Eliana Willis

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    Trump's claims of fraud aim to 'scare people', says ex-head of US election security

    Donald Trump and his allies are “undermining democracy” with evidence-free claims of fraud and conspiracy, the former head of US election security said on Sunday, discussing the effort he led before he was fired by the president.“What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people,” Chris Krebs told CBS 60 Minutes.Trump called the interview “ridiculous, one-sided [and] an international joke”, as he continued to tweet conspiracy theories and baseless claims of electoral malpractice.Trump lost the electoral college to Joe Biden by 306-232, the result he said was a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is more than 6m ahead in the popular vote and won the support of more than 80m Americans, the most of any presidential candidate.Trump belatedly allowed the transition to proceed but has not conceded defeat, despite his team having won one election-related lawsuit and lost 39.Relaying baseless claims to reporters over the Thanksgiving holiday, the president did say he will leave the White House if the electoral college is confirmed for Biden. It votes on 14 December, a result certified on 6 January. Inauguration day is 20 January.Krebs, 43, was fired as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) two weeks after election day. Two days after that, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani gave a press conference in which he and then team member Sidney Powell pushed Trump’s false claims.“It was upsetting,” Krebs told CBS.“It’s not me, it’s not just Cisa. It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months. They’re getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that … didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.”Trump tweeted in response, part of a stream of Sunday night messages.“There is no foreign power that is flipping votes,” Krebs said. “There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.”Claims by Trump lawyers of interference from Venezuela or China were “farcical”, he said, adding: “The American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.”Polling, however, shows a majority of Republicans believe the president. Krebs defended state officials who Trump, and subsequently his supporters, have targeted.“It’s in my view a travesty what’s happening right now with all these death threats to election officials, to secretaries of state,” Krebs said.“I want everybody to look at Secretary [Kathy] Boockvar in Pennsylvania, Secretary [Jocelyn] Benson in Michigan, Secretary [Barbara] Cegavske in Nevada, Secretary [Katie] Hobbs in Arizona. All strong women that are standing up, that are under attack from all sides, and they’re defending democracy. They’re doing their jobs.“Look Secretary [Brad] Raffensperger in Georgia. Lifelong Republican. He put country before party in his holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There are some real patriots.” More

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    Biden says 'America is back'. But will his team of insiders repeat their old mistakes? | Samuel Moyn

    The big question for the US president-elect, Joe Biden, who has taken “build back better” as his motto, is whether this will mean genuine renovation or mere restoration. Americans desperately need a pivot after the madness of Donald Trump. And when Biden takes the reins of power from his predecessor, there is no doubt that a big reset will come. But the risk of complacent restoration is nowhere greater than in US foreign policy – especially since it is a domain in which the office of president has so much authority, even in the midst of legislative gridlock.“Everything must change so that everything can remain the same,” says the aristocratic hero of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). It seems to be the motto of current elites eager to bracket the Trump years in the name of the status quo ante.Since the shock of 2016, Washington foreign policy elites, both mainstream Democrats out of power and their Never Trump Republican allies, have developed a just-so story about their benevolent role in the world. It goes like this: the US was once isolationist, but then committed after the second world war to leading a “rules-based international order”, a phrase that is increasingly hard to avoid in assessments of the presidential transition. In this story, Trump’s election represented atavism and immorality, the return of rightly repressed nationalism and nativism at home and abroad. In response, the agenda has to be to restore US credibility and leadership as the “indispensable nation” by embracing internationalism again.Trump’s boorish attack on traditional pieties understandably makes Washington traditions seem like comfort food after a hangover. The darker truth this response conceals is that generations of foreign policy mistakes both preceded and precipitated Trump – who often went on to continue them anyway. The record of Washington’s “wise men”, who coddled dictators, militarised the globe, and entrenched economic unfairness at home and abroad, opened an extraordinary opportunity for any Trump-like demagogue – making his ascendancy less a matter of atavism than another form of the blowback to mistakes that America perpetually made abroad. If his presence shamed US foreign policy elites, it was because they helped make him possible.There is no doubt that Trump altered national security policy in a host of ways. But the idea that the old international order was actually rules-based is a fiction that is impossible to sustain – especially regarding the US, which bent or broke the rules across the world throughout the cold war, fearful of its Soviet adversary. After September 11, the US crafted its own version of international law, shaped in its own interests – under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, and against much resistance from others across the world.In economic matters since 1945, it is not so much that the US either forged or ruptured a rules-based order, but rather that it pivoted from one set of rules to a radically new one. For decades after the second world war, the system allowed other governments considerable room for manoeuvre in their economic policies. But then the US helped to impose a draconian neoliberal order that persists to the present day, including through international financial institutions it dominated.Trump’s attitudes towards war and peace were paradoxical. He beat his Republican rivals in 2016 by shockingly condemning the Iraq war, falsely claiming to have been on the right side of history all along, before going on to prevail against Clinton by appealing to veterans and other Americans fatigued by their country’s fruitless global interventionism. As a result, Biden himself ran on “ending endless wars” because Trump helped to make it an obligatory gesture. More

