President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday announced the hiring of nine senior White House officials, including close confidants from his winning campaign, as he forged ahead with his transition, even as President Trump continues to hold up a normal process and falsely claim that he won the Nov. 3 election.
Biden also received a national security briefing from experts outside the government, given that Trump has blocked the Democrat’s access to administration officials. Trump has no events on his public schedule, as he largely stays out of public view and tweets grievances about the election.
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Biden pandemic advisers add pressure for White House cooperation
By Anne Gearan
WILMINGTON, Del. — Doctors advising Biden on the coronavirus pandemic invoked the need for rapid distribution of a vaccine as they sought Tuesday to add pressure on Trump to begin cooperating with the man who defeated him.
Vaccine distribution is hard under the best of circumstances, former FDA commissioner David Kessler told reporters during a briefing arranged by the Biden transition office.Read the full story
“We don’t have a day to waste” waiting for Trump and his aides, Kessler said.
Two weeks after the Nov. 3 election and 10 days after Biden was declared the winner, Trump has refused to acknowledge the results or to green-light normal cooperation between the outgoing administration and the incoming one.
Federal employees are at work designing the rollout for one or more vaccines now nearing initial distribution, but Biden’s team is blind to those plans, Kessler and two other doctors leading Biden’s effort said.
“There is valuable information inside the administration that you know is held by career officials, by other political appointees and others who have been working hard at the covid response for the last year. We need to talk to those individuals. We need to work together with them,” said former surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy.Read the full story
Biden said Monday that Trump’s intransigence could cost lives as the country copes with a nationwide surge in cases this winter.Read the full story
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The election was a chance for Facebook and Twitter to show they could control misinformation. Now lawmakers are grilling them on it.
By Cat Zakrzewski and Rachel Lerman
Twitter and Facebook executives fielded familiar questions from lawmakers Tuesday about their moderation and labeling practices, and scratched the surface of their actions during the 2020 election.
Both social media companies took unprecedented steps to limit the spread of election misinformation both before and in the weeks following the vote, and eventually lawmakers got around to asking the executives about those actions. But first, lawmakers focused on their pet issues with the companies, including unsubstantiated claims of bias against conservatives and concerns that the platforms have become too dominant in the market.
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Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were last before a Senate panel just three weeks ago, when they appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee to answer questions about their companies’ content moderation practices.
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Raffensperger deputy on Graham call confirms his boss’s account of conversation
By Amy Gardner
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference in Atlanta on Nov. 11. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
A top deputy to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who was on a call between his boss and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) confirmed Tuesday that he heard Graham suggest that Raffensperger should try to discard whole counties’ worth of absentee ballots, including legal ones.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting systems implementation manager, told reporters Tuesday that Graham asked Raffensperger questions about how the state’s signature verification process works. In Georgia, if voters’ ballot envelope signatures don’t match the signatures on file, those ballots are rejected and the voters are notified and given a chance to fix the deficiency.
Raffensperger told The Washington Post on Monday that Graham asked him if partisan bias might cause some invalid signatures to be accepted, and, if those invalid signatures could be identified in large numbers, whether all of the absentee ballots from those counties could be tossed out.
Sterling confirmed those details. “What I heard were discussions of absentee ballots, if there were a percentage of signatures that weren’t truly matching, is there some point where we could go to a court and throw out all of the ballots,” he recalled.
Sterling also repeated Raffensperger’s assertion that, barring court intervention, the secretary doesn’t have the power to take such a step, as counties administer elections in Georgia.
“I could see that Sen. Graham wanted to go one way and Secretary Raffensperger wanted to go another way,” he said.
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In response to The Post’s report Monday evening, Graham, a supporter of President Trump, said he was simply trying to learn more about the integrity of the election in a key state that helped President-elect Joe Biden to victory. Graham said he also spoke to election officials in two other states where Biden won with razor-thin margins, Arizona and Nevada — but the secretaries of states in both quickly denied speaking with him.
Graham’s inquiry with Raffensperger came on the same day that a Trump supporter in Atlanta, lawyer Lin Wood, filed a lawsuit alleging that Raffensperger had violated the Constitution by altering the state’s signature-matching rules as part of a settlement in a lawsuit filed by Democrats.
