Tag Archives: Ron Klain

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)

Biden moves forward, names longtime adviser chief of staff

By Trevor Hunnicutt and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday named longtime adviser Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff, his first major appointment, as he builds his administration regardless of whether President Donald Trump accepts the election results.

Klain, 59, served as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president under President Barack Obama and had been widely expected to be named to the post.

He also has experience battling a public health crisis, as he worked as Obama’s “Ebola Czar” in 2014 during an outbreak of that virus in Africa. A fierce critic of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Klain is expected to be a key figure in Biden’s response to the health crisis.

As Biden moved toward assuming office, Trump’s campaign filed a federal lawsuit in Michigan as it continued its long-shot legal strategy of trying to overturn the election results in key states.

All week, Biden has paid little public attention to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, instead focusing on transition issues as he prepares to be sworn in on Jan. 20.

Biden clinched victory last Saturday as he won a series of battleground states to exceed the 270 electoral votes needed in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines who wins the presidency. Biden also was winning the national popular vote by more than 5 million ballots with a few states still counting votes.

Trump has refused to concede, and his administration has resisted cooperating with transition efforts.

Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of aiming to undermine public trust in the U.S. electoral system and delegitimize Biden’s victory through unproven and anecdotal claims of voter fraud as Trump, the first U.S. president to lose a re-election bid since 1992, desperately tries to cling to power.

In Klain, Biden brings in a trusted and experienced operative who also served as Vice President Al Gore’s top aide during Bill Clinton’s administration. He served as an outside adviser to Biden during the campaign and the two have a relationship dating back to Biden’s years as a U.S. senator from Delaware.

As Biden’s chief of staff during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Klain helped oversee the implementation of the $787 billion Recovery Act that boosted the cratering economy.

In 2014, he earned plaudits from public health experts as the government’s Ebola response coordinator.

“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” Biden said in a statement.

“His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff.”

NO SURRENDER

Trump’s new lawsuit in Michigan appeared unlikely to alter the outcome in a state he won in 2016 but was losing by roughly 148,000 votes, or 2.6 percentage points, in unofficial Michigan vote totals, according to Edison Research.

The lawsuit made allegations of voting misconduct, with the focus on the Democratic stronghold of Wayne County, which includes Detroit. Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said the Trump campaign was promoting false claims to erode public confidence in the election.

“It does not change the truth: Michigan’s elections were conducted fairly, securely, transparently, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people,” Rollow said in a statement.

Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced a hand recount of all ballots cast in the state’s 159 counties. He said it was expected to begin this week and would be finished in time to certify the results by a Nov. 20 deadline.

Biden became the election winner even without Georgia factored in. He held a lead of just over 14,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage point, in Georgia, a Southern state that Democrats have not carried in a presidential election since 1992.

Judges have tossed out several Trump lawsuits, and legal experts say the litigation has scant chance of changing the outcome.

The lawsuits are part of a broader effort to find evidence to back up Trump’s fraud allegations and forge a case that could end up at the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three justices appointed by him.

One Republican strategist with ties to the White House said the legal maneuvers and push for recounts were aimed at coming up with support for Trump’s claims.

The strategist, like many others close to the effort, acknowledged the Trump campaign faced an uphill struggle.

“They’re looking at throwing up a hundred Hail Marys,” he said, using a football term referring to a desperation pass at the end of a game.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington and Trevor Hunnicutt in New York; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel, Andy Sullivan, Tim Reid, Noeleen Walder, Jarrett Renshaw, Steve Holland, Susan Heavey, Julia Harte, Jan Wolfe, Jason Lange and Tim Ahmann; Writing by Daniel Trotta, Paul Simao and James Oliphant; Editing by Scott Malone, Will Dunham and Peter Cooney)