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    Biden calls Trump's behavior 'embarrassing' as Pompeo dismisses election result – video

    The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has predicted ‘there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration’ while US allies offered their congratulations to the president-elect, Joe Biden.
    Pompeo focused on the various legal challenges being pursued by the Trump administration, while Biden, who said he has not spoken to Donald Trump since the election was called in Biden’s favor on Saturday, said Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was ‘an embarrassment’
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    Pompeo makes baseless claims about ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’ More

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    DoJ officials condemn Barr's approval of voter fraud inquiries without evidence

    Current and former US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has stoked further discord around the president’s refusal to concede electoral defeat by approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite little evidence of any wrongdoing.
    Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to the 93 US attorneys across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by senior figures inside and outside the DoJ.
    In the most dramatic response, the top DoJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned from his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.
    In a statement, Pilger pointed out that for the past 40 years the justice department had abided by a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, with criminal investigations only carried out after contests were certified and completed.
    Barr’s memo tears up that rule by giving federal prosecutors the go-ahead to investigate what he called “apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”. His action was specifically aimed at closely fought presidential contests in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
    Complaints about unsubstantiated irregularities have been received by the justice department from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
    Outside the DoJ, there was widespread unease that Barr has once again mobilised the might of the justice department in a politicised direction. The memo was interpreted as casting doubt on the propriety of the election, which on Saturday was called for Joe Biden following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.

    Vanita Gupta, a former head of the civil rights division of the DoJ under Barack Obama, denounced Barr’s tactics as “scaremongering”.
    “Let’s be clear, this is about disruption, disinformation and sowing chaos,” she said on Twitter:
    Gupta, now chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s aim was “stoking division, polarization and lies”, in order to “undermine confidence in outcome with Trump voters and ultimately a Biden administration”.
    Other former prosecutors, legal scholars and election experts debated how serious Barr’s move was likely to be. Steve Vladeck, a specialist in national security law at the University of Texas, stressed that the DoJ had no power to block states from certifying election results – only judges could do that.
    But Vladeck went on to describe the Barr memo as “ominous” in that it “perpetuates the illegitimacy narrative” that has been embraced by Trump and senior Republicans in the hope of clouding Biden’s victory.
    Preet Bharara, who Trump fired in 2017 as US attorney for the southern district of New York, gave a similarly nuanced response. For now, he said, he was “more disgusted than scared” by Barr’s intervention.
    “But stay tuned.”
    Barr specifically refers in his memo to the 40-year-old non-intervention policy over which he has now run roughshod. He denigrates it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”, and says it was never a “hard and fast rule”.
    Later in the letter, he softens his advice to federal prosecutors, urging them to follow “appropriate caution” in line with the DoJ’s commitment to “fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship”.
    “Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” he says.
    Those sentences prompted some speculation that Barr was merely going through the motions to placate Trump. The president has by all accounts been on the warpath since the election was called for Biden, ordering his administration to take any action to forward the lie that the election has been stolen.
    But such a theory of Barr’s conduct is countered by the fact that this is not the first time he has attempted to push prosecutors into intervening in the election. Three weeks before election day, he made a similar gambit to lift the decades-old restriction on intervening in the middle of a race.
    Having been appointed by Trump to be the nation’s most senior prosecutor in February 2019, Barr has shown himself willing to side openly with the president in apparent breach of the time-honoured independence of his office. One notable example was his handling of the publication of the Mueller report into collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, which was criticized as spin on behalf of the president.
    More recently, Barr has mirrored Trump’s attempts to sow doubt on the election. In particular, the attorney general has intensified baseless claims from the White House about rampant fraud in mail-in voting – a form of electoral participation that has long been practiced by some states and that was widely used this year.
    Barr went as far as to lie on live television about an indictment for an electoral crime in Texas. Officials were forced to retract the statement, as the supposed incident never took place.
    Doubts about Barr’s intentions were heightened after it was reported that a few hours before the letter to prosecutors was disclosed, he met with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader.
    McConnell has remained in lockstep with Trump, showing no sign he is prepared to break with a president whose resistance to accepting defeat shatters a norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been central to US democracy since 1800.

