Biden chooses familiar face for his chief of staff
President-elect Joe Biden named longtime aide Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff on Wednesday, pushing ahead his commander-in-chief plans as President Trump keeps raising baseless claims of voter fraud.
Klain was a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign. He previously served as Biden’s first chief of staff when he was vice president and coordinated the White House Ebola response.
“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together,” Biden said in a statement. “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again.”
Prior to the announcement Wednesday evening, Biden spent Veterans Day meeting with advisors, visiting the Philadelphia Korean War Memorial for a ceremony and ignoring Trump’s continued legal challenges to vote counting.
“This Veterans Day, I feel the full weight of the honor and the responsibility that has been entrusted to me by the American people as the next president, and I vow to honor our country’s sacred obligation,” Biden tweeted.
“To our proud veterans — I will be a commander in chief who respects your sacrifice, understands your service, and will never betray the values you fought so bravely to defend,” he wrote.
The president-elect and his wife Jill laid wreaths at the Philadelphia Korean War Memorial during a Veterans Day tribute. Biden’s late son Beau served in the Delaware Army National Guard.
“If anybody understands what veterans go through, it’s this family,” Patrick Dugan, chief judge of the Philadelphia Veterans Court, said at the ceremony.
“We’re standing here today in front of a memorial to 640 Philadelphians who did not come home from the Korean War,” Dugan added. “In their memory, and all those others who did not come home since the beginning of our country, a moment of silence please.”
Biden, wearing a mask during the ceremony, did not make public remarks at the Veterans Day tribute, but in a statement he talked about how the Bidens “learned what it really means to be part of a military family the year that Beau deployed to Iraq with his National Guard unit.”
“We prayed every night and morning for his safety, and we missed him at every family gathering or when tucking his children in at night,” Biden said. “It was hard. It hurt. These are challenges most American families never have to face.”