Tag Archives: Joe Biden

Biden to name Kerry as U.S. climate czar, emphasizing diplomacy’s role in the fight

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team said on Monday former Secretary of State John Kerry will be named climate czar, a sign that Biden views diplomatic skills as vital to the job.

As Biden’s special envoy for climate, Kerry will have a seat on the National Security Council in the White House, marking the first time an official will be dedicated to the issue in that organization, Biden’s transition team said in a statement.

The NSC has played a powerful foreign policy role since it was created in 1947 under President Harry Truman.

Biden has pledged to reverse course on climate from President Donald Trump who doubts mainstream climate science. He yanked the United States out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate, and dismantled Obama-era climate and environment regulations to boost drilling, mining and manufacturing.

Kerry, 76, called climate change “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” as secretary of state under former President Barack Obama. In travels from glaciers in Greenland to the Solomon Islands, Kerry emphasized cooperation on tackling climate change.

Before the landmark Paris agreement Kerry also pushed for China, the world top greenhouse gas emitter, and the United States, the second-leading polluter, to agree targets on emissions and work toward a global deal.

Kerry, who was also a longtime liberal senator from Massachusetts and 2004 presidential candidate, will likely get a quick start as Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris agreement soon after he comes to office.

Appointing Kerry as climate envoy “sends the strongest possible signal about the importance of climate action to the incoming administration,” said Paul Bodnar, who was a senior director for energy and climate under Obama.

After leaving government Kerry continued to work on climate change. Late last year, Kerry launched World War Zero, a bipartisan group of world leaders and celebrities to combat climate change.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Blinken is president-elect’s pick as U.S. secretary of state – Biden ally

By Matt Spetalnick and Trevor Hunnicutt

NEW YORK/WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) – Joe Biden will pick Antony Blinken as U.S. secretary of state, a person close to the president-elect’s transition said on Sunday, elevating one of his most seasoned and trusted aides as he prepares to undo President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Blinken is a longtime Biden confidant who served as No. 2 at the State Department and as deputy national security adviser in President Barack Obama’s administration, in which Biden served as vice president.

A second Biden ally said that Blinken was Biden’s first choice. An announcement is likely on Tuesday.

Blinken’s appointment makes another longtime Biden aide with a foreign policy background, Jake Sullivan, the top candidate to be U.S. national security adviser, the first source said. Bloomberg News first reported the expected roles.

Biden’s transition team declined to comment. Neither Blinken nor Sullivan responded to requests for comment.

While neither are household names, Blinken and Sullivan have helped Biden formulate a strategy that will include immediate outreach to U.S. allies who have often been antagonized by Trump’s “America First” approach, and to demonstrate a willingness to work together on major global problems like the coronavirus epidemic and its economic fallout.

Biden has vowed to rejoin a nuclear deal with Iran if the country returns to compliance, return to the Paris climate accord, abandon plans to leave the World Health Organization and end a U.S. rule that bans funding of aid groups that discuss abortion. Each move would reverse Trump’s policies and some could take place quickly after Biden takes office on Jan. 20.

Biden is also likely to name Linda Thomas-Greenfield as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, media outlets reported on Sunday. Thomas-Greenfield is Black, an expert on Africa policy and held a top diplomatic post in the administration of former President Barack Obama.

‘DIPLOMAT’S DIPLOMAT’

Blinken, 58, has long touted the view that the United States needs to take an active leadership role in the world, engaging with allies, or see that role filled by countries like China with contrary interests.

“As much of a burden as it sometimes seems to play … the alternative in terms of our interests and the lives of Americans are much worse,” he said in an interview with Reuters in October.

When asked if relations with the United States might improve with Blinken replacing Mike Pompeo, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian sidestepped the question by saying he does not comment on U.S. domestic affairs.​

He reiterated that China was willing to improve communication, strengthen cooperation and manage differences with the United States.

People familiar with his management style describe Blinken as a “diplomat’s diplomat,” deliberative and relatively soft-spoken, but well-versed in the nuts and bolts of foreign policy.

After Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Trump, Blinken became one of the founders of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consultancy advising corporations on geopolitical risks.

Having practiced law briefly, he entered politics in the late 1980s helping Democrat Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign raise money.

