December 14, 2024 - Presidential transition news

Our live coverage of the Trump administration’s transition has moved here.

Ric Grenell speaks at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 17.

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday announced Ric Grenell would serve as the presidential envoy for special missions.

Grenell served as the acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first administration. He was also Trump’s ambassador to Germany and the presidential envoy for Kosovo-Serbia negotiations, according to the president-elect’s announcement.

Some background: While serving in Trump’s first administration, Grenell embarked upon an effort to declassify documents that were of interest to the then-president, who believed they could delegitimize the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Last year, Grenell testified before a grand jury investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents.

Grenell remained in Trump’s orbit after the former president left office and was floated for the role of CIA director in Trump’s second term, though the position ultimately went to John Ratcliffe.

This post has been updated with additional information.

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday announced Edward Walsh as his pick to serve as US ambassador to Ireland.

Walsh helms a construction and real estate company and was previously the chair of the New Jersey agency that manages the construction of new school facilities, according to Trump’s announcement on Truth Social.

President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and Daniel Penny, center, attend the Army-Navy football game Saturday in Landover, Maryland.

Daniel Penny, the former Marine who was acquitted on criminal charges this week in the death of Jordan Neely, was spotted alongside Vice President-elect JD Vance in the presidential suite at the Army-Navy football game on Saturday.

“SPOTTED: American Hero Daniel Penny joins VP-elect @JDVance at the @ArmyNavyGame,” wrote the Trump War Room account on X, a social media account for the president-elect’s campaign.

Vance had invited Penny earlier in the week after he was acquitted by a jury on a criminally negligent homicide charge in a case that raised questions about the safety of New York City subways and what constitutes self-defense.

Penny also faced a more serious second-degree manslaughter charge, but Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed it at the request of prosecutors after jurors twice told the court they could not come to a verdict on the count. He could have faced up to 15 years in prison if convicted of manslaughter.

Penny has been embraced by right-wing figures, including Vance, who said after the verdict: “Thank God justice was done in this case. It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement with Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit that will result in ABC paying $15 million to charity and issuing an apology.

The settlement was filed publicly Saturday and reveals ABC will make the payment as a charitable contribution to a “presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for the Plaintiff.” The network will also pay $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees.

Trump filed the lawsuit in Florida federal court earlier this year, arguing that Stephanopoulos and ABC News defamed him when the anchor said 10 times during a contentious on-air interview with Rep. Nancy Mace that a jury found Trump had “raped” E. Jean Carroll — a writer whose own cases against Trump led to him being found liable for sexual abuse.

Key context: Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s and that he defamed her when he denied her claim. Trump has denied all wrongdoing toward Carroll.

In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused the columnist, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her.

A judge concluded months later when dismissing Trump’s countersuit against Carroll that the claim Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true.” The judge wrote in August 2023 that Trump “raped” her in the broader sense of that word, as people generally understand it, though not as it is narrowly defined by New York state law.

Trump filed the lawsuit against ABC News in March, and the judge allowed the case to move forward in July, writing that the generally accepted definition of the term and the definition as it applied to New York law were sufficiently different to consider Trump’s claim.

What ABC is saying: The network’s apology will come in the form of an editor’s note on the online article at the center of the suit, stating that “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump” made during the Mace interview.

ABC News is “pleased” to have reached the settlement agreement, a spokesperson told CNN in statement Saturday.

CNN’s Brian Stelter contributed reporting to this post.

President-elect Donald Trump, center, is joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump's choice for director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President-elect JD Vance and defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth at the Army-Navy football game Saturday in Landover, Maryland.

President-elect Donald Trump is at Northwest Field in Landover, Maryland, for the 125th edition of the Army-Navy football game.

Vice President-elect JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth and Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, could all be seen waving from a box at the stadium alongside the president-elect.

The stands are packed, and a loud cheer went up as Trump was shown on the stadium’s video boards. The presence of the president-elect added additional heft to the tradition and pomp that comes before the rivalry game between the nation’s service academies.

Chants of “U-S-A” broke out as members of the crowd spotted Trump in his suite near midfield. Students from both service academies cheered wildly when he was shown.

Also joining the president-elect at the game on Saturday were tech billionaire Elon Musk — the Trump confidante set to co-lead his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and GOP Sen.-elect Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.

