President-elect Joe Biden will have an all-female senior communications team at his White House, led by campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield.

Bedingfield will serve as Biden’s White House communications director, and Jen Psaki, a longtime Democratic spokeswoman, will be his press secretary.

Biden also plans to name Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the transition process granted anonymity to speak freely about internal deliberations.

All three are veterans of the Obama administration. Bedingfield served as communications director for Biden while he was vice president; Psaki was a White House communications director and a spokesperson at the State Department; and Tanden served as a senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

“Communicating directly and truthfully to the American people is one of the most important duties of a President, and this team will be entrusted with the tremendous responsibility of connecting the American people to the White House,” Biden said in a statement.

“These qualified, experienced communicators bring diverse perspectives to their work and a shared commitment to building this country back better,” he added.

Karine Jean Pierre, who was Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ chief of staff, will serve as a principal deputy press secretary for the president-elect. She’s another Obama administration alum, having served as a regional political director for the White House office of political affairs.

Pili Tobar, who was communications director for coalitions on Biden’s campaign, will be his deputy White House communications director.

Source: AP

The top US cyber security official fired by Republican President Donald Trump for saying the Nov. 3 election was the most secure in American history said on Friday voter fraud allegations made by Trump and his allies are “farcical”.

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber security and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the CBS 60 Minutes program that allegations of U.S. voting machines being manipulated by foreign countries were baseless.

Sidney Powell, a Trump attorney cut loose by the Trump legal team this week, had put forward a conspiracy theory that election systems created in Venezuela at the behest of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez helped tip the U.S. election to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.

She and others have also alleged that voting machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden and some U.S. voting information was stored on servers in Germany.

“All votes in the Unites States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period,” Krebs said, in an excerpt broadcast on CBS Evening News. The full 60 Minutes interview will air on Sunday. Krebs was fired by Trump on Nov. 17 after calling the election the “most secure in American history.”

“There’s no evidence that any machine that I’m aware of has been manipulated by a foreign power,” Krebs said, calling such allegations “farcical claims.” He added: “The American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.”

Biden won the election with 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232. He leads Trump by over six million in the popular vote.

Trump and his lawyers continue to allege, without evidence, that the election was stolen through widespread fraud and Trump is the winner. Trump said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden.

(Source: Reuters)

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden, the closest he has come to conceding the Nov. 3 election, even as he reiterated his unfounded claims of massive voter fraud.

Speaking to reporters on the Thanksgiving holiday, Republican Trump said if Democrat Biden – who is due to be sworn in on Jan. 20 – is certified the election winner by the Electoral College, he will depart the White House.

But Trump said it would be hard for him to concede under the current circumstances and declined to say whether he would attend Biden’s inauguration. The electors are scheduled to meet on Dec. 14.

“This election was a fraud,” Trump insisted, while offering no concrete evidence of such voting irregularities.

Biden and Trump both stayed close to home to celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday as the coronavirus pandemic raged across the country.

Biden spent the holiday in the small seaside town of Rehoboth, Delaware, where he and his wife Jill have a vacation home. The Bidens are hosting daughter Ashley Biden and her husband Dr. Howard Krein for the holiday meal.

The former vice president, appearing with his wife in a video message posted to his Twitter account on Thanksgiving, said his family typically holds a large gathering on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts, but would remain in Delaware this year “with just a small group around our dinner table” because of the pandemic.

In the presidential-style address to a nation that has lost more than 260,000 lives to the coronavirus, the Democratic president-elect said Americans were making a “shared sacrifice for the whole country” and a “statement of common purpose” by staying at home with their immediate families.

“I know this isn’t the way many of us hoped we’d spend our holiday. We know that a small act of staying home is a gift to our fellow Americans,” said Biden. “I know better days are coming.”

Republican President Trump often likes to celebrate holidays at his Mar-a-Largo resort in Florida. But on Thursday he remained in the Washington area, spending part of the morning at his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia where he played a round of golf.