He joined Democratic President Bill Clinton’s White House as a speechwriter and became one of his national security aides.

Under Obama, Blinken worked to limit most U.S. combat deployments to small numbers of troops. But he told Reuters last year that Trump had “gutted American credibility” with his pullback of U.S. troops in Syria in 2019 that left Kurdish U.S. allies in the lurch in their fight against Islamic State.

On the campaign trail, Blinken was one of Biden’s closest advisers, even on issues that went beyond foreign policy.

That trust is the product of the years Blinken worked alongside Biden as an adviser to his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, as national security adviser early in his vice presidency and as the Democratic staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was chair.

Sullivan, formerly a close policy aide to Hillary Clinton, became one of the key policy advisers to Biden. He served as the former vice president’s national security adviser during the Obama administration.

A 43-year-old graduate of Yale, who was also a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and has a reputation as a behind-the-scenes operator, Sullivan took part in secret back channel talks with Iran that led to a 2015 international nuclear deal that Trump subsequently overturned.

He took on a broad portfolio on foreign and domestic policy, including the campaign’s views on the public health and economic response to the coronavirus pandemic, and was quickly chosen to stay on with Biden through the transition.

(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick in New York, Trevor Hunnicutt in Wilmington, Delaware, and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Additional reporting by Yew Lun Tian in Beijing; Editing by Diane Craft, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Toby Chopra)

Trump to meet Michigan lawmakers in bid to overturn electoral defeat

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) – President Donald Trump will meet with Republican leaders from Michigan at the White House on Friday as his campaign pursues a bid to overturn the Nov. 3 election following a series of courtroom defeats.

The Trump campaign’s latest strategy, as described by three people familiar with the plan, is to convince Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden, such as Michigan, to set aside the results and determine Trump the winner.

“The entire election frankly in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump,” Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, told Fox Business Network on Thursday.

Biden, a Democrat, won the election and is preparing to take office on Jan. 20, but Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede and is searching for a way to invalidate the results, claiming widespread voter fraud.

The Trump team is focusing on Michigan and Pennsylvania for now, but even if both those states flipped to the president he would need another state to overturn its vote to surpass Biden in the Electoral College.

Such an extraordinary event would be unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Trump not only would need three state legislatures to intervene against vote counts as they stand now, but then also have those actions upheld by Congress and, almost certainly, the Supreme Court.

Michigan’s state legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, will visit the White House at Trump’s request, according to a source in Michigan.

The two lawmakers will listen to what the president has to say, the source said. Shirkey told a Michigan news outlet earlier this week that the legislature would not appoint a second slate of electors.

“It’s incredibly dangerous that they are even entertaining the conversation,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told MSNBC. “This is an embarrassment to the state.”

SOUNDING THE ALARM

Biden, meanwhile, is due on Friday to meet Democratic leaders in Congress, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after spending most of the week with advisers planning his administration.

Nationally, Biden won nearly 6 million more votes than Trump, a difference of 3.8 percentage points. But the outcome of the election is determined in the Electoral College, where each state’s electoral votes, based largely on population, are typically awarded to the winner of a state’s popular vote.

Biden leads by 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 as states work to certify their results at least six days before the Electoral College convenes on Dec. 14.

Legal experts have sounded the alarm at the notion of a sitting president seeking to undermine the will of the voters, though they have expressed skepticism that a state legislature could lawfully substitute its own electors.

Trump’s lawyers are seeking to take the power of appointing electors away from state governors and secretaries of state, and give it to friendly state lawmakers from his party, saying the U.S. Constitution gives legislatures the ultimate authority.

ROMNEY CRITICIZES TRUMP

Even though election officials have not reported any major irregularities, most prominent Republicans have remained devoted to their leader or quietly acceded. But a few Republicans, including senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have spoken out.

“Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the president has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Romney said in a statement on Thursday. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

Other Republican senators including Ben Sasse and Joni Ernst called on Trump to offer proof.

Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome via lawsuits and recounts have met with little success.

The Georgia Secretary of State on Friday confirmed that Biden won the state after a manual recount and an audit were conducted.

“The numbers reflect the verdict of the people, not a decision by the secretary of state’s office or courts, or of either campaigns,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican and Trump supporter, told reporters.