The suit claimed that people of color were disproportionately harmed by the state’s signature-matching rules. In the settlement, Raffensperger and Democrats agreed to require multiple county election officials, rather than just one, to agree that a signature doesn’t match before a ballot is disqualified. The settlement also gave voters more time to fix rejected ballots.
In the lawsuit filed Friday, Wood argued that the new signature-matching requirements are cumbersome and make it more likely that county election officials won’t bother verifying signatures at all.
In fact, in several states with extensive experience with mail voting, such signature-verification procedures are standard.
The suit also criticized Raffensperger for instituting a ballot-tracking system as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the increased demand for mail voting. That system “increased pressure” on local election officials to process ballots quickly, making it less likely that they would properly verify signatures.
Analysis: Trump and allies pitch yet another woeful voter-fraud theory in Nevada
By Aaron Blake
Supporters of President Trump demonstrate in front of the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas on Saturday. (John Locher/AP)
Trump’s and his allies’ scattershot hunt for voter fraud appears to have landed on its new target: a race in Nevada that elections officials have moved to redo because of ballot discrepancies.
To hear Trump and his allies tell it, it’s something amounting to a voter-fraud smoking gun. As usual, the truth is far less compelling.
“Big victory moments ago in the State of Nevada,” Trump tweeted, adding that the “County Commissioner race, on same ballot as President, just thrown out because of large scale voter discrepancy. Clark County officials do not have confidence in their own election security. Major impact!”
The language they use, though, is highly misleading and sometimes demonstrably false.
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House Republicans retain McCarthy, other top leaders in the next Congress
By Mike DeBonis
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaks at a news conference Thursday on Capitol Hill. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
House Republican lawmakers, fresh off surprise gains in the general election, voted to keep their top leadership team in place. Remaining in their jobs are Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) and Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.), all of whom ran unopposed.
While in past elections, McCarthy has had to fend off grumbles from his most conservative colleagues, he will enter the coming Congress at the apex of his power and influence, supported by members across the party’s ideological spectrum. That is, in part, a testament to the party’s performance, winning at least 11 House seats from Democrats and beating widespread expectations of GOP House losses — including within the party itself.
Joining the Republican caucus next year will be at least 17 women and seven non-White members, greatly bolstering the diversity of the GOP ranks. That was a key priority for McCarthy, who endorsed several of those incoming members in competitive GOP primaries.
McCarthy’s leadership is also a reflection of the close relationship he has cultivated with Trump, who speaks frequently with the 55-year-old Californian about political strategy and has quieted much of the right-wing dissatisfaction with McCarthy’s style.
Now, while Trump is set to influence Republican politics from the sidelines, McCarthy will have a muscular minority and a political tail wind as he seeks to become the first Republican House speaker from California after the 2022 midterms.
Scalise and Cheney will remain in their posts after speculation that a Democratic rout could have threatened McCarthy’s hold on the top job, sparking a leadership battle between the two junior leaders.
“House Republicans will use every available opportunity to fight against Democrats’ socialist agenda while uniting the country behind a bold conservative vision that delivers results for hard-working families,” Scalise said in a statement.
Trump’s new Pa. lawyer previously said lawsuits ‘will not reverse this election’
By Teo Armus
Marc A. Scaringi, seen in 2011. (Mary Altaffer/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Moments after the presidential race was called for Joe Biden, Marc A. Scaringi took to his talk radio show to question President Trump’s dubious legal campaign to challenge the election results in some swing states.
“At the end of the day, in my view, the litigation will not work,” the Harrisburg, Pa., lawyer said on iHeartRadio on Nov. 7. “It will not reverse this election.”
Barely a week later, Scaringi is now playing a key role in one piece of that litigation, representing the Trump campaign in what may be its last stand in Pennsylvania — an unlikely lawsuit intended to block the Keystone State from certifying its election results.
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Loeffler agrees to debate Warnock ahead of Senate runoff election in Georgia
By John Wagner
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) speaks to supporters at a restaurant on Nov. 13 in Cumming, Ga. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) has accepted an invitation to debate Democrat Raphael Warnock ahead of their Jan. 5 runoff election for a Senate seat from Georgia, according to the Atlanta Press Club, the event’s host.