It was a far cry from last year when he made a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he served turkey to U.S. troops before sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner with them.

This time, Trump spoke by video link from the White House to members of the military.

Source: REUTERS

The United States presidential election remains unresolved three weeks after the vote, drastically undermining perceptions regarding the quality of their political system.

Three weeks after the US presidential election there is still no clear winner. However, incumbent Donald Trump has now permitted the government agency which handles presidential transitions to begin working with Democrat Joe Biden, and key swing states have just certified the election in favor of Biden.

Recent polls from top media such as The Economist reveal that nearly half the country wants Trump to litigate, believes fraud swung the vote in Biden’s favor, and views Biden’s victory as illegitimate. Trump has still not spoken publicly on the subject, only communicating his refusal to concede via Twitter, repeatedly. The fact of America’s intense division still remains, and many wonder how and if the nation can be united.

Even though the election was on November 3rd, many urban areas are still boarded up and resemble war zones. The political chaos continues to feed concerns that the violent protests and rebellions from earlier in the year will return.

Biden is starting to unveil his cabinet, which was described by the mainstream media site Politico, as a “team of careerists”, because not since George Bush the first have so many key positions been handed to personal loyalists and longtime Washington insiders. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party and other party factions have been almost totally excluded.

For Secretary of State Biden has tapped Antony Blinken, viewed as the architect of Barack Obama’s interventionist foreign policy and the longtime advisor to Biden who persuaded him to vote for the second war on Iraq. Blinken was a major proponent of US involvement in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, the Saudi-led war on Yemen, and is considered a major hawk on Russia. He is expected to push the US to try and rejoin the JCPOA agreement on Iran’s nuclear energy program.

Source: Presstv

The campaign of US President Donald Trump has distanced itself from Sidney Powell, after the lawyer was widely ridiculed for alleging baseless conspiracy theories related to the disputed November 3 election.

Trump, who has not conceded defeat after the media declared his rival Joe Biden the winner of the election, had tweeted on November 14 that Powell would be a member of his legal team, alongside his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis.

However, in a statement on Sunday, Giuliani and Ellis said, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” adding, “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

In an interview with Newsmax, Powell said that Dominion Voting Systems “has a long history of rigging elections” and that this is “what it was created to do to begin with.”

The statement comes just days after an extraordinary 90-minute press conference at the Republican National Committee in Washington, during which legal team members argued that a broad “national conspiracy” to deny Trump reelection was underway.

The team has mounted multiple legal challenges to reverse the results in several key states. However, the efforts have so far met with little success in the courtroom or on the ground.

Powell said that Trump had beaten Biden in a landslide, despite the fact that Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College votes, which decide who takes the White House, by 306 to 232.

Biden is also set to win the popular vote by more than six million votes.

Source: Presstv

A US federal judge has dealt a new blow to President Donald Trump’s long-shot bid to reverse the results of the disputed presidential election held on November 3.

US District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit which sought to overturn the results in the state, calling Trump’s legal claim a “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede defeat in the election and mounted multiple legal challenges to reverse the results in several key states. His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, was declared the projected winner.

However, his campaign’s efforts have so far met with little success in the courtroom or on the ground.

The court decision paves the way for Pennsylvania to certify Biden’s victory there, which is scheduled to take place Monday.

Brann described the case as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations,” adding, “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.”

“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” Brann wrote.

“Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

In response, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said in a statement he was disappointed with the ruling, adding, “Today’s decision turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the US Supreme Court.”

Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College votes, which decide who takes the White House, by 306 to 232, according to media reports.

The Electoral College is set to formally vote on December 14, with certifications to occur beforehand.

States’ certification of results of their popular votes is normally routine following a presidential election in the United States.

However, Trump’s refusal to concede has complicated the process and raised concerns that he could cause long-term damage to American voters’ trust in their voting system.