    McConnell, who is likely to continue to control the Senate for the Republicans unless Democrats can win two runoff elections in Georgia in January, has declared his loyalty to Trump.
    He said: “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” More

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    Now what does Giuliani's Four Seasons Total Landscaping farce remind me of? | Marina Hyde

    We begin in many people’s happy place, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. As you may know, Donald Trump’s losing presidential campaign held a press conference that has passed immediately into the annals of political comedy. And also the annals of horticultural business marketing. Consider this Philadelphia gardening establishment the world’s leading purveyor of seasonal colour.If you somehow missed the Four Seasons Total Landscaping story, it was truly the quattro stagioni of political events. Each time it seemed it couldn’t get any better, there turned out to be some new quarter of it to enjoy. But let me briefly summarise. On Saturday, the current US president tweeted that a “big press conference” would be held that morning at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, his account offered clarification – that wasn’t the hotel, but somewhere called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Double-taking at their satnavs, reporters scrambled to this prestige location in a suburban business park, where Trump branding had been hastily affixed to the roller door of a single-storey building. Then again, the backdrop was really the best of it. Pan out, and the venue lay next door to a sex shop and a crematorium.Clearly this was … unconventional. Yet amazingly, the world’s media would indeed end up being addressed there. Not by Trump, but by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Dead people were always voting in Philadelphia, Rudy claimed. Joe Frazier, and Will Smith’s dad (twice).And as he said all this, he was flanked by a long line of unsmiling campaign guys trying to look like nothing could be more normal than standing in a forgotten corner of suburbia in front of some garden hoses. There are millions of potential captions to the picture. Let’s go with something befitting the tragedy: They Were Four Years In Power.Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference is: why did they carry on with it? Some sort of mistake had clearly been made, so why did they persist and pretend it hadn’t? Many speculate it was down to fear of not obeying the will of the White House idiot, however lunatic the reality of it may appear. Others simply think that by the time the campaign staff stopped screaming, they felt they were in too deep to turn around.Either way, the upshot is the same: no matter the absurdity of any situation, no matter how ridiculous it looks when you get there, there will ALWAYS be a line of guys ready to butch it out like it was their plan along. There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who feel that it is somehow less ridiculous to look completely ridiculous than it is to simply say: “Oh wait, we made a mistake – give us half an hour and we’ll tell you the new venue.” There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who, even if they walked over a cliff, would leave very specific last words echoing behind them. “I meant to do that.”It was at this point, about three days into the story, that I suddenly stopped, mid-laugh. Like a flash, it had dawned on me. Oh I SEE, I thought. How very “United Kingdom”. These days, our country is that press conference. Whether it be butching out the warnings of 7,000-long lorry queues, or pissing off a new US president who already thinks our government is a nasty basket case, Boris Johnson & Co are very much one of those lines of guys. Source of escalating international bemusement or amusement? Yeah, we meant to do that.This morning, it was claimed that Johnson’s congratulatory tweet to Biden was a hastily doctored congratulatory message to Trump – with the remains of the Trump message still slightly visible. Think of it as the Turin shroud of digital incompetence – and accept that some hyper-defensive Whitehall source will turn up to say “actually we meant to do that”.Meanwhile, the government’s insistence on the international law-breaking clauses in its internal markets bill could easily leave the UK with no meaningful EU or US trade deal. On Monday night, John Major warned that the plan “is unprecedented in all our history – and for good reason. It has damaged our reputation around the world.” Still, we meant to do that. “Because of our bombast, our blustering, our threats and our inflexibility,” continued Major, “our trade will be less profitable, our Treasury poorer, our jobs fewer, and our future less prosperous.” I guess we meant to do that.A month and a half from the end of transition, the guys who promised people the sunlit uplands are now building giant car parks like it’s a positive thing. Or to put it another way, they are telling you that the Four Seasons – an international standard of luxury and service – is actually less good than Four Seasons Total Landscaping. We still plan to exit transition in midwinter in a deadly pandemic we’ve known about almost the whole year. They are butching it out.This is statecraft by Clouseau. There’s a bit in The Pink Panther Strikes Again where the inspector finds himself in a home gym and is trying to show off his familiarity with the parallel bars. He take a couple of swings, then loses control in the dismount and contrives not just to be thrown off the bars, but all the way down a long nearby staircase, right into the middle of a genteel drawing room scene. Noting the gaze of the room’s inhabitants, Clouseau picks himself up and declares: “Well, that felt good!”This, but with a trade policy on which our national and international future hinges. Perhaps, like Clouseau, we will agonisingly pratfall our way to eventual Brexit triumph, and not have senselessly angered the new US administration along the way. However, real life not being a carefully plotted movie farce, we might have to accept that the chances are we won’t. Still, you can be sure that whatever happens, some guys will be claiming they meant to do it all.• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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    What is the future for Latino voters in the US? Five experts weigh in | Chuck Rocha, Cristina Beltrán, Danielle Pilar Clealand, Arlene Dávila, Sonja Diaz

