Donald Trump's transition team asks some interesting questions as part of the onboarding interview process, according to the New York Times.
David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and famous Trump reporter Maggie Haberman reported on Saturday about the purported "loyalty test" that includes questions about January 6th and the 2020 election.
The reporters had interviews "with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process."
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"The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump," according to the report. "The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question."
The report also notes that, among those being interviewed "were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020."
"Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs," it states.
The report notes that a Trump spokesperson refused to answer questions about the reported loyalty test part of the interviews.
"Three of the people interviewed are close to the transition team and confirmed that loyalty questions were part of some interviews across multiple agencies, and that the Trump team researched what candidates had said about Mr. Trump on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following," it says. "Candidates are also rated on a scale of one to four in more than a half-dozen categories, including competence."