So far, a limited number of Republicans have recognized Biden as the winner. On Saturday and following the ruling, Pat Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said that Biden “won the 2020 election and will become the 46th president of the United States.”

“President Trump should accept the outcome of the election and facilitate the presidential transition process,” Toomey said in a statement that congratulated Biden.

The ruling came hours after Republicans also asked for a delay in certification in Michigan, another battleground.

In a letter that repeated claims of irregularities in the state which Biden won by 155,000 votes, the Republicans called for a delay of two weeks to allow for a full audit of results in Wayne County.

Republican Party national committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and the party’s Michigan chair Laura Cox called on the board to “adjourn for 14 days to allow for a full audit and investigation into those anomalies and irregularities.”

Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has, however, said that audits cannot be carried out until after certification as officials do not have legal access to the documents needed until then.

On Saturday, she posted on Twitter that there had been “no evidence” to put into question the result of the election.

“In a nutshell: 5.5m Michigan citizens voted,” she wrote.

“The results of their votes are clear. No evidence has emerged to undermine that.”

Trump has rarely appeared in public after the media declared Biden the winner of the election, but has not given up on his provocative Twitter campaign.

“The proof pouring in is undeniable,” he tweeted Saturday.

“Many more votes than needed. This was a LANDSLIDE!”

Source: Presstv

After a painstaking recount, Georgia officials confirmed on Thursday that President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the battleground state on Nov. 3, further narrowing the president’s dubious effort to overturn the election results.

The result of the six-day hand recount of the state’s 5 million ballots had been widely expected, despite baseless allegations from Trump and his allies that Georgia’s vote tallies were suspect because of widespread fraud.

Amid a series of losses in court, Trump’s re-election campaign has shifted to a new strategy that relies on persuading Republican state legislators in crucial states to ignore the election results and intervene on Trump’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the plan.

The campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to try to challenge the results in battleground states that Biden won, as election officials across the country have affirmed that there is no evidence of major irregularities. Judges in three states delivered new legal setbacks to the campaign on Thursday, rejecting claims of improper vote counting.

Biden, a Democrat, has captured 306 electoral votes to the Republican Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner of the election, well above the 270 needed for victory.

Georgia’s audit, launched after unofficial results showed Biden leading Trump by about 14,000 votes cast, ended with Biden winning by 12,284, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. The state is expected to certify Biden’s victory on Friday.

Trump and his allies, including Georgia’s Republican U.S. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who both face runoff elections in January, have accused fellow Republican Raffensperger without evidence of overseeing a flawed election, an allegation Raffensperger has angrily disputed.

In remarks on Thursday after a call with 10 state governors, Biden called Trump’s attempt to reverse the results “totally irresponsible.”

“It sends a horrible message about who we are as a country,” said the president-elect, although he expressed no concern that the gambit would succeed in preventing him from taking office on Jan. 20.

While legal experts see Trump’s last-gasp effort as unlikely to succeed, they say the strategy represents an unprecedented assault on the country’s democratic institutions by a sitting president.

The Trump campaign has already asked a judge in Pennsylvania, where Biden won by 82,000 votes, to declare Trump the winner, allowing the Republican-controlled legislature to choose the state’s 20 Electoral College voters.

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

Giuliani alleges conspiracy

At a news conference on Thursday, Giuliani said he planned to file more lawsuits and that Democrats had engaged in a “national conspiracy” to manipulate vote totals, although he admitted he did not have any evidence.

Other members of the legal team floated a theory involving Venezuela and George Soros, a bogeyman of conservatives, although they said they would probably not pursue it in court.

Giuliani said accounts of suspicious activity would ultimately overturn the election, which Biden won nationwide by 5.9 million votes. Some of those accounts have already been thrown out of court.

“We cannot allow these crooks – because that’s what they are – to steal this election. They elected Donald Trump. They didn’t elect Joe Biden,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani’s agitated performance, featuring rivulets of hair dye running down his face, was widely mocked by Democrats.  Others expressed alarm.