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    Five factors that helped US democracy resist Trump's election onslaught

    [embedded content]
    It is not clear yet whether US democracy “survived” the 2020 presidential election unscathed.
    If Donald Trump’s playbook of seeking to undermine a legitimate election becomes standard Republican practice for future elections – refuse to concede, make false claims of fraud, fan the flames of conspiracy, sue everywhere and refuse to certify any win by the other side – then American democracy might already have sustained a fatal wound.
    But Trump has not succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, despite his historic attempt to do so, in what analysts call the most dangerous frontal assault on US democracy since the civil war era. The two states upon which Trump’s plot most hinged, Pennsylvania and Michigan, certified their results in Joe Biden’s favor earlier this week. The presidential transition is at last under way.
    But while the election exposed key areas where American democracy is failing, it also highlighted structural features that make national elections in the United States hard to steal, no matter how determined the would-be despot or how complicit his party colleagues.
    Here is a select list of those features:
    1 Decentralization
    No central authority oversees US elections. National elections are broken down by 50 states and the District of Columbia. Elections within each state are run in turn by counties and by precincts within counties. People vote locally, in thousands of jurisdictions; ballots are tallied locally; and the results are reported locally, and then added up in the public eye. The sheer number of people involved defies both coordination and conspiracy.
    On election night, the tributaries of local results become streams, and then flow together to form rivers, and then become a flood. No president or any other figure has the power to stop the result. While every national election is stained by voter suppression measures and strained by human error and voting irregularities, the totality of the vote, and the transparency of its accumulation, constitutes an overwhelming force.
    2 Turnout
    A persistent symptom of weakness in US democracy has been low voter turnout. Less voter participation means less representative government. But turnout was a bright spot in 2020. Before this November’s election, no presidential ticket had ever notched 70m votes – Barack Obama got 69.5m in 2008. In 2020, Trump’s tally was building toward 74m – while Biden had surpassed the incredible total of 80m, with many ballots from the majority-Democrat New York state yet to be reported.
    The previous benchmark for total votes cast for the two major parties in a presidential election was about 130m. Astoundingly, the 2020 election is on track to record almost 20% more votes than that for the Republican and Democratic tickets. As a uniquely polarizing and inescapable figure in politics, Trump appears to have been a huge driver of turnout, both for and against.
    3 Integrity and transparency
    Despite Trump’s false assertions, US presidential elections are not subject to widespread fraud, miscounts or other significant irregularities. This is in part thanks to the tireless work of activists and no thanks to routine attempts at voter suppression.
    No significant instances of fraud emerged from the 2020 election, conducted over more than a month with an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots cast amid a pandemic. No Trump lawyer dared impute election fraud in court, despite the lies filling Trump’s Twitter feed.
    A hand recount of about 5m ballots in Georgia inconsequentially moved the overall result by about 1,200 votes – a typically small recount result. A recount is also under way in Wisconsin, which Biden won by more than 20,000 votes. State officials reported no significant changes in the overall tally after a fourth day of recounting.
    4 The courts
    From melting hair dye to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Trump’s legal team has been much-derided. But in key states, the campaign also hired top-flight lawyers from firms such as Jones Day and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur. On the whole these lawyers have fared miserably, winning only one minor case out of 43 in six states, while losing 35 cases so far, according to a running tally maintained by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias.
    The judges who threw out Trump campaign cases include Trump appointees. Judge Steven Grimberg in the northern district of Georgia booted a complaint by a Trump elector seeking to block certification of the state’s vote. “I didn’t hear any justification for why the plaintiff delayed bringing this claim until two weeks after this election and on the cusp of these election results being certified,” Grimberg wrote.
    Before the election, another Trump appointee, Judge J Nicholas Ranjan, threw out a Trump complaint in Pennsylvania challenging mail-in ballots. And district judge Matthew Brann of Pennsylvania, a former Republican party official and Federalist Society member, sternly jettisoned a separate Trump campaign challenge filed after the election.
    “This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” Brann wrote. “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. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
    5 The media
    Apart from Congress, the media is one of the least-loved institutions in the United States, abused with glee from the White House on down. And the American media has been terribly crippled by the loss over the last decade of countless local outlets that offered irreplaceable, knowledgable coverage of local events. Pseudo-media propaganda services such as Breitbart, One America News, Newsmax and Parler, financed by conservative billionaires, represent ominous new entries on the media landscape given invaluable support by Trump.
    But strong and independent media, afforded powerful protections by the first amendment, remain a vital feature of US democracy. With no central authority over US elections, it falls to the media to project a winner. Where the intimidation of voters or poll workers is reported, it falls to the media to shine a light. Where false accusations about election fraud are spread by the president, it falls to the media to investigate and explain what is true and what is false.
    Trump grew enraged when Fox News called the state of Arizona for Biden early on Wednesday after the election. But in doing so, the network – in its election-calling operations, at least – demonstrated its independence and investment in the truth. The Associated Press worked for years to maintain and upgrade its elections operations while committing to unprecedented transparency in 2020 in explaining how its elections reporting worked. Other media outlets demonstrated similar will and resolve in waiting to call states until the result was plain but then calling them definitively when it was. More

