By Dartunorro Clark - NBC News
President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that the Trump Administration has already begun communicating with its transition team, describing the effort as "in good faith," a day after a federal agency published a letter to formally begin the transition of power.
"Immediately,
there was a rapprochement
, from the national security team to the rest of the departments," Biden said in an exclusive interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, our sister network.
[Follow our coverage of the 2020 presidential elections]
"And they are already working on my ability to get the daily presidential reports," Biden said, "we are already working on a meeting with the COVID-19 team at the White House and on how not only to distribute, but to get people to be able to. get vaccinated, so I think we
're not going to be as behind as we thought we were going to be. "
Trump took weeks to start the transition.
In 2016 he already warned: "I will keep you in suspense"
Nov. 24, 202001: 42
Biden added: "And I have to say that the approach has been in good faith, not grudgingly so far, nor did I expect it to be."
The president-elect clarified that
his administration will not be "a third term for Obama"
[referring to former president Barack Obama;
Biden was his vice president] because the world has changed so much during the Trump years.
[Biden chooses Mayorkas to lead national security: "One of the toughest jobs in government"]
"This is not a third term for Obama because ... we face a totally different world than the one we face in the Obama-Biden Administration," he said.
"President Trump has changed the landscape. He has become America first, it has been America alone."
This is the first interview Biden has offered since the election.
Joe Biden in interview with NBC News' Lester Holt, Nov 24, 2020 Screenshot
President Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge that he lost in the vote.
Biden makes these comments after nearly three weeks of attempts by Trump's legal team to reverse the election.
That strategy took a hit this week when states began certifying their election results.
After Michigan certified its results on Monday, the director of the General Services Administration (GSA) informed Biden that the official government transition process had been approved, after weeks of delay.
GSA Administrator Emily Murphy said in a letter that Biden, whom she called "the apparent president-elect," can now access millions of dollars in federal funding and other resources to begin his transition to power.
In his letter,
Murphy also denied that he had received pressure from the White House to delay the process.
[Trump authorizes the transition to the Biden government]
Hours later on Monday, the president tweeted that he would "never give in to fake 'Dominion" ballots, referring to
a conspiracy theory that baselessly alleges
that a company that makes voting machines removed millions of votes from Trump.
The refusal had prevented Biden's team from gaining critical access to government resources as the nation grapples with
rising COVID-19 cases and economic uncertainty.
Joe Biden presents his nominees for handling foreign policy and national security
Nov. 24, 202000: 29
However, during the delay Biden has begun filling his Cabinet and announcing who he has appointed as staff to other high-level roles.
He also held briefings with former senior government officials and formed his own working group to deal with COVID-19.
Trump and the GSA faced mounting pressure: A growing number of Republican lawmakers began publicly asking him to grant Biden access,
citing national security concerns.
Some Democratic lawmakers had also started asking Murphy to testify before Congress.
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