On Wednesday morning, in an office lobby not too far from the U.S. Capitol, media members lined up for a morning “gaggle” at the office of the Presidential Transition.

Security was tight, and delayed some familiar faces: Even top reporters such as CBS News’ Major Garrett waited.

“[The media] attempted in every way they could to provoke reaction and generate copy. At some point, they have to strike camp.”

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Cabinet-level nominees Dr. Ben Carson and Linda McMahon, along with transition aides like Omarosa Manigault, walked by the idling press members.

Then, a green light from the Secret Service.

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The remaining media joined their peers, guided by numerous staffers into an area for a press conference with Sean Spicer, President-Elect Donald Trump’s soon-to-be official White House press secretary.

It was a brief look for many in the press at the tight ship being run by the transition, and by its top official, Eric Ueland, who declines to hold an official title.

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Outside the transition offices, the media and Hollywood have openly ridiculed the transition. Stephen Colbert, the CBS late-night comedian, didn’t wait too long after his morbid election night special on Showtime to rip the transition.

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“Trump’s plan to drain the swamp of corruption means bringing back [Rudy] Giuliani, [Chris] Christie, [Newt] Gingrich, and [Sarah] Palin,” said Colbert on his Nov. 10 show. “It makes sense. They’re exactly what I’d expect to find at the bottom of a drained swamp.”

Trump ended up choosing none of those people for top Cabinet slots.

Now the media narrative is that Trump is failing because the president-elect’s choices have not been confirmed fast enough. On Tuesday, Politico wrote that Trump was on track to have the fewest Cabinet officials confirmed since President George H.W. Bush took office on Jan. 20, 1989.

And hundreds more deputy jobs have gone unfilled, one Bloomberg columnist claimed.

“Overall, out of 690 positions requiring Senate confirmation tracked by The Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service, Trump has come up with only 28 people so far,” writes Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg.

The Trump transition team says it isn’t so, and they on par with previous administrations-in-waiting.

“Selecting people and announcing people are two different things,” said Rick Dearborn, the former executive director of the transition, and soon-to-be Trump’s deputy chief of staff for intergovernmental, legislative, and Cabinet affairs.

Dearborn says the Trump transition team has chosen and prepped what it calls the “Impactful 100.” And Trump and the team have already made decisions on many more, Dearborn says.

The reason many of the appointees and nominees have not been announced is because of protocol, Dearborn said. The transition team would prefer to wait for the Senate’s Cabinet confirmations before announcing deputies, Dearborn said.

The transition team obviously has no control over the Senate confirmation process. But Dearborn, chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), told LifeZette on Wednesday that the Democratic minority’s tactics in the upper chamber are a factor.

“The only thing slowing us down is the nomination schedule in the Senate,” said Dearborn, whose Senate boss, Sessions, is up for attorney general.

For those hearings, the team has spent hundreds of hours preparing their nominees.

As for senators claiming questions went unanswered, the team disputes that. It released statistics to LifeZette about their workload since Nov. 8. The transition says it:

Met with all 100 members of the Senate: 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats. In total, nominees had more than 370 meetings with senators.

Participated in over 40 practice hearings since first week of January.

Turned in on time every answer to every U.S. senator’s question, including 1,151 questions for Rex Tillerson alone.

Submitted, on time, every piece of background information and financial disclosure.

As for the press, Ueland, the Senate Budget Committee staff director, says the transition team deliberately set out to avoid the media. The order came from Trump himself, who wanted the work to get done and the policy to get established.

The team went about avoiding lobbyists too, and wanted to make sure transition’s viewpoints were not tainted by special interests.

Still, the media and Democrats let out a cry when questionnaires were submitted to various agencies about policies that President Obama held dear. Environmental activists were particularly upset that federal agency employees were being asked about what climate seminars they attended.

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Transitions are “rare and unique,” said Ueland, who said the team wanted to gather as much information as possible to make the best decisions for the transition.

The media crowed often since Nov. 8 about such transition actions. A team official said the U.S. media was “under-stimulated” by the Trump team’s decision to let the president-elect and many of his political surrogates in New York City do the talking. (Communications for Trump were run out of the Big Apple until recently.)

The team simply decided to keep working on transition tasks and ignore the press.

“[The media] attempted in every way they could to provoke reaction and generate copy,” said Ueland. “At some point, they have to strike camp.”