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    Obama didn’t deliver for Africa – can Biden prove that black lives matter everywhere? | Vava Tampa

    How different is the Biden-Harris administration’s Africa policy going to be from Donald Trump’s, or even Barack Obama’s? Many African people, as well as the continent’s strongman leaders, are now gingerly asking – is Biden going to be Obama 2.0, or Trump-lite?For the sake of black lives mattering everywhere in these turbulent times, I hope Biden will chart a bold new course, diametrically away from not only Trump but also Obama’s Africa policy.I welcomed the Biden presidency with a deep sigh of relief. Yet I am still worried about his Africa strategy. Relations between president-elect Biden and African people will kick off with tensions and apprehensions – understandably so.For the past 60 years, Democrat and Republican presidents have approached Africa primarily for access to, and control of, our extractive industries and, at certain points, for counter-terrorism operations. This approach, under the influence of the cold war, translated into the US supporting Africa’s strongmen, leaving vulnerable people struggling to survive their ruthlessness, while China cheered from the sidelines.The most prominent of these strongmen, including but not limited to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, in power since 1979; Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, head of state since 1986; Djibouti’s Ismail Omar Guelleh, in post since 1999; Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, ruling since 1994, and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki, in power since 1993. The human cost of US support for these men has been jarring for even the most cynical observers.By my calculation Africa’s strongmen have been responsible for more than 22 million deaths on the continent since independence in 1960. That is almost twice as many people as historians say were forcibly transported from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Yet it seems no US president has found this troubling.The bloodiestkilling field has been the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where brutal US-backed strongmen killed more than 5.4 million Congolese people over access and control of minerals between 1998 and 2008, and sparked outbreaks of disease, famine and the use of rape as a weapon of war. With Trump out of the picture, our biggest fear is a repeat of Obama’s Africa doctrine – and for many black people this is the single biggest concern about the Biden-Harris administration.As we all know, President Obama promised Africa one thing in Ghana in 2009: to support strong institutions instead of strongmen. That simple pledge – repeated, in one form or another – felt very personal to many of us fighting for peace and change.During the Obama presidency, 11 African strongmen clung to power, killing thousands of their citizensBut Obama delivered almost nothing meaningful; not because of a Russian or Chinese veto at the UN security council but because in the first few years of his presidency some in his team sought to protect people such as Joseph Kabila, former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose security forces were linked to killings and torture, and Paul Kagame, whose tight grip on the Rwanda presidency has earned him the tag of “benevolent dictator”.The result? Tragic. During the Obama presidency, 11 African strongmen clung to power, killing thousands of their citizens and displacing millions more. Yet almost not a single one of them faced a serious tit-for-tat consequences from the US – and this has been a colossal disaster for democratic forces across the continent.Trump, too, turned a blind eye to atrocities in Africa. During his presidency, President Biya’s troops in Cameroon have killed 4,000 civilians. In Ivory Coast, Allassane Ouattara “won” a third unconstitutional term with 94% of the vote. Many civilians were killed in election-linked violence. The list may very well go on.For the sake of black lives mattering everywhere, will the Biden-Harris administration end the US’s longstanding but shortsighted and destructive support for Africa’s strongmen? How may President Biden respond to #EndSars, a movement against police brutality in Nigeria, or #CongoIsBleeding, a campaign against exploitation in the mines of the DRC? What will he do to de-escalate growing tensions inside Ethiopia or in Eritrea?Many of us are wondering, too, whether or not Biden will refocus US policy and push for peace in Somalia, Libya, Cameroon or Mozambique? Will he support the creation of an international criminal tribunal for Congo to end the continuing killings and use of rape as a weapon of war and, simultaneously, jump-start development in Africa’s great lakes – a region that seems pitifully prone to strongmen and mass killing?Answers to these questions are unclear. But I am hopeful about Biden. His career and some of his pitch-perfect public statements – think of his 1986 statement against apartheid South Africa or his commitment to black lives mattering during the campaign trail – reveal instincts, even a moral commitment, to supporting Africa and black people. More