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” tweeted Christopher Krebs, who headed up the U.S. government’s efforts to combat election disinformation until he was fired by Trump earlier this week.

‘No excuse’

Critics say Trump’s refusal to concede has serious implications for national security and the fight against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 250,000 Americans.

Biden is not receiving the classified intelligence due a president-elect, and his transition team has not received the funding, office space and briefings from current government officials normally afforded to an incoming administration.

He warned the delay could cause additional deaths as the pandemic surges to record levels across the country.

“There is no excuse not to share the data and let us begin to plan, because on Day One it’s going to take us time, if we don’t have access to all this data,” he said in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. “It’s going to put us behind the eight ball by a matter of a month or more, and that’s lives.”

The former vice president has focused on preparing his incoming administration, naming senior staff members and getting briefed by his advisers. He said on Thursday he had selected a Treasury secretary and could announce his pick as soon as next week.

Democratic leaders in Congress sent a letter on Thursday to the administrator in charge of releasing transition funds, Emily Murphy, demanding that she explain why she has yet to recognize Biden as president-elect.

Part of the new Trump campaign effort involves trying to delay certification, the normally routine process by which election results are finalized, a senior campaign official said.

In Detroit on Tuesday, Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers refused at first to certify the results, then reversed themselves, then signed affidavits that they wanted to rescind their certification.

One of the members told Reuters that Trump called her after she agreed to certify the results.

Trump’s campaign dropped a federal lawsuit on Thursday challenging the election results in Michigan, citing the Wayne County officials’ affidavits. Officials said the affidavits were too late to stop certification.

Republican legislative leaders from Michigan are scheduled to visit the White House on Friday at Trump’s request, a source in Michigan said, adding the lawmakers planned to hear what the president had to say.

Source: REUTERS

President Donald Trump’s attempts to cling to power appeared more tenuous than ever on Wednesday as election officials in Georgia said a soon-to-be-completed recount was not likely to change President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.

Georgia is one of several states where Trump’s campaign is contesting election returns, so far without success. Election officials there said recount results due to be announced on Thursday were not likely to overturn Biden’s 14,000-vote victory in the state. They also said the recount would not provide evidence for Trump’s unsupported claims of widespread fraud.

“He’s been misinformed on that front,” Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system manager, told reporters.

Election officials in Wisconsin likewise said that a partial recount requested by the Trump campaign would not reverse the Republican incumbent’s loss in that state, which he won in 2016.

Trump himself has stayed out of the public eye while venting his anger on Twitter. His election-related lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan have met with little courtroom success.

Trump’s refusal to concede the Nov. 3 election is blocking the smooth transition to a new administration and complicating Biden’s response to the coronavirus pandemic when he takes office on Jan. 20.

Opinion polls show Trump’s unfounded claims about the election having been “rigged” have a political benefit, with as many as half of Trump’s fellow Republicans believing them, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Arizona’s top election official, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, said she faced escalating threats of violence and blamed Trump for spreading misinformation to undermine trust in the results.

The president is holding out hope that a manual recount ordered by Georgia can erase Biden’s lead there. The state’s top election official said that was unlikely.

“I don’t believe at the end of the day it’ll change the total results,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told CNN.

As of Wednesday morning, Biden’s lead over Trump had fallen to 12,781 ballots, down from 14,156 previously, according to Sterling, the state voting system manager. Sterling said he expected the recount to be completed by midnight EST on Wednesday (0500 GMT Thursday) and certified by the state on Friday.

In Wisconsin, the state Elections Commission said it would oversee recounts in two heavily Democratic counties – Milwaukee and Dane, which includes Madison – after the Trump campaign paid $3 million, less than the $7.9 million estimated cost of a statewide recount.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said a recount would start on Friday and finish within days. He said the recount would probably not change the tally significantly. “Certainly nothing anywhere near what would be required for changing the outcomes,” he said.