Vance made headlines Friday by also inviting Daniel Penny, a former Marine, to attend with him in the presidential suite. Penny was widely embraced by right-wing political figures after being charged with fatally choking Jordan Neely on a New York subway, and many of them celebrated his acquittal on Monday. It’s not yet clear if Penny is in the suite with Trump and his allies.

A series of high-ranking Biden administration officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, are also at the game, which kicked off a short time ago.

This is the fifth time Trump has attended the rivalry matchup: three times as president, and twice now as president-elect. The two teams are facing off at the home of the NFL’s Washington Commanders.

This post has been updated with additional details on Trump and his allies’ attendance at the game.

Then-Rep. Devin Nunes speaks at a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, DC, in 2021.

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday announced former congressman and Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes as chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

The board is intended to serve as an independent source of advice within the executive branch about how the country’s intelligence community is performing.

Some background: Nunes in 2022 ended a nearly 20-year stint in the House of Representatives to become CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group.

Nunes served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans were in the majority, in which he led efforts among Trump’s allies to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. His role as an attack dog against the Russia probe raised his popularity among Trump’s supporters, and he became a top fundraiser in the House GOP conference as he gained stature on the right.

He was also an outspoken defender of Trump during his first impeachment, and the then-president awarded Nunes the Medal of Freedom in 2021.

This post has been updated with more background on Nunes.

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday announced Bill White was his pick to be US Ambassador to Belgium.

Trump continued: “Bill has worked tirelessly to support Great American Patriots who have given everything for our Country by raising over $1.5 Billion Dollars for our fallen heroes, catastrophically wounded, and severely burned Service Members. He is a twice recipient of the Meritorious Public Service Award for extraordinary service from the U.S. Coast Guard, and for outstanding support from the U.S. Navy. Congratulations Bill!”

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday announced he has picked Troy Edgar for the position of deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump added that Edgar is currently “an executive at IBM” and was the mayor of Los Alamitos, California, “where he helped me lead the City and County revolt against Sanctuary Cities in 2018.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson speaks at the Democratic National Convention on August 19 in Chicago.

Donald Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan this week said the president-elect’s promise of mass deportations will begin in Chicago once Trump is in office, according to CNN affiliate WLS.

In an interview Saturday with CNN’s Victor Blackwell, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson vowed to protect the people in his city, when asked whether he would inform US Immigration and Customs Enforcement if there is someone in local police custody who is accused of a serious crime.

Johnson was also asked if Chicago police would stand in the way if ICE decides to go into schools or workplaces.

Chicago is a sanctuary city, so local police are not allowed to cooperate with ICE to deport a person.

“If there is someone here who has committed a violent crime, that’s not someone you have to look for. Once they are arrested and they are in custody, then the law, of course, is fully prepared to prosecute,” he said.

The mayor accused the incoming Trump administration of stoking fear.

“Look, no one is going to harbor or protect criminals, whether you have come here as an immigrant or undocumented or otherwise,” he said.

“Any administration that would look to disrupt the sensibility of public accommodations, consider (it) … a threat to our democracy,” Johnson said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks during a news conference on November 19 in Washington, DC.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, made an apparent warning to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday against “even the appearance of association” with efforts to rescind the approval of the polio vaccine.

A lawyer who works closely with RFK Jr., Trump’s controversial pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, petitioned the FDA to rescind its approval of the polio vaccine in 2022.

While McConnell did not mention Kennedy by name, Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s top health agency is subject to the Senate confirmation process. As head of HHS, he would oversee the FDA and could take the rare step of intervening in its petition review process.

What we know about RFK Jr.’s associate: Aaron Siri filed the polio vaccine petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, a nonprofit that challenges the safety of vaccines and vaccine mandates.

Siri has been working closely with Kennedy — who has long espoused conspiracy theories about vaccines and other public health issues — to choose officials to serve in the incoming administration. He was also Kennedy’s personal lawyer during his own presidential campaign.

The petition and Kennedy’s affiliation with the lawyer who filed it were first reported by the New York Times.

CNN reached out to the Trump transition team and ICAN for comment but did not get a response. The FDA told CNN on Friday that the petition remains under review.

In this 2018 photo, congressional staffers eat by the reflecting pool in Washington, DC.

The US population grew a lot in the past 40 years, expanding by about 100 million people.

One of them was Vivek Ramaswamy, who was born in 1985 and is one of two wealthy men tasked by President-elect Donald Trump with shrinking the size of the federal government.