Despite the setbacks, the Trump campaign has not abandoned its legal efforts.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, said on Thursday he planned to file more lawsuits, accusing Democrats of masterminding a “national conspiracy” to steal the election, though he offered no evidence to support the claim.

Biden called Trump’s attempts “totally irresponsible” on Thursday, though he has expressed little concern they will succeed in preventing him from taking office on Jan. 20.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax in Princeton, New Jersey; Additional reporting by Michael Martina in Detroit, Jarrett Renshaw in Wilmington, Delaware, Karen Freifeld in New York and Jan Wolfe and Doina Chiacu in Washington; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Daniel Trotta, David Clarke and Chizu Nomiyama)

Biden’s possible attorney general pick has moderate track record: progressive critics

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to end the federal death penalty and eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, but some progressives say a potential pick for attorney general to carry out those reforms may not be the one to enact bold changes.

Sally Yates, 60, is a leading candidate for the job, according to sources. The Atlanta native is perhaps best known for being fired from her position as acting attorney general by Republican President Donald Trump in his first month in office when she refused to enforce his first attempt at banning travelers from Muslim-majority nations.

Her history at the Department of Justice (DOJ) – where Democratic President Barack Obama appointed her as deputy attorney general in 2015, and before that as Atlanta’s top federal prosecutor for about five years – make the adviser to the Biden transition team a safe pick for a role subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate, which may still be under Republican control next year.

Asked for comment, a Yates spokeswoman provided a lengthy list of opinion articles, testimony and other records she said demonstrate Yates’ strong commitment to criminal justice reform.

A Biden transition team spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Yates has expressed a measured approach on some criminal justice reforms, including previously voicing some support for the mandatory minimum sentences Biden wants to end – a position some progressives worry may not go far enough at a time of reckoning for the criminal justice system.

“She has done courageous things, but she is a career prosecutor,” said Rachel Barkow, a New York University law professor who previously served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets federal sentencing guidelines.

“The question will be, if Sally Yates comes in a second time, does she do a better job reading the moment or is she still coming with that DOJ insider lens?”

The United States was rocked by a fresh wave of street protests this year over the killings of Black men and women by police, including George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.

CONFRONTING RACIAL INJUSTICE

That has led Democrats, including Biden to rethink policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, that have led to the disproportionate incarceration of African-American men. Biden has also expressed support for approving more clemency petitions from nonviolent offenders.

Yates, during her 2015 confirmation hearing for deputy attorney general, called mandatory minimum sentences “an important tool for prosecutors,” which could nevertheless be used more judiciously due to the “fiscal reality” facing U.S. prisons.

While she was U.S. attorney in Atlanta, her office also sought the death penalty in some cases, and she testified on the Justice Department’s behalf to urge the U.S. Sentencing Commission to narrowly limit who could qualify to apply retroactively for a drug sentence reduction.

She was also involved in a controversy surrounding a 2014 clemency project, after Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff resigned in protest due to a backlog of 1,000 recommendations sitting in Yates’ office, 100 of which were urging clemency be granted.

In her January 2016 resignation letter, Leff said Yates had blocked her access to the White House, including on cases where Yates had reversed Leff’s clemency determinations. Yates’ defenders say she was passionate about clemency, and personally reviewed every petition herself.

Some former colleagues say Yates deserves credit for important work that began during the Obama administration, much of which has since largely been undone during Trump’s term.

Yates spearheaded efforts to scale back the federal government’s use of private prisons, revamped the Bureau of Prisons’ education program to better prepare inmates for release and urged limits on solitary confinement.

She also persuaded Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder to expand on his new policy scaling back the use of mandatory minimums and later publicly rebuked Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, after he reversed these policies in 2017.

“Somebody like Sally is very attuned to what has been happening in the country after George Floyd’s murder,” said Vanita Gupta, who headed the DOJ’s civil rights division during Yates’ tenure and now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human rights. “She is very personally committed to civil rights and criminal justice reform, and I would fully expect that commitment would actually only deepen.”

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis)

Options dwindling, Trump faces likely setback in Georgia recount

By Andy Sullivan and Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. presidential election battleground state of Georgia is expected on Thursday to affirm Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump after a painstaking recount, which would deal yet another setback to the president’s attempts to cling to power.

