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With help from Allie Bice Welcome to POLITICO’s 2021 Transition Playbook, your guide to the first 100 days of the Biden administration. The most important meeting in JOE BIDEN’s White House each day doesn’t even happen in person. The senior staff meeting each morning around 7:30 or 8 a.m. happens on video call, according to people familiar with the meeting. (It’s unclear if the call is actually being conducted via Zoom or another video service.) And being invited onto it has become an early status symbol in the Biden administration, according to Biden allies. Some of the invitees are unsurprising, like chief of staff RON KLAIN or other senior aides from the campaign such as MIKE DONILON, STEVE RICCHETTI, ANITA DUNN, BRUCE REED, CEDRIC RICHMOND and KATE BEDINGFIELD. But the list of regular participants gives us a glimpse at who has juice in the West Wing in the early going. That includes the head of the Office of Presidential Personnel, CATHY RUSSELL; White House Counsel DANA REMUS; White House Cabinet Secretary EVAN RYAN; Covid-19 czar JEFF ZIENTS; press secretary JEN PSAKI; national security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN; and deputy chief of staff JEN O’MALLEY DILLON. The White House declined to comment. The important early morning call began during the transition and also included TONY BLINKEN, who is now set to be secretary of state and is not as regular a participant, YOHANNES ABRAHAM, the transition’s executive director who is now at the NSC under Sullivan, and BOB BAUER, the campaign’s lead lawyer, who did not join the administration. Back then, the early morning senior staff call was followed by a much bigger call with dozens of people around 8:30 to 9 a.m. Being included in the call is essentially being invited into the (virtual) room where it happens. Veterans of the Obama administration noted that the director of presidential personnel was normally not in the senior staff meetings and always reported to the deputy chiefs of staff. But Russell, who worked on Biden’s 1988 campaign and is married to longtime Biden aide TOM DONILON , has higher standing in Biden’s world than past people in that position. All of this is to say, can we get an invite? Call us, maybe? CHANNEL CHANGE: Biden White House sources tell us that when they came into the West Wing on Inauguration Day, the TVs were mostly tuned to Fox News and Fox Business. Occasionally, Trump folks would flip on Newsmax. But since they gained control of the remotes, there’s been a lot more CNN and MSNBC on in the West Wing, we’re told.
David Jolly: Why I Might RunOn today’s Bulwark podcast, David Jolly joins Charlie Sykes to discuss his contemplation on running for governor of Florida as an independent, his work with SAM, why he’s working to disrupt the duopoly, and why the GOP of the past is not coming back.
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