    Why did Democrats leave Latino organizations scrambling for resources?
    Everyone is talking about Miami-Dade, Florida, where Joe Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton by a large margin. Let’s be clear, however: even if Biden won the county by the same margin as Clinton, he still would have lost the state by over 170,000 votes. Democrats mostly won Latinos in Florida; the demographic we lost was white voters.
    The most devastating problem made evident in this election was Democrats’ lack of outreach for races beside the presidential one. Poor and limited outreach around down-ballot campaigns cost us a majority in the Senate and numerous congressional seats. We assumed that the presidential race would draw Latino voters to the polls, but Biden’s campaign couldn’t pull it off on their own. In the final months before the election, Biden spent more money on bilingual communications than any presidential candidate in history. The problem was the disbursement of money from outside organizations: most of it seemed to go to predominantly white-led Super Pacs which focused on turning out what they viewed as persuadable white voters. Latino organizations were left scrambling for resources.
    The story of the Latino vote in 2020 isn’t over. We have a lot of data to use in future operations and in efforts to keep pushing Latino turnout up. To take on the disaster in Florida, we need to invest in intentional organizing and outreach by Latino-led firms and organizations. We must build a political infrastructure for the community, by the community.
    Chuck Rocha is the president of Solidarity Strategies and the founder of Nuestro Pac. He was a senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign
    Politically, there is no ‘Latino community’
    This election revealed, yet again, that Latinos are a diverse population – not just demographically, but ideologically. When it comes to politics, there is no “Latino community”. And while Latinos are a disproportionately Democratic electorate, 2020 reminds us is that there is no single story here. Latino voters helped turn Nevada and Arizona blue – yet Latino Trump supporters in Florida and Texas help keep those states red.
    Going forward, the Democratic party needs to put much more energy into partnering with and listening to local Latino candidates and grassroots organizers on the ground. Democrats need to get their act together when it comes to developing mobilization strategies that take into account differences of age, gender, class, race, region, sexuality, education, occupation, national origin, and generation within Latino communities.
    In our eagerness to analyze Latino voting patterns, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Trump almost won re-election because the majority of white voters in the United States continued to support him. The only reason Trump lost is because a minority of white voters came together with the majority of Black, Latino, Asian American and Native voters. A multiracial coalition saved our democracy to fight another day.
    Cristina Beltrán is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She is author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity and Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy
    Anti-communism – and veiled racism – drove many Latino voters in Florida
    A large portion of Latino voters in Florida are conservatives for whom the legacy of the Cuban Revolution – and, more recently, Venezuela’s move to the left – are central to their voting decisions. To that end, Republicans worked overtime this election to paint Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as socialists, despite the candidates’ moderate positions within the Democratic party.
    But that’s not the entire story. The narrative about socialism was bolstered by conservatives’ labeling of Black Lives Matter supporters as Marxists and communists. Support for Trump among certain Latino populations in south Florida must be seen within the context of anti-Blackness, heightened by the Black Lives Matter protests and a Black woman as the vice-presidential candidate. Mislabeling Black Lives Matter as “communist” was a way to repackage racism among white Cubans and other white-identifying Latinos and make that racism politically palatable.
    Danielle Pilar Clealand is an associate professor of Mexican American and Latino studies at the University of Texas at Austin
    Stop obsessing over Miami-Dade
    A lot of media attention has focused on conservative Cuban voters in the Miami area, yet Miami-Dade county accounts for only 3.1% of the national Latinx vote. Most Latinx in the US voted for Biden, as did most people of color generally. We need to turn our attention to young Latinx voters, including those who flipped Arizona to the Democrats, as well as those who seek progressive alternatives beyond the limits of institutional politics.
    Unfortunately, both political parties still consistently ignore Latinx people, and popular knowledge about Latinx communities remains stereotypical and rudimentary. People still marvel at discovering we’re not a monolith and don’t fit into a neat demographic.
    Arlene Dávila is professor of anthropology and American studies at NYU and the founding director of the Latinx Project
    The US political machine must invest in reaching Latino voters
    The 2020 election has seen historic levels of turnout, including Latinos and young voters. Amid a global pandemic, however, voters badly needed alternatives to traditional campaign tactics and election administration. They also deserved a more adequate response to widespread misinformation and voter suppression.
    Within this context, neither party or campaign expended the necessary resources to fully engage Latinos. Democrats and Republicans invested large sums in persuading white voters, while neglecting the Latinos and young voters of color who have proved critical to Democratic support in Arizona. UCLA research shows Latinos overwhelmingly supported Biden in Maricopa, Pima and Yuma counties, driving Biden toward victory there.
    This was made possible by civil society organizations consistently engaging Latinos – not over months, but over years. And Florida’s exit polls show Latino voters overall preferred Biden by 21 points. Yet we keep hearing tired tropes about conservative Cuban American voters – a narrative which ignores the surge of white women and seniors who ultimately clinched Florida for Trump.
    Sonja Diaz is the founding director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative More