Georgia’s top election official, a Republican, has said the manual recount of almost 5 million votes is unlikely to erode Biden’s initial 14,000 winning margin by enough to hand Trump victory in the state.

That would leave Republican Trump with a dwindling number of options to overturn the results of an election in which Democrat Biden won 5.8 million more votes nationwide. Barring a series of unprecedented events, Biden will be sworn in on Jan. 20.

In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner, Biden has captured 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, well ahead of the 270 needed for victory. The winner in each state is awarded that state’s electoral votes, a number roughly proportional to the population.

Flipping Georgia’s 16 votes would still leave Trump at least two closely contested states away from overturning Biden’s victory. Georgia officials say they expect to release results on Thursday ahead of a certification deadline on Friday.

In Pennsylvania, where Biden won by 82,000 votes, the Trump campaign is asking a judge to declare him the winner there, saying its Republican-controlled legislature should choose the state’s slate of 20 Electoral College voters.

In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign has paid for a partial recount, even though election officials there say that will likely only add to Biden’s 20,000-vote advantage in a state that carries 10 electoral votes.

‘A DEEPER PROBLEM’

Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits in a number of other states, including Michigan, with scant success so far.

Those legal motions, sprinkled with factual errors, have been dismissed by Biden’s campaign as “theatrics” that are not based on sound law.

Several prominent law firms have pulled out of the operation, leaving Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to spearhead the efforts.

Trump said on Twitter on Thursday that lawyers would discuss a “viable path to victory” at a news conference at noon ET (1700 GMT).

State and federal election officials, as well as outside experts, say Trump’s argument that the election was stolen from him by widespread voter fraud has no basis in fact.

However, it does appear to be affecting public confidence in American democracy. A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Wednesday found about half of Republicans believe Trump “rightfully won” the election.

Arizona’s top election official, Democrat Katie Hobbs, said she and her family had been getting violent threats and urged Trump to stop casting doubt on the result, in which he lost by just over 10,000 votes.

“(The threats) are a symptom of a deeper problem in our state and country – the consistent and systematic undermining of trust in each other and our democratic process,” Hobbs said in a statement.

Trump, who has largely stayed in the White House and kept out of public view since the election, has no public events scheduled for Thursday.

His administration has so far refused to recognize Biden as the winner, which has held up funding and security clearances to ease the transition from one president to another ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Biden said on Wednesday that the delay was preventing his team from planning a new assault on surging coronavirus infections, which is straining the U.S. healthcare system.

(Writing by Andy Sullivan and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Ross Colvin, Lincoln Feast and David Clarke)

As Giuliani argues for Trump, Pennsylvania asks judge to toss election challenge

By Jan Wolfe and Brad Heath

(Reuters) – Lawyers for Pennsylvania asked a judge on Tuesday to dismiss Donald Trump’s bid to block President-elect Joe Biden from being certified as the victor in the state as the Republican president, with personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani arguing for him, pursued a long-shot legal challenge to his U.S. election loss.

Giuliani, the former New York mayor, took a key role in spearheading Trump’s case before U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. A loss in the case would likely doom Trump’s already-remote prospects of altering the election’s outcome.

There was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud” in the election, Giuliani told Brann, but provided little evidence to back up that claim.

Daniel Donovan, a lawyer for Pennsylvania’s top election official, said Trump’s campaign did not allege irregularities that would change the outcome in the state.

The Trump campaign on Sunday narrowed the Pennsylvania case to focus on a claim that voters in the state were improperly allowed to fix ballots that had been rejected because of technical errors such as missing a “secrecy envelope.”

Pennsylvania officials have said a small number of ballots were fixed. Trump’s campaign, however, is asking Brann to halt certification of Biden’s victory in the state. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is due to certify the election results next Monday, meaning Brann is expected to rule quickly.

Biden, due to take office on Jan. 20, is projected to have won the state by more than 70,000 votes, giving him 49.9% of the state’s votes to 48.8% for Trump.

Hours before the hearing, Brann allowed Giuliani to formally appear in the case. Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday that Giuliani was spearheading a new team to pursue the campaign’s legal fight.