The debate between Loeffler and Warnock, who previously accepted the invitation, will take place Dec. 6, the club said.
Their race is one of two for Senate seats from Georgia, which will determine whether Republicans have a slim Senate majority or a 50–50 split in the chamber.
On Monday, the Atlanta Press Club said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) had declined an invitation to debate Democrat Jon Ossoff, the two candidates in the other runoff election.
Ossoff has confirmed that he will participate. Perdue will be represented by an empty lectern if he does not change his mind, the organization said.
“That is not our preference,” the group noted in a news release. “The Atlanta Press Club works hard to provide a platform for all candidates running for public office.”
Both debates are scheduled to take place live in the studios of Georgia Public Television.
How a Biden presidency could advance transgender rights — and lead to backlash
By Samantha Schmidt and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux
On Nov. 7, when major news outlets called the election for Biden, the transgender community watched as the president-elect specifically mentioned them in his victory speech, the first U.S. president-elect in history to do so.
It was only one word, but the mention of the transgender community in Biden’s acceptance speech was a symbolic shift from a presidential administration that has spent the past four years repeatedly erasing protections for transgender people — in health care, federal employment, federal prisons, homeless shelters and other housing services receiving federal funds.
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Analysis: Angry at vaccine makers, Trump is pushing a last-minute plan to lower drug prices
By Paige Winfield Cunningham
Trump is infuriated that Pfizer and Moderna announced that their vaccine candidates are highly effective after the presidential election, even though company officials insisted that the timing wasn’t politically motivated.
Now the president is trying to get back at the pharmaceutical industry in the waning weeks of his administration.
The Department of Health and Human Services may soon release a proposal to lower drug prices in the Medicare program through what’s known as the “most favored nation” price. The policy, dreaded by the industry, would require drugmakers to accept the lowest price from the government for medicines paid by comparably wealthy countries in Europe and elsewhere.
It’s not clear that the incoming administration would keep such a regulation — so the move is viewed as a final, desperate effort to give Trump the ability to claim the “win” on lowering drug prices he’s sought for years.
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Leaders of medical associations urge Trump to cooperate with Biden on coronavirus response
By John Wagner
Leaders of three major medical associations wrote to Trump on Tuesday urging his administration to cooperate with Biden’s team on the country’s response to the coronavirus, among the issues that have been impeded by Trump’s refusal to concede the election and allow a normal transition to unfold.
“We urge your Administration to work closely with the Biden transition team to share all critical information related to COVID-19,” said the letter, signed by Richard J. Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association; James L. Madara, chief executive of the American Medical Association; and Debbie Dawson Hatmaker, acting chief executive of the American Nurses Association.
The letter came a day after Biden warned in a speech that “more people may die” without cooperation.
“As providers of care for all Americans, we see the suffering that is occurring in our communities due to COVID-19,” the letter said. “We see families who have lost both parents from COVID-19; we see children suffering from long-term effects due to a COVID-19 infection; and we see minority populations disproportionately suffering from the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is from this front line human perspective that we urge you to share critical data and information as soon as possible.”
Biden names senior White House staff, including Jen O’Malley Dillon
By Sean Sullivan and Michael Scherer
Biden announced the hiring of nine senior White House officials on Tuesday, a list that includes confidants who spearheaded his campaign.
Longtime aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti will step in as senior adviser and counselor to the president, respectively. Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, will be deputy chief of staff. And his campaign’s general counsel, Dana Remus, will be counsel to the president, acting as Biden’s top attorney in the White House.
Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), one of Biden’s most prominent African American allies, will leave Capitol Hill to become senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a deputy campaign manager for Biden, will become director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. She has worked for Vice President-elect Harris and is the granddaughter of labor activist César Chávez.
Annie Tomasini will become director of Oval Office operations. She has been Biden’s traveling chief of staff.
“I am proud to announce additional members of my senior team who will help us build back better than before. America faces great challenges, and they bring diverse perspectives and a shared commitment to tackling these challenges and emerging on the other side a stronger, more united nation,” Biden said in a statement.