While the population grew, government spending skyrocketed: The US spent around $900 billion in 1984 ($2.7 trillion in 2024 dollars), compared with more than $7 trillion in 2024. Some of that money goes via contracts to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is working with Ramaswamy on the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), a new nongovernmental commission.

But the size of the government workforce has not: In those 40 years of explosive population, spending and debt growth, the size of the federal workforce — this is actually kind of shocking — has stayed pretty much the same, confounding the popular presumption that the number of federal workers must have skyrocketed with federal spending. There were about 2.96 million civilians, including postal workers, getting full-time paychecks from the federal government at the end of 1984, and there are a hair over 3 million working for the federal government today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The official tally from the Office of Personnel Management is a smidge lower, at about 2.87 million, including postal workers. In fact, the number of full-time federal workers has been relatively static, within a few hundred thousand civilians, since the 1960s.

But there are also millions more government contractors and grant employees.

Concentrating on improving government might not mean shrinking it, according to Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for smarter government.

Read more about the size of the federal workforce from Wolf’s analysis.

Nearly three dozen of President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to serve in his incoming administration donated to his campaign or to the deep-pocketed outside groups that worked to elect him, a CNN analysis of federal campaign records shows.

They range from tech multibillionaire Elon Musk — who has emerged as the single largest disclosed political donor of the 2024 presidential election — to others close to Trump tapped for key roles throughout government.

In all, eight of his Cabinet picks — led by Linda McMahon, the billionaire wrestling magnate Trump has selected to oversee the Education Department — and their spouses donated more than $37 million combined from their personal accounts to aid Trump, the review found, underscoring the proliferation of ultra-rich Americans now poised to shape US policy in the incoming second Trump administration.

Incoming President-elect Donald Trump will attend the 125th Army-Navy football game on Saturday, adding an extra level of stateliness to an occasion already rife with tradition.

This is the fifth time Trump has attended the game, which kicks off today at 3 p.m. ET from Northwest Field in Landover, Maryland. The clash between the nation’s service academies is a staple of the final month of the college football season and marks the traditional end point of the regular season.

While the sitting president typically conducts the coin toss before the game when in attendance, it’s unclear if Trump will take up this task as president-elect. When he attended the game as president-elect in 2016, he did not perform that duty.

Vice President-elect JD Vance will also be in attendance — and made headlines Friday by inviting Daniel Penny, a former Marine, to attend with him in the presidential suite. Penny was widely embraced by right-wing political figures after being charged with fatally choking Jordan Neely earlier this year, and many of them celebrated his acquittal on Monday.

Trump previously commented on the case, telling Fox News, “It’s an awfully tough case, I think.” Vance expressed his support for Penny on Monday, posting to X, “thank God justice was done in this case. It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who served in the US Navy, is also expected to attend the game, according to a source familiar with the plan, but it’s unclear if his and Trump’s trips are related.

CNN’s Kit Maher contributed reporting to this post.

From left: Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Friday became the latest in a string of tech founders to announce a donation to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, as leaders in the space seek to boost relations with the president-elect.

Altman is expected to make a $1 million donation, matching pledges made earlier this week by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Altman said in a statement. This was a personal donation from the CEO, according to an OpenAI spokesperson.

Some context: Trump has been warming up to tech giants. He has flaunted his private conversations with them in interviews and appearances, and now heaps praise on companies he once blamed in part for his 2020 electoral defeat.

Tech leaders have, in turn, been looking to foster a closer relationship with the president-elect.

The Washington Post was thrown into turmoil in late October after Bezos withheld the newspaper’s endorsement in the 2024 presidential race. The Amazon founder said he made the decision over concerns that an endorsement would create a perception of bias.

Trump met with executives from Blue Origin, a Bezos-founded spacefaring company, hours after the Post announced its decision. In an op-ed explaining the move, Bezos denied allegations he withheld the endorsement to curry favor with Trump, saying he had no advance knowledge of the meeting.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Ramishah Maruf and Clare Duffy contributed reporting to this post.

From left: Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard during their respective visits to Capitol Hill.

Several of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks met with key senators this week.

Defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to run the FBI, were on Capitol Hill. Top GOP senators have signaled support for Patel, while keeping the door open for Hegseth, who faces a series of misconduct allegations.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s selection for director of national intelligence, also met with lawmakers at the beginning of the week.

Here is some of what they had to say:

Next week: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is expected to hold meetings with senators next week, according to a source familiar with the plans. Hegseth is also expected to be back on Capitol Hill, a source familiar with his plans told CNN.