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    Brace yourselves. The next Donald Trump could be much worse | Bhaskar Sunkara

    Joe Biden has defeated Donald Trump. Millions across the country are applauding the downfall of a president who has been mendacious in his public communications, loathsome in his personal conduct, and utterly inept in his handling of a pandemic that has killed 230,000 Americans.Amid the celebration, however, there should be nagging fear. Biden ran largely on the idea that he will be a return to the normalcy of the Obama years. But if he governs as a “normal” Democrat, it won’t be long before we have to deal with the next Donald Trump.The real Trump buried himself in blunders and couldn’t deliver on campaign promises to voters. Instead of saving manufacturing jobs and protecting, as he pledged, “the jobs, wages and wellbeing of American workers before any other consideration”, the Trump administration eliminated paid overtime rules, created tax cuts for the rich and lost 740,000 manufacturing positions this year alone.Yet a different Donald Trump might have handled the coronavirus pandemic competently and launched an ambitious infrastructure and jobs program capable of improving the lives of millions of people. Without actually challenging oligarchs and big business interests, this alternate-reality Trump might have been able to effectively marry economic populism with xenophobia, the same formula that has propelled rightwing authoritarians to power elsewhere in the world. A different Trump might have even managed to win over enough voters who typically vote for Democrats, including black and brown voters, to expand his base into one capable of winning the popular vote.As bad as the last four years have been, we’ve been lucky to get the actual – bumbling – Trump, as opposed to a more effective politician, an American Narendra Modi or Jair Bolsonaro.We’re not preordained to go the route of rightwing populism, of course. Countries like Denmark, Portugal and Spain have cemented left-of-center governments in recent years and held the right at bay. But to prevent the rise of another Trump, liberals are going to have to start thinking more seriously about what gave us Trump to begin with.Trump was not just a product of latent racism and sexism. The economic hypocrisy of recent Democratic administrations alienated part of the Democrats’ traditional blue-collar voting base, not to mention the millions of unaffiliated voters who simply opted not to vote for either Clinton or Trump in 2016. It’s these voters, not the wealthy suburbanites which many in the party’s establishment cater to, that still hold the keys to American politics.Biden won simply because of how unpopular Trump isBiden won simply because of how unpopular Trump is. Democrats will need to offer Americans something different – a type of politics that can activate irregular working-class voters and deliver on bread-and-butter economic issues – if they’re to create a stable and responsive government.Progressives have to challenge the centrist policies of past Democratic administrations. But they will also have to resist narrow identitarianism within their own ranks. There can be no mass progressive politics if we insist on only talking to those who already agree with us. By staying siloed in the progressive bubble we implicitly reject the possibility of organizing workers of all races, rural and urban alike, behind a program of Medicare for All, good union jobs and a Green New Deal.Biden campaigned differently than Clinton did. He embraced a slightly more populist message and campaigned in areas the former secretary of state neglected. But the thrust of his proposed method of governance is closer to the normal of the Clinton and Obama administrations than the one advocated by Biden’s erstwhile, more leftwing allies, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.Under Bill Clinton, that “normalcy” saw much of the manufacturing base of the United States gutted, mass incarceration accelerated and essential welfare supports eliminated. Under Barack Obama, millions of people were deported, establishment figures like John Podesta were given White House posts, and even during a Great Recession there was no serious attempt to break with decades of failed economic policies.When Hillary Clinton told voters that she had been in politics for 30 years, there were plenty of reasons for voters to be skeptical, given what happened to their lives and communities during 30 years of stagnant wages and soaring inequality. By deciding to play the role of populist, Trump was able to win over just enough of them to sneak into the White House.He squandered whatever mandate he had. If Joe Biden does the same, the next rightwing president might not. More

