Category: Joe Biden

Murphy’s choice: Fed official has say on transition launch

The head of an obscure federal agency that is holding up the presidential transition knew well before Election Day that she might soon have a messy situation on her hands.

Before Nov. 3, Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, held a Zoom call with Dave Barram, the man who was in her shoes 20 years earlier. 

The conversation, set up by mutual friends, was a chance for Barram, 77, to tell Murphy a little about his torturous experience with “ascertainment” — the task of determining the expected winner of the presidential election, which launches the official transition process. Continue reading.

Ga. secretary of state says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude ballots

Washington Post logo

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who he said questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

In a wide-ranging interview about the election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation over a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes to be left out of the count.

The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.” Continue reading.

Biden: ‘More people may die’ if Trump refuses to coordinate on vaccine plans

The Hill logo

President-elect Joe Biden warned Monday that “more people may die” from COVID-19 if the Trump administration does not begin to engage in a smooth transition of power.

“More people may die if we don’t coordinate,” Biden told reporters following a speech on his economic plan in Wilmington, Del., emphasizing the pressing need for his transition team to gain access to the Trump administration’s plan for distributing a future vaccine for the coronavirus.

“A vaccine is important. It’s of little use until you are vaccinated. So how do we get the vaccine, how do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What is the game plan? It is a huge, huge, huge undertaking to get it done,” Biden said. Continue reading.

Trump officials rush to auction off rights to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before Biden can block it

Washington Post logo

Officials aim to sell drilling rights to the pristine wilderness’s coastal plain before the president-elect takes office

The Trump administration is asking oil and gas firms to pick spots where they want to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as it races to open the pristine wilderness to development and lock in drilling rights before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The “call for nominations” to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register allows companies to identify tracts on which to bid during an upcoming lease sale on the refuge’s nearly 1.6 million-acre coastal plain, a sale that the Interior Department aims to hold before Biden takes the oath of office in January. The move would be a capstone of President Trump’s efforts to open up public lands to logging, mining and grazing, which Biden strongly opposes.

A GOP-controlled Congress in 2017 authorized drilling in the refuge, a vast wilderness that is home to tens of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl, along with polar bears and Arctic foxes. Continue reading.

We opposed each other in Bush v. Gore. Now we agree: Biden won.

Washington Post logo

David Boies is chairman of the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Theodore B. Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general, is a partner of the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Twenty years ago, we represented the opposing sides in Bush v. Gore. We still don’t agree about how the Supreme Court ruled, but we completely agree that nothing in that case — or in the Supreme Court’s decision — supports the challenges now being thrown about in an attempt to undermine President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Yet, over the past week, we have heard repeated assertions that the outcome of this election is somehow in doubt, as it was in 2000.

It is not. Biden will be president. There are many areas of policy on which we disagree. But no matter how you voted in this election, that is the clear outcome. The nation’s laws and shared values dictate that Americans now unite to support democracy, national security, the public trust in institutions and the urgent work of the next administration. Continue reading.

John Kelly criticizes Trump over delay of Biden transition

“It’s about the nation,” Trump’s former chief of staff says in an interview with POLITICO. The wait “hurts our national security.”

President-elect Joe Biden should start receiving intelligence briefings, and the delay in allowing the transition to officially get started is damaging U.S. national security, President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly told POLITICO in an exclusive interview.

“You lose a lot if the transition is delayed because the new people are not allowed to get their head in the game,” Kelly said Friday. “The president, with all due respect, does not have to concede. But it’s about the nation. It hurts our national security because the people who should be getting [up to speed], it’s not a process where you go from zero to 1,000 miles per hour.”

“Mr. Trump doesn’t have to concede if he doesn’t want to, I guess, until the full election process is complete. But there’s nothing wrong with starting the transition, starting to get people like the national security people, obviously the president and the vice president-elect, if they are in fact elected, to start getting them [up to speed] on the intelligence,” he said. Continue reading.

Supreme Court goes idle on Trump-related disputes and time is running out

Washington Post logo

Has the Supreme Court hit the pause button on all things President Trump?

The justices for more than three weeks have been holding on to the president’s last-ditch plea to shield his private financial records from Manhattan’s district attorney.

And all has been quiet on the election front. Continue reading.

How Trump Won Florida With False Advertising And Fake News

In Florida, where President Donald Trump gained crucial support among Latino voters, his campaign ran a YouTube ad in Spanish making the explosive — and false — claim that Venezuela’s ruling clique was backing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

YouTube showed the ad more than 100,000 times in Florida in the eight days leading up to the election, even after The Associated Press published a fact-check debunking the Trump campaign’s claim. Actually, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressed opposition to both presidential candidates.

The video was part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in heavily Latino South Florida that sought to tie Biden to Socialist leaders like Maduro and the late Cuban President Fidel Castro. Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, the largest margin in a presidential election there since 1988. He carried about 55 percent of the Cuban American vote, according to exit polls by NBC News. Continue reading.

How long can Republicans keep helping Trump’s effort to delegitimize the election?

Washington Post logo

There are cracks starting to show — but there are strong political reasons for Republicans to hang on until the Senate runoffs in Georgia in January

Republicans’ private talking point about how they can continue to aid President Trump in denying election results boils down to what a senior Republican told The Washington Post this week: What’s the harm in humoring him?

Plenty, say national security officials who are concerned about how other countries — and the coronavirus — could take advantage of a slowed transition for President-elect Joe Biden. Plenty, say democracy experts who warn that the Republican Party is undermining the foundations of the U.S. electoral system and that the GOP is mirroring authoritarianism.

And amid such heavy criticism, and the fact that Trump’s legal team is struggling to provide any evidence or gain traction in the courts, we’re starting to see cracks in the GOP over holding the line for Trump. Continue reading.

Trump Floats Improbable Survival Scenarios as He Ponders His Future

New York Times logo

There is no grand strategy. President Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next.

At a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, President Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.

He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion.

It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Mr. Trump’s to remain in the White House. Continue reading.