Trump, the first U.S. president to lose a re-election bid since 1992, has called the election “rigged,” has made unsubstantiated claims of widespread voting fraud and has falsely claimed victory. State election officials around the country have said they have found no such fraud.

Biden clinched the election by winning Pennsylvania to put him over the 270 state-by-state electoral votes needed. Biden, a Democrat, won 306 Electoral College votes overall to the Republican Trumps 232, Edison Research said on Friday.

Giuliani said there was a history of voter fraud in large U.S. cities, adding, without offering evidence, that the expansion of mail-in voting in 2020 allowed officials to take advantage of a public health crisis, the coronavirus pandemic.

Donovan said the Trump campaign’s alleged injuries are “speculative” and “cannot give them standing in federal court.”

On Monday, three lawyers representing the Trump campaign asked to withdraw from the case, saying the campaign consented to the move but offering little explanation. Brann allowed two of the three to drop out.

The campaign and Trump supporters have filed lawsuits in multiple states challenging the Nov. 3 election result but have yet to overturn any votes. Any remote hope of reversing the election’s outcome hangs on Pennsylvania.

Legal experts have said the lawsuits stand little chance of changing the outcome. A senior Biden legal adviser has dismissed the litigation as “theatrics, not really lawsuits.”

The Trump campaign has had difficulty retaining legal counsel to take on its post-election challenges. Last week, lawyers at the firm of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from representing the campaign in the Pennsylvania suit.

Another firm, Snell & Wilmer, withdrew on Tuesday from a lawsuit alleging that Arizona’s Maricopa County incorrectly rejected some votes cast on Election Day.

In the Pennsylvania lawsuit, the Trump campaign alleges Democratic-leaning counties unlawfully identified mail-in ballots before Election Day that had defects so that voters could fix, or “cure,” them.

Pennsylvania officials sought to have the lawsuit thrown out, saying all of the state’s counties were permitted to inform residents if their mail-in ballots were deficient, even if it was not mandatory for them to do so.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Additional reporting by Tom Hals and Nate Raymond; Editing by Will Dunham, Lincoln Feast, Howard Goller and Noeleen Walder)

Biden names top campaign staff, U.S. congressman to White House roles

By Trevor Hunnicutt and James Oliphant

WILMINGTON, Del./WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday named several top advisers from his election campaign and a Democratic congressman as senior White House aides, sticking with a tight inner circle as he transitions to the White House.

Biden is focused on preparing to take over the presidency on Jan. 20, despite President Donald Trump’s increasingly tenuous effort to reverse the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.

Biden presidential campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, the first woman to lead a winning Democratic presidential bid, will be named a deputy chief of staff, Biden said in a statement released by his transition team.

Longtime close advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti will join the White House as senior advisor to the president and counselor to the President, respectively. Dana Remus, the campaign’s top lawyer, will be senior counsel to the president.

Another close adviser, Ron Klain, was already named chief of staff.

U.S. Representative Cedric Richmond, who was a national co-chair of Biden’s campaign and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, will vacate a House seat in Louisiana to join as a senior adviser and Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Biden, who may name more staff soon, could still be weeks away from naming his Cabinet appointees.

The former vice president is also due to discuss national security threats on Tuesday with his own team of advisers, rather than current government officials, as the Trump administration has blocked him from receiving the classified intelligence briefings normally accorded to an incoming president.

General Services Administrator Emily Murphy has not yet recognized Biden as the “apparent winner,” which is needed to release government funding and office space to the president-elect. A Murphy spokeswoman said the administrator was following precedent and would make a decision once the winner is clear.

Trump has remained angry and defiant on social media even as a handful of Republicans have said Biden should be considered the president-elect. The president, who has not conceded, has repeatedly claimed without evidence he is the victim of widespread voter fraud, and his campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits in battleground states.

Election officials in both parties have said they see no evidence of serious irregularities.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Erin Perrine on Tuesday defended the campaign’s effort, even as courts in multiple states have rejected their legal challenges.

Asked what evidence Trump campaign had, Perrine told Fox News, “That’s part of what our pursuit is at this point … There’s no silver bullet here. It’s going to take a little bit of time.”