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    Barr tells prosecutors to investigate 'vote irregularities' despite lack of evidence

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    The US attorney general, William Barr, has authorized federal prosecutors to begin investigating “substantial allegations” of voter irregularities across the country in a stark break with longstanding practice and despite a lack of evidence of any major fraud having been committed.
    The intervention of Barr, who has frequently been accused of politicizing the DoJ, comes as Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat and promotes a number of legally meritless lawsuits aimed at casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election. Joe Biden was confirmed as president-elect on Saturday after he won the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania.
    Barr wrote on Monday to US attorneys, giving them the green light to pursue “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities” before the results of the presidential election in their jurisdictions are certified. As Barr himself admits in his letter, such a move by federal prosecutors to intervene in the thick of an election has traditionally been frowned upon, with the view being that investigations into possible fraud should only be carried out after the race is completed.
    But Barr, who was appointed by Trump in February 2019, pours scorn on such an approach, denouncing it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”.
    The highly contentious action, which was first reported by Associated Press, was greeted with delight by Trump supporters but with skepticism from lawyers and election experts. Within hours of the news, the New York Times reported that the justice department official overseeing voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, had resigned from his position.
    “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” Pilger reportedly told colleagues in an email, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.”
    Doubts about Barr’s intentions were heightened after it was reported that a few hours before the letter to prosecutors was disclosed, he met with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader.
    McConnell has so far remained in lockstep with Trump. Earlier on Monday he expressed support for the defeated president on the floor of the chamber. He said: “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”
    As news of Barr’s memo circulated, social media lit up. “Here we go,” tweeted Stephanie Cutter, Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager in the 2012 presidential race after the Barr memo was revealed.
    Mimi Rocha, a former assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York, decried the memo, saying it “negates DoJ policy re not getting involved til after election certified. Not good.” She added though that there were no “clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”, as cited by Barr, and urged federal lawyers to “remain true to your oaths”.
    The Barr memo is the culmination of months of cumulative controversy in which the attorney general has proven himself willing to imperil the reputation for impartiality of the justice department by following Trump into his election-fraud rabbit hole.
    In particular, he has doubled down on Trump’s baseless claims about rampant fraud in mail-in voting. That included lying on television about an indictment for an electoral crime in Texas that his department later had to concede never took place.
    Barr’s intervention emerged shortly after the Trump campaign filed another longshot lawsuit in Pennsylvania, attempting to block the state from certifying its election results. It was the calling of the Pennsylvania contest on Saturday by media organisations in favor of Biden, who remains about 45,000 votes ahead of Trump in the state, that tipped the Democratic candidate over the 270 electoral college mark and awarded him the presidency.
    The new Pennsylvania lawsuit rehashes many of the already disproven claims that have failed to succeed so far in federal and state courts. The case hangs on the claim – posited without any new hard evidence – that voters were treated differently depending on whether they voted by mail or in person.
    The legal action also claims that almost 700,000 mail-in and absentee ballots were counted in Philadelphia and Allegheny county, both Democratic strongholds, without observers present. That complaint has already been repeatedly debunked.
    Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania, dismissed the lawsuit as meritless. “I am confident Pennsylvania law will be upheld and the will of the people of the Commonwealth will be respected in this election,” he said. More