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    It's only fake-believe: how to deal with a conspiracy theorist

    Unless you’ve been on a silent retreat for the past year, you will have almost certainly heard the rumours – that the pandemic is an elaborate hoax, or that the virus was created as a Chinese weapon, or that dangerous elites are trying to kill off the elderly and to establish a new world order, or that the symptoms are caused by 5G.It is troubling enough to see these ideas on social media. But when you are hearing them from your family, your friends, or a casual acquaintance, it is even harder to know how to respond. You are going to struggle to convince the most committed believers, of course, but what about people who are only flirting with the ideas?These difficult conversations are only set to increase now that a new vaccine is on the horizon. Certain niches of internet are already rife with the “plandemic” theory, which alleges that the spread of the virus has been designed to create big bucks for pharmaceutical companies and the philanthropist Bill Gates (whose charity is funding many of the efforts). The idea has been debunked numerous times, whereas there is good evidence that conspiracy theorists such as David Icke are themselves reaping huge profits from spreading misinformation. The danger, of course, is that their ideas will discourage people from taking the vaccine, leaving them vulnerable to the actual disease. More

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    Donald Trump says he will leave White House if electoral college votes for Joe Biden

    Donald Trump has said that he will leave the White House in January if the electoral college votes for Democratic president-elect Joe Biden, in the closest the outgoing president has come to conceding defeat.
    Biden won the presidential election with 306 electoral college votes – many more than the 270 required – to Trump’s 232. Biden also leads Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally.
    Trump has so far defied tradition by refusing to concede defeat, instead making a series of baseless claims about alleged ballot fraud and launching legal attempts to challenge the outcomes in several states such Pennsylvania and Michigan.
    But desperate efforts by Trump and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed.
    Speaking to reporters on the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump said if Biden – who is due to be sworn in on 20 January – was certified the election winner by the electoral college, he would depart the White House.
    Trump’s comments, made to reporters at the White House after speaking to troops during the traditional Thanksgiving Day address to US service members, appear to take him one step nearer to admitting defeat.
    Asked if he would leave the White House if the college vote went against him, Trump said: “Certainly I will. And you know that,” adding that: “If they do, they’ve made a mistake.” More

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    'Our democracy was tested this year': Joe Biden's Thanksgiving address – video

    Joe Biden urged Americans to put aside their political differences as he called for unity in his Thanksgiving address to the nation.
    ‘We need to remember, we are at war with the virus, not one another,’ said the president-elect. ‘Our democracy was tested this year, and what we learned was this: the people of this nation were up to the task.’
    Joe Biden says ‘Let’s be thankful for democracy’ in message of unity – live More

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    Biden appeals for resilience and unity in Thanksgiving address to America

    In an eve-of-Thanksgiving address on Wednesday, Joe Biden drew on historic hardships and his deep personal loss to make a passionate appeal for resilience, asking Americans to endure a national holiday amid restrictions on travel and gatherings imposed to fight the pandemic.
    More than 12.6m cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in the US and more than 260,000 people have died. Vaccines are imminent but hospitalisations and deaths are surging, straining infrastructure to breaking point as leaders warn of impending disaster.
    His speech struck a note of unity. “We need to remember, we’re at war with the virus, not with each other,” Biden said from Wilmington, Delaware, where he is continuing transition work before his inauguration as the 46th president in Washington on 20 January.
    The tone was in marked contrast to speeches by Donald Trump, who shortly after Biden spoke announced in a tweet that he was giving a full pardon to Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official.
    While Trump has allowed the Biden transition to proceed he has not conceded defeat or stopped making baseless claims of electoral fraud. On Wednesday the president cancelled a trip to Gettysburg meant to support efforts to overturn his defeat in Pennsylvania, after at least two aides to lawyer Rudy Giuliani tested positive for Covid-19. Trump instead addressed state Republicans remotely, claiming: “This election was lost by the Democrats. They cheated. It was a fraudulent election.”