CLEAR BIDEN VICTORY

Biden won the national popular vote by at least 5.6 million votes, or 3.6 percentage points, with some ballots still being counted.

In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner, Biden has secured 306 votes to Trump’s 232.

One of Trump’s legal challenges will get a hearing on Tuesday in a Pennsylvania federal court, where another setback would likely doom his already slim chances.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann will hear arguments in a Trump campaign lawsuit that seeks to block the state’s top election official from certifying Biden as the winner.

To remain in office, Trump would need to overturn results in at least three of the closely contested states in unprecedented fashion, and has no apparent legal means to do so.

Trump supporters are also clinging to hope that recounts could reverse state results, even though experts have said Biden’s margins appear insurmountable.

Georgia is undertaking a manual recount on its own, but in Wisconsin the Trump campaign would have to pay for a recount in advance. The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Monday estimated such a recount would cost $7.9 million.

Perrine, the Trump campaign spokeswoman, said the campaign would decide whether to pursue a Wisconsin recount in the next few days. Biden won Wisconsin by around 20,000 votes.

Georgia’s top elections official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said in television interviews that the audit was almost complete and that the results would be largely unchanged.

He also repeated his assertion that fellow Republicans have pressured him to find ways to discount legally cast votes.

“I’ve always been a conservative Republican and I want to make sure we have a lawful process because I think integrity still matters,” he told CBS News. “That’s what this audit is going to do.”

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and James Oliphant; Additional reporting by Jan Wolfe, Andrea Shalal, Joseph Ax and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Scott Malone and Grant McCool)

Trump campaign abandons parts of Pennsylvania election lawsuit

By Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign on Sunday dropped a major part of a lawsuit it brought seeking to halt Pennsylvania from certifying its results in the presidential election, narrowing the case to a small number of ballots.

In an amended complaint filed in federal court, the Trump campaign dropped a claim that election officials unlawfully blocked observers from watching the counting of mail-in ballots in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The pared-down lawsuit now focuses on a claim that Democratic-leaning counties unlawfully allowed voters to fix errors in their mail-in ballots in violation of state law. Officials have said the dispute affects a small number of ballots in the state, where Democrat Joe Biden is projected to win by more than 60,000 votes.

Pennsylvania officials have asked a judge to toss Trump’s lawsuit, saying the election observers were allowed to assess the processing of mail-in ballots and that all of the state’s counties were permitted to inform residents if their mailed-in ballots were deficient, even if it was not mandatory for them to do so.

In Pennsylvania’s populous Montgomery County, less than 100 voters fixed ballots with technical errors, a county official testified at a court hearing on Nov. 4.

The Trump campaign continues to seek a court order blocking the Pennsylvania secretary of state from ratifying the result.

Biden clinched the election after news media and Edison Research called him as the victor in Pennsylvania, putting him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Edison Research said on Friday that Biden had won 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232.

Trump on Sunday briefly appeared to acknowledge that Biden’s victory, but then recanted and claimed he would soon file fresh challenges. His campaign has filed a string of long-shot lawsuits in several battleground states.

On Twitter on Sunday, Trump said many cases being filed were not from his campaign.

“Our big cases showing the unconstitutionality of the 2020 Election, & the outrage of things that were done to change the outcome, will soon be filed!,” he tweeted.

Legal experts say the lawsuits have little chance of changing the outcome of the election. A senior Biden legal adviser has dismissed the litigation as “theatrics, not really lawsuits.”

Pennsylvania is due to certify the election results on Nov. 23.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

Biden to spotlight economy as Trump vows more court challenges to election

By Trevor Hunnicutt and John Whitesides

WILMINGTON, Del./WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Joe Biden on Monday will focus on reviving a pandemic-battered U.S. economy as he prepares to take office, while outgoing President Donald Trump has promised more lawsuits of the type that so far have failed to alter his election defeat.

With coronavirus cases surging, Biden will receive a briefing and give a speech in his home state of Delaware on rebuilding an economy that has suffered millions of job losses as the pandemic has killed more than 245,000 Americans.

Biden’s scientific advisers will meet this week with pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines to prevent COVID-19, a top aide to the president-elect said, in preparation for the logistical challenges of widespread vaccination after the Democrat takes office on Jan. 20.

