff," he said, per The Hill. "These over 2-year-old documents were initial pre-interview briefings put together to inform the transition team of top-line issues of note in the candidates' background. Individuals selected for high-level administration jobs would have gone through more thorough background checks by lawyers, law enforcement agencies, and ethics officials before formally assuming their role."
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