Soon-to-be first lady Jill Biden has also hired staff. Julissa Reynoso Pantaleon, a former ambassador to Uruguay, will be her chief of staff. Anthony Bernal, a top aide to Jill Biden during the campaign, will be her senior adviser in the White House.
The hires mark Joe Biden’s latest effort to staff his incoming team. Last week, he tapped longtime aide Ron Klain to be his White House chief of staff. Some of the newest round of people Biden is bringing into his administration also have deep ties to him.
Ricchetti was campaign chairman for Biden, and Donilon was chief strategist, playing a leading role in crafting many of Biden’s speeches.
O’Malley Dillon became Biden’s campaign manager earlier this year, stepping onboard as the team retooled after struggling in the early nominating contests. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection run, she managed former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s unsuccessful Democratic presidential bid in 2019.
Richmond was an early supporter of Biden and is said to be close to Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.). Clyburn’s support helped Biden win the South Carolina primary, a victory that eased his way to the nomination.
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Maricopa County will canvass election results on time despite GOP pressure, official says
By Hannah Knowles
A Republican-led pressure campaign is mounting in Arizona’s largest county, where officials are being urged to recount every vote by hand before finalizing the election results. But the GOP-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors intends to move ahead to meet a Monday deadline, a board spokesman said.
“Right now, all the evidence points to a completely accurate and fair election,” Fields Moseley said. “That’s where the board is on this.”
As for a conservative congressman’s suggestion that the board chairman could subpoena the company behind voting software “for a full forensic audit by county IT staff,” Moseley told The Washington Post, “This is not a power I’ve ever seen the board or the chairman use in almost six years here.” He added that the board has “no evidence or inkling to do that” and that “we have a statistically significant audit of our machines that show they worked with 100 percent accuracy.”
The board of each county “canvasses” the results, or makes them official, and sends them on to the Arizona secretary of state, who certifies the outcome statewide. Arizona’s election manual says that county supervisors have “no authority to change vote totals or reject the election results,” and must canvass within 20 days of the election, barring some limited delays for missing precinct results.
But several Trump allies in Congress and the state Republican Party are pushing for a manual count of the more than 2 million ballots cast this year in Maricopa, even though the county’s customary hand audit found that machines processed votes perfectly. Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), who called for the subpoena, was an early proponent of the rumor that Sharpies invalidated ballots, which election officials and the state’s Republican attorney general have all denied. More recently, Gosar has focused on baseless allegations that election software used in Maricopa County and around the country, from a company called Dominion Voting Systems, cannot be trusted and has given thousands of Trump votes to Biden.
Biden leads Trump statewide by about 10,500 votes. Two election-related lawsuits, one brought by the Arizona GOP, are still pending in Maricopa’s courts.
What curbed Moscow’s election interference? Experts have theories.
By Ellen Nakashima
A view of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square in Moscow earlier this month. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
Russia did not mount any major hacking or disinformation operations to interfere in the U.S. presidential election this year, and the Kremlin’s hackers did not even attempt to target elections systems in the way they did in 2016, according to U.S. officials.
Officials and analysts said it’s too soon to know why, but they point to a variety of possible reasons. Those include cyber and other operations that helped keep the Russians at bay, harder targets at the state and local levels, and a political climate in which Americans were the largest purveyors of disinformation, dwarfing Moscow’s efforts to influence the campaign through social media and its propaganda channels.
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Georgia secretary of state stands by comments about Sen. Graham seeking invalidation of legally cast ballots
By John Wagner
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference on Nov. 11 in Atlanta. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) on Tuesday stood by his comments that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) had suggested to him that he find a way to toss legally cast mail-in ballots in the state — a characterization that Graham has called “ridiculous.”
During an appearance on Fox News, Raffensperger reiterated comments he made to The Washington Post that Graham asked during a phone conversation Friday whether he had the power to invalidate all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of mismatches between signatures on ballots and envelopes.
“His question was really about if ballots could be matched back to the envelope,” Raffensperger said on Fox News. “I thought that he implied that he wanted us to audit the envelopes and then throw out ballots of counties who had the highest frequency error rate of signatures. And that means you’d be throwing out good ballots with bad ballots. That’s the philosophy that he had.”