Trump, a Republican, briefly appeared to acknowledge defeat on Sunday only to backtrack, saying on Twitter that he concedes “nothing” and repeating his unfounded accusations of voter fraud.

He later promised on Twitter to file “big cases showing the unconstitutionality of the 2020 Election,” even though he has made no headway with his legal challenges in multiple states so far.

Election officials from both parties have said there is no evidence of major irregularities. Federal election security officials have decried “unfounded claims” and expressed “utmost confidence” in the integrity of the elections, according to a statement last week by the lead U.S. cybersecurity agency.

LEGAL SETBACK

In another blow to Trump’s legal strategy, his campaign on Sunday dropped a major part of a lawsuit it had brought seeking to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its results, narrowing the case to an issue affecting a small number of ballots. Biden won the state by more than 68,000 votes.

Biden beat Trump in the Nov. 3 election by the same 306-232 margin in the state-by-state Electoral College that Trump proclaimed a “landslide” when he won in 2016. The former vice president also won the national popular vote by at least 5.5 million votes, or 3.6 percentage points, with ballots still being counted.

Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat who campaigned against Trump, said it was past time for Trump to concede, and criticized Republicans who also refuse to accept the victory of his former vice president.

“When your time is up, then it is your job to put the country first and think beyond your own ego,” Obama told the CBS News show “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired on Sunday.

“I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, will hold a hearing on Tuesday titled: “Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression and the 2020 Election.”

STILL NO CONCESSION

The Trump administration has still not recognized Biden as president-elect, preventing his team from gaining access to the government office space and funding normally provided to an incoming administration.

Biden’s top advisers said Trump’s refusal to begin a transition could jeopardize the battle against the virus and inhibit vaccine distribution planning.

The number of U.S. coronavirus cases passed 11 million on Sunday, up a million in a week and the fastest increase since the pandemic began.

Biden has promised to make the health crisis a top priority as president. Ron Klain, who will be White House chief of staff when Biden takes office, said Biden’s scientific advisers would meet with Pfizer Inc and other unnamed drugmakers this week.

Pfizer said last week its vaccine candidate had proved more than 90% effective in initial trials, giving hope that widespread vaccination in the coming months could help get the pandemic under control.

Moderna Inc said on Monday its experimental vaccine was 94.5% effective in preventing COVID-19, based on interim data from a late-stage clinical trial.

Other companies also are in advanced stages of developing promising vaccines.

Biden will also resume work on building his governing team. Although Klain, his first appointment, is a white man, the president-elect has vowed that his administration will “look like America” and be represented by women and minorities.

Some 46% of his transition staff are people of color and 52% are women, CNN reported, citing data provided by the transition team.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Wilmington and John Whitesides in Washington; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Jan Wolfe, David Shepardson, David Morgan and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Peter Cooney and Kevin Liffey)

Factbox: U.S. election: key tallies, undetermined states, certification deadlines

(Reuters) – Democrat Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, beating Republican President Donald Trump after a longer-than-usual process of counting mail-in ballots that a record number of Americans relied on during the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden, who surpassed the 270 Electoral College votes needed to clinch the presidency on Saturday, ended with 306, Edison Research projected on Friday. Trump closed out the race at 232 Electoral College votes, according to Edison’s tally.

Votes, however, still need to be certified in most states and tallies are being challenged in several, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. At the same time, the Trump campaign has signaled it may seek a recount in Wisconsin.

Here are the key counts in the White House race, as of 3:25 p.m. EST on Friday (2025 GMT), as well as vote certification deadlines.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE: Biden 306; Trump 232

POPULAR VOTE:

Biden – 77,973,369; Trump – 72,654,368;

Biden leads by 5,319,001, or 5.3 million votes.

Biden – 50.8%; Trump 47.4%

VOTE CERTIFICATION DEADLINES:

Arizona – Deadline is Nov. 30

Georgia – Deadline is Nov. 20

Michigan – Deadline is Nov. 23

North Carolina – Deadline is Nov. 24

Pennsylvania – Deadline is Nov. 23

Wisconsin – Deadline is Dec. 1

(Reporting by Katanga Johnson; Editing by Tim Ahmann)