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Hello everyone, my name is Valerie Jarrett,
and I’m one of the three co-chairs
of President-elect Obama’s Transition committee.
The other two chairs are
John Podesta, who was formerly Chief of Staff for President Clinton
and Pete Rouse, who was formerly Chief of Staff
Senator Obama when he was in the Senate.
So we are very interested in making sure that this transition is transparent,
that we are giving information
information just in time to those of you who are logging
on to our Change.gov website
so that you know what’s going on just as decisions are being made.
Last week, we announced the co-chairs.
President-elect Obama also announced that Rahm Emmanuel
will be his Chief of Staff
and this week we announced
several of the key people who are leading the agency reviews.
The Departments of Treasury, State, and Defense
are the three we came out with
since of course you know that the economy and national security
are two of the key issues that you,
the American people, are concerned about.
So we have a lot of work to do, we've hit the ground running.
President-elect Obama is committed to having an efficient, competent,
well organized, transparent and bi-partisan Transition Team.
We are looking for the best and the brightest around the country
to help the President-elect as he assumes office on January 20th.
President-elect Obama adopted the most
sweeping and strict ethics rules that have ever been in place
in the course of a transition.
What we will prohibit is anyone who has lobbied on an issue
in the last year from working on that issue during the course of the transition.
Also if you are a lobbyist,
you may not lobby during the course of the transition,
nor may you come back after President-elect Obama takes office for one year
and lobby on an issue that you worked on in the course of the transition.
These are sweeping rules.
The goal is to make sure that everyone understands
this is not going to be a revolving door for lobbyists.
We are looking for people who have the best interests of you,
the American people, in mind
as they help us prepare to govern going forward.
We’ll be back frequently to give you updates.
We encourage you to log on to our website -
as I mentioned that's Change.gov, on a regular basis so that you have just in time information.
Thank you very much.