    On the national scene, such words increasingly seem like ambient noise. In Wilmington, from a podium emblazoned with “Office of the President-elect” and in front of an austere golden backdrop, Biden opened by quoting from a plaque at Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania which commemorates 18 December 1777, the first official Thanksgiving, celebrated in the midst of war with Britain.
    Echoing previous speeches informed by the historian Jon Meacham, Biden said George Washington’s army marked the day “under extremely harsh conditions and deprivation.
    “Lacking food, clothing, shelter, they were preparing to ride out a long, hard winter … In spite of the suffering, they showed reverence and character that was forging the soul of the nation. Faith, courage, sacrifice, service to country, service to each other and gratitude, even in the face of suffering, have long been part of what Thanksgiving means in America.”
    Almost 250 years later, families across America are preparing for a holiday with loved ones distant or lost altogether. Switching from the epic to the personal, Biden remembered his own family’s first Thanksgiving without his wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and young daughter Naomi, both killed in a car crash in 1972.
    “I know this time of year can be especially difficult,” he said. “Believe me, I know. I remember that first Thanksgiving. The empty chair, silence that takes your breath away. It’s really hard to care. It’s hard to give thanks … It’s so hard to hope, to understand.
    “I’ll be thinking and praying for each and every one of you this Thanksgiving.”
    In a year marked by bitter partisan divide, the president-elect also saluted “simply extraordinary” turnout and said: “Let’s be thankful for democracy itself. Our democracy was tested this year, and what we learned is this. The people of America are up to the task.”
    Biden is the first presidential candidate to receive more than 80m votes. But Trump was only 6m behind.
    “Out of pain comes possibility. Out of frustration comes progress. Out of division, unity,” Biden said.
    His words also struck a contrast with Trump’s actions. The president has won one election lawsuit in a battleground state – but lost 36. Regardless, he continues to solicit donations to benefit future political moves, including a possible White House run in 2024.
    Nonetheless, in 56 days’ time Biden will replace Trump in office. He has unveiled his nominations for key foreign policy and national security posts and will reportedly name his economic team on 2 December. From Monday, he will receive the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
    Democrats and Republicans in Congress are preparing for Biden to abandon Trump’s state-by-state approach to fighting the pandemic and build a national strategy instead. Democrats believe a Biden plan should include elements of the House’s $2tn coronavirus aid bill which aims to revive the US economy. Republicans have resisted big spending but agree new funding is needed.
    Biden must also plan for the vaccination of hundreds of millions.

    In an interview with NBC broadcast on Tuesday, he said: “The [Trump] administration has set up a roll-out [of] how they think it should occur, what will be available when and how. And we’ll look at that. And we may alter that, we may keep the exact same outline. But that’s in train now. We haven’t gotten that briefing yet.”
    Last week, some lawmakers expressed anger over a lack of federal coordination with Biden. On Tuesday, health secretary Alex Azar said his department “immediately” started working with the president-elect after the General Services Administration acknowledged the election result. It did so on Monday, more than two weeks after the race was called.
    Biden told NBC he thought vaccine distribution should focus “on obviously the doctors, the nurses, those people who are the first responders. I think we should also be focusing on being able to open schools as rapidly as we can. I think it can be done safely … Now, maybe, the hope is we can actually begin to distribute it, this administration can begin to distribute it before we are sworn in to take office.”
    In his speech in Wilmington on Wednesday, Biden hailed “significant record-breaking progress in developing a vaccine” and said the US was “on track for the first immunisations to begin by late December, early January.
    “We’ll need to put in place a distribution plan to get the entire country immunised as soon as possible, which we will do. It’s going to take time. And hopefully the news of the vaccine will serve as incentive to every American to take simple steps to get control of the virus.”
    Biden listed such steps, including wearing a mask, social distancing and more.
    “There’s real hope,” he said. “Tangible hope.” More