Biden won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes to lead Trump 49.5% to 48.8%.

In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the election winner, Biden captured 306 votes to Trump’s 232. He won the popular vote by more than 5.8 million.

To remain in office, Trump would need to overturn results in at least three large and closely competitive states to reach the threshold of 270 electoral votes. That would be unprecedented.

False claim on Detroit

Trump is also challenging results in Michigan, falsely claiming on Wednesday that the number of votes in Detroit had surpassed the number of residents. The largest city in the state is heavily Democratic.

“In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!” he tweeted.

City records show that 250,138 votes were cast there in the presidential election. That is a little more than a third of the city’s population, which according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 670,031.

The state’s top election official said all counties, including Detroit’s Wayne County, had certified their tallies.

In Pennsylvania, Trump’s campaign sought to reintroduce claims to a lawsuit it dropped three days ago that alleged that Republican observers were not allowed to watch ballot counting. Lawyers said they had dropped the claims because of miscommunication.

Earlier in the day, the state Supreme Court said it would hear an appeal in a separate case challenging thousands of mail-in votes in Philadelphia.

Biden held a virtual meeting on Wednesday with frontline healthcare workers in Delaware who complained about a lack of personal protective equipment and COVID-19 tests for themselves.

He warned that the delay in declaring him the election winner could mean that “soon we’re going to be behind by weeks or months being able to put together the whole initiative” to distribute coronavirus vaccines when they become available.

The General Services Administration agency, run by a Trump appointee, has yet to formally declare an election winner. Biden’s team says that is hindering coordination with the current White House coronavirus task force.

States face a Dec. 8 deadline to certify election results in time for the official Electoral College vote on Dec. 14.

Congress is scheduled to count the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, which is normally a formality. But Trump supporters in the Senate and House of Representatives could object to the results in a final, desperate attempt to deprive Biden of 270 electoral votes and turn the final decision over to the House.

Election officials from both parties, across the United States, have said there is no evidence of vote tampering, and a federal review drew the same conclusion.

Source: REUTERS

US President Donald Trump seems to have implicitly conceded defeat to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, while claims the presidential election was rigged.

Trump took to his official Twitter account on Sunday and said Biden “won” the presidential election on November 3 because the vote was “rigged.”

“He won because the election was rigged. No vote watchers or observers allowed, vote tabulated by a radical left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!” Trump tweeted.

“All of the mechanical ‘glitches’ that took place on Election Night were really them getting caught trying to steal votes. They succeeded plenty, however, without getting caught,” the president added in a subsequent tweet. “Mail-in elections are a sick joke!”

The tweets, like many of Trump’s recent posts about the election, were flagged by Twitter as containing disputed claims about election fraud.

Reacting to the Republican president’s tweets on Sunday, Biden’s incoming Chief of Staff Ron Klain said the election result was a decision made by the American people and that he accepted the tweets “as a further confirmation of the reality that Joe Biden won the election.”

Klain went on to say that, “He won because he got more votes, in the popular vote by a lot and he won the same number of electoral votes that President Trump called a landslide four years ago.”

President Donald Trump’s supporters gathered in Washington on Saturday for a protest to back his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud as he pushes ahead with a flurry of longshot legal challenges to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory.

After night fell in the nation’s capital, demonstrators favouring Trump clashed in the streets with counterprotesters, videos posted on social media showing fistfights, projectiles and clubs. Police arrested at least 20 people on a variety of charges, including assault and weapons possession, officials said. One stabbing was reported, two police officers were injured and several firearms were also recovered by police.

Earlier in the day, Trump made a brief drive-past through the demonstrations in his motorcade as supporters, many waving “MAGA” – or “Make America Great Again” – flags, cheered.

The president smiled at demonstrators shouting, “USA! USA!” from the car window, but he did not step out.

Source: AFP