In an earlier interview Tuesday on CBS, Raffensperger also stood his ground and said after consulting with a lawyer had decided not to “reengage” with Graham any more on the issue.
In an interview on Capitol Hill on Monday evening, Graham denied that he had suggested that Raffensperger toss legal ballots, calling that characterization “ridiculous.”
But he said he did seek out the secretary of state to understand the state’s signature-matching requirements. Graham said he contacted Raffensperger on his own and was not asked to do so by Trump.
“The main issue for me is: How do you protect the integrity of mail-in voting, and how does signature verification work?” he said.
Giuliani seeks to join Trump legal team for Pennsylvania election challenge
By Jon Swaine and Aaron Schaffer
Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, speaks during a news conference Nov. 7 at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia. (John Minchillo/AP)
Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney and longtime adviser, applied Tuesday to represent the president’s campaign in its chaotic legal challenge of the election in Pennsylvania.
In a court filing, Giuliani asked the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania to allow him to join Trump’s legal team on the case, which seeks to block certification of the election results in the state.
Four attorneys representing Trump in the case have withdrawn since the campaign filed its lawsuit Nov. 9, and a fifth has applied to pull out of the case.
Giuliani was a federal prosecutor during the 1980s and won plaudits for securing convictions of major mob figures. According to Pacer, the public records service for the federal court system, he last entered an appearance in a federal case in 1992.
In a text message, Giuliani estimated that it had been “four or five years” since he tried a case in court.
Trump appointed Giuliani to oversee the legal effort to challenge his loss to Biden in several battleground states following defeats and setbacks in the courts. Like Trump, Giuliani has used social media to push baseless claims that the election was stolen from the president through widespread voter fraud in cities such as Philadelphia.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s campaign alleges that its constitutional rights were violated because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots, while some Republican-leaning counties did not.
Trump’s lawsuit in Pennsylvania previously included several other counts based on allegations that Republican observers were not able to watch ballots being counted. But these were removed in a drastic overhaul of the lawsuit filed Sunday.
Giuliani is not qualified to practice law in Pennsylvania, but attorneys are permitted to petition courts in states where they are not qualified to ask them for special permission to try a case there.
Sen. Grassley says he’s quarantining after exposure to the coronavirus
By Felicia Sonmez and Mike DeBonis
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) walks through the Capitol on Nov. 12. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg)
Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the second-oldest sitting U.S. senator, said Tuesday that he is quarantining after being exposed to the coronavirus.
“I learned today that I’ve been exposed to the coronavirus,” Grassley said in a statement. “I will follow my doctors’ orders and immediately quarantine as I await my test results. I’m feeling well and not currently experiencing any symptoms, but it’s important we all follow public health guidelines to keep each other healthy.”
Grassley’s office said the senator will continue working remotely from his home in Iowa. No details were provided on when or how Grassley was exposed to the virus.
The absence of the 87-year-old senator throws a scheduled Tuesday confirmation vote for controversial Federal Reserve nominee Judy Shelton into at least temporary limbo. It also means the likely end of Grassley’s 27-year streak of not missing a Senate floor vote.
In a statement later Tuesday, Grassley said he was disappointed that he wasn’t able to vote but that “the health of others is more important than any record.”
“My voting streak reflects how seriously I take my commitment to represent Iowans. Choosing not to potentially expose others to this deadly virus is obviously the right and responsible thing to do,” he said.
Grassley has cast 8,927 uninterrupted votes since 1993 and holds the record for the longest length of time without missing a vote in the history of the Senate, according to his office.
Paul Kane and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
Analysis: How the attack ads in Georgia’s Senate runoff races are shaping up
By Amber Phillips
A supporter waves a sign during a rally Sunday for Georgia Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Marietta, Ga. (Jessica Mcgowan/Getty Images)
Whichever party wins both Georgia Senate runoff races will have done it because they successfully motivated more of their voters to come to the polls again in January. And that means doubling down on partisan attacks against the other side.
Both Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and their respective Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are going for the jugular right now. Here are some trends about how they attack each other in these two runoff elections that will decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.