Trump railed against the 'deep state,' but he also built his own. Biden ...

Rohde called that effort, if it had proceeded unfettered, “an existential threat to democracy.”Seeking to cut off any potential such damage, the Biden administration has in recent weeks terminated or placed on leave several government employees placed into their jobs by Trump in the waning days of his presidency, including the top lawyer at the National Security Agency and several members on Pentagon advisory boards.In a statement to NBC News, a Biden White House official said the administration “is conducting a thorough review of several councils, commissions, and advisory boards,” adding that “as part of that review, we may remove individuals whose continued membership on the board would not serve the public interest.”But experts warned that countless others are likely peppered throughout the federal government and that it would be difficult for Biden to identify and remove all of them.“Not to be hyperbolic, but the damage some of these people could do is enormous,” said Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.Trump political appointees petitioned the Office of Personnel Management 49 times for conversion to civil service jobs from January 2020 through September 2020, a congressional aide with knowledge of the matter told NBC News. During President Barack Obama’s final year in the White House, including the first 20 days of January 2017, his administration had a total of 39 conversion requests, the aide said.A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.The Trump administration conversion that caused the most concern, the congressional aide and numerous experts said, was Michael Ellis, a Trump loyalist who, one day before Biden took office last month, was sworn in as the top lawyer for the National Security Agency.On Jan. 20, Biden's first day in office, his administration placed Ellis on administrative leave while his transfer to the agency from his previous role at the Trump White House was reviewed by an inspector general for the Department of Defense.Ellis, a former staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who went on to work in the Trump White House, was involved in the placement ofa reconstructed transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into a classified computer system, The Associated Press reported. A National Security Council spokesman speaking on Ellis' behalf at the time declined to comment to the AP.Two years earlier, The New York Times reported that Ellis, then a lawyer working on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office, was involved in giving Nunes, then the House Intelligence Committee chair, access to intelligence reports that seemed to show Trump and his associates were incidentally included in surveillance efforts during the Obama administration.Ellis, who later worked as a White House senior director of intelligence, a political job, was tapped to be the general counsel of the NSA, a civil service position that would extend beyond Trump’s time in office, in the weeks after he lost the election.Experts on burrowing told NBC News that based on Ellis' reported past actions, they were concerned that as NSA general counsel, he would have the opportunity to continue to evaluate intelligence in a way that would have benefited Trump or his allies.“If there is a track record of mishandling classified information, that should disqualify him from this role,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight.