US Politics

William Barr said on Tuesday the US Department of Justice has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.The attorney general’s comments come despite Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the election was stolen, and his refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden.Shortly after the comments were made public, the White House pool report said the attorney general had been seen to enter the building.Trump did not immediately comment. But campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a statement: “With the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”Barr made his comments in an interview with the Associated Press. US attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up complaints and information, he said, but have uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said.Barr has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls.Last month, Barr issued a directive to US attorneys allowing them to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the election was certified, despite no evidence at that time of widespread fraud.That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around department policy. Soon after it was issued, the department’s top elections crime official announced he would step aside because of the memo.A Trump team led by Giuliani has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system – with no evidence.They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers did not have a clear enough view in some locations and therefore something illegal must have happened.The claims have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican-appointed judges. Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making unsupported claims.Trump has railed against the election though his own administration has said it was the most secure ever. He recently allowed his administration to begin the transition to Biden, but has still refused to admit he lost.The issues Trump’s campaign and its allies have pointed to are typical in elections: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots to be miscast or lost.Attorney Sidney Powell has spun fictional tales of election systems flipping votes, German servers storing US voting information and election software created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chávez” – the Venezuelan president who died in 2013.Powell was removed from the Trump team after threatening to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court filing.Barr said: “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the [Department of Homeland Security] and DoJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”Barr said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits. He said a remedy for such complaints would be a top-down audit by state or local officials, not the DoJ.“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate’,” Barr said.He said first of all there must be a basis to believe there is a crime to investigate.“Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations and those have been run down; they are being run down,” Barr said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”Giuliani and Ellis insisted they had “gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states” and had “many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud”.“As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DoJ,” they said, adding: “Nonetheless, we will continue our pursuit of the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures.” More

Joe Biden, the US president-elect, formally introduced his top economic advisers on Tuesday, as his incoming administration prepares to deal with the worst financial crisis in decades and a resurgent coronavirus pandemic.Wearing a black boot on the right foot he recently fractured while playing with one of his dogs, Biden appeared in his home city, Wilmington, Delaware, for an event that stressed the gravity of the situation but sought to offer hope.“We’re going to create a recovery for everybody,” Biden said. “Our message to everybody struggling right now is this: help is on the way.”Biden’s nominations would put several women in top economic roles, drawing a clear contrast with Donald Trump and reflecting his commitment to diversity.They include Janet Yellen, who if confirmed by the Senate will be the first woman to lead the US treasury in its 231-year history. Biden said he “might have to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical about the first treasury secretary, [Alexander] Hamilton, to write another musical” about his new nominee.Yellen led the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, focusing on maximising employment and less on price inflation. In remarks on Tuesday, she noted the damage caused by the pandemic.“Lost lives, lost jobs, small businesses struggling to stay alive or closed for good,” she said. “So many people struggling to put food on the table and pay bills and rent.“It’s an American tragedy and it’s essential we move with urgency. Inaction will cause a self-reinforcing downturn, causing yet more devastation. And we risk missing the obligation to address deeper structural problems.” More

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Joe Biden’s nominee for a key economic post has deleted more than a thousand of her own tweets, some of which were critical of senators who now hold her fate in their hands.
The Daily Beast first reported the steps by Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank who Biden has nominated to lead the federal Office of Management and Budget.
“Can people on here please focus their ire on [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell and the GOP senators who are up [for re-election] this cycle who enable him,” Tanden wrote in June 2019, in a tweet recovered by the Beast.
Tanden named those “enablers” as Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn, David Perdue, Thom Tillis “and many more”.
A tweet calling McConnell “#MoscowMitch”, a common nickname for the majority leader among liberals during the investigation of Donald Trump’s links to Russia, was also among those deleted.
Tanden’s fate may hinge on two runoff elections in Georgia in January. If Democrats win both seats – one held by Perdue – they will control the Senate via Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president. That would make Tanden’s confirmation achievable – if party discipline held.
But Tanden, a former policy aide to Hillary Clinton, has also been a fierce critic of senators from the Democratic side of the aisle, for example the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
“It’s an odd choice for Biden and his ‘healing’ presidency to bring someone in who is so combative, especially on Twitter, being that we just ended a four-year Twitter presidency,” Josh Fox, a climate activist and Sanders surrogate, told the Beast. “She causes ire unnecessarily.”
Fox also said CAP “pretends to be aligned with progressive values, but Neera Tanden seems so cynical that she attacks progressive policies like a ban on fracking, the Green New Deal and Medicare for All”.
The Massachusetts progressive Elizabeth Warren is among prominent Democratic senators who have backed Tanden.
Republicans have been quick to tell reporters Tanden will not be confirmed if their party can help it. On Monday, Cornyn, from Texas, told reporters he thought Tanden was Biden’s “worst nominee so far”.
“Her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, [create] certainly, a problematic path,” he said.
The Beast said Tanden had deleted at least one tweet in support of MJ Hegar, the Democrat Cornyn beat for re-election last month.
Speaking on MSNBC, Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator from Missouri, accused Republicans of displaying “a whole new level of hypocrisy”.
“The Republican senators are now all of a sudden worried about tweets that hurt their feelings,” she said. “This is just ridiculous.
“We’ve had a president who has used his Twitter account like a battering ram, going after not just his political opponents but Republican senators, unfairly, with incredibly brutal tweets. Now all of a sudden it’s a disqualification for someone to serve in the cabinet that engaged in her own opinion on Twitter? I think that’s dumb.”
In a statement emailed to the Guardian, a transition spokesperson said Biden would “choose the most-qualified, most experienced candidates capable of leading on day one” and “looks forward to working in good faith with both parties in Congress to install qualified, experienced leaders.
“The president-elect has been heartened to see a number of Republican senators express their desire to work together and indicate that they believe that presidents deserve latitude in building their team.”
Jen Psaki, Biden’s incoming White House press secretary, said Tanden was “a brilliant policy expert and she knows how vital funding for [government] programs is. As a child, for a period her family relied on food stamps to eat, on Section 8 vouchers to pay the rent and on the social safety. Her fresh perspective can help meet this moment.”
Tanden did not comment on the Daily Beast report. She tweeted: “After my parents were divorced when I was young, my mother relied on public food and housing programs to get by. Now, I’m being nominated to help ensure those programs are secure, and ensure families like mine can live with dignity. I am beyond honored.”
She has also changed her Twitter biography. It now reads: “Director of OMB nominee, liberal, Indian American, feminist, mom, wife. Not in that order. Views expressed are most definitely my own.” More

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A bipartisan group of US lawmakers on Tuesday unveiled a $908bn Covid-19 relief bill aimed at breaking a months-long deadlock between Democrats and Republicans over new emergency assistance for small businesses, unemployed people, airlines and other industries.
The measure has not been written into legislation. Nor has it been embraced by the Trump administration, President-elect Joe Biden or leaders in the Senate or House of Representatives, all of whom would be needed for passage.
But it comes with the backing of a group of conservatives and moderates who claim it will appeal to a broad swath of Congress. Economists and senior government figures, including the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, have warned the US economy is at risk unless Congress acts.
Lawmakers are hoping to wrap up their work for the year by mid-December but they still have a massive government-funding bill to approve or else risk agency shutdowns starting on 12 December. If the bipartisan coronavirus aid bill gains traction, it could either be attached to the spending bill or advance on a separate track.
“It would be stupidity on steroids if Congress left for Christmas without doing an interim package,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat.
Earlier this year, more than $3tn in coronavirus aid was enacted, which included economic stimulus measures and money for medical supplies. But since then negotiations about more aid have stalled in Congress.
On Tuesday Powell told Congress that the outlook for the US economy was “extraordinarily uncertain” as the rise in Covid-19 cases continues to take an economic toll on the country. The latest monthly jobs report, released on Friday, is expected to show that the pace of recovery in the jobs market is continuing to slow.
The plan was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference, amid a surge in coronavirus cases, with significant increases in deaths and hospital resources at a breaking point.
The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, urged quick action on the bipartisan plan as she ticked off business closures mushrooming in her state “during a pretty dark and cold time of year”, with many suffering job losses and “food insecurity”.
The proposal would provide emergency aid through 31 March, including $228bn in paycheck protection program funds for hotels, restaurants and other small businesses. State and local governments would receive direct aid, the lawmakers said.
The Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican, appealed for help from Congress, noting in an interview on CBS that his state has more than 5,000 coronavirus patients in hospitals and not enough money to distribute the much-awaited Covid vaccines that are expected to be available beginning this winter.
US airlines would receive $17bn for four months of payroll support as part of $45bn for the transportation sector that also includes airports, buses and Amtrak passenger rail, according to two people familiar with the plan.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a Republican, said the bill contained $560bn in “repurposed” funding from the Cares Act enacted in March, with the remaining $348bn in new money.
The measure includes provisions Republicans have been pressing for, including liability protections for businesses and schools. But it is far more expensive than the $500bn that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been advocating.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and her fellow Democrats would win a central demand with the aid to state and local governments, which face layoffs of frontline workers.
A compromise $300 a week for four months in additional unemployment benefits is in the package, according to the lawmakers. Democrats had been seeking $600.
Separately, a group of Democratic senators introduced legislation on Tuesday that would extend until October 2021 the $600 a week in jobless benefits for workers who lost their jobs due to Covid-19.
While it is significantly below the $2.2tn Pelosi sought in her last offer to the White House before the 3 November elections, the $908bn is for a relatively short period, potentially opening the door to additional requests for money once the Biden administration is in place.
Pelosi and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, were expected to discuss coronavirus aid and the must-pass government funding bill later on Tuesday. More

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Donald Trump and Rudy Giulani discussed as recently as last week the possibility of a “pre-emptive pardon”, the New York Times reported.
A spokeswoman for the president’s personal attorney, Christianne Allen, told the Times: “Mayor Giuliani cannot comment on any discussions that he has with his client.”
Shortly after the Times published its story, however, Giuliani tweeted a denial.
“Fake News NYT lies again,” he wrote. “Never had the discussion they falsely attribute to an anonymous source. Hard to keep up with all their lies.”
The Times cited two anonymous sources.
Presidential pardons are a common feature of the waning days of any White House term. Trump has not conceded defeat by Joe Biden but he will leave office on 20 January regardless.
Last week, the president pardoned his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official.
Trump had already pardoned political allies including Bernard Kerik and Joe Arpaio and commuted a sentence handed to longtime ally Roger Stone. Former Trump aides Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates are all thought to be possible pardon recipients.
Gates, a former deputy campaign chair who also worked on Trump’s inauguration, pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators and was sentenced to 45 days’ confinement.
Last week, he told the Times Trump “knows how much those of us who worked for him have suffered, and I hope he takes that into consideration if and when he grants any pardons”.
Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, has not been convicted of any federal crime. But he has been reported to be under investigation by federal prosecutors, regarding his dealings in Ukraine and possible violations of lobbying law.
Giuliani’s own lawyer, Robert Costello, told the Times: “He’s not concerned about this investigation, because he didn’t do anything wrong and that’s been our position from day one.”
Presidential pardons pre-empting charges or conviction are extremely rare but not unknown. Jimmy Carter, for example, pardoned thousands of men who illegally avoided the draft for the Vietnam war.
Richard Nixon’s pardon from Gerald Ford after resigning over the Watergate scandal covered all his actions as president.
On Monday, conservative commentator Sean Hannity said on his radio show that Trump “needs to pardon his whole family and himself”.
Most observers think a self-pardon would be both unconstitutional and not likely to work. If Trump did try it, it would have no effect on prosecutors in New York state investigating his tax affairs and possible violations of campaign finance law.
According to the Department of Justice, presidential pardons do not signify that the recipient is innocent.
The White House did not comment on the Times report. More

Melania Trump is a woman of few words: she Be Best at brevity. Now that the first lady is getting ready to vacate the White House, however, it looks as if she may have found her voice. Rumour has it that Melania is planning to write a memoir about her time in public office. “She’s not done, or going as quietly as you might expect,” a mysterious source recently told the New York Post.Well, of course she isn’t. Melania may not have the gift of the gab, but she is good at grabbing any opportunity for self-advancement that comes her way. When Donald Trump took office, a lot of liberals seemed to want to see Melania as a victim. #FreeMelania memes circulated; theories that she had done a runner and been replaced by a body double abounded. But Melania, it has become painfully clear, is no shrinking violet. She is no victim. She is every bit as conniving as her husband, not to mention petty: if Melania’s former friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, is to be believed, the first lady spent a large part of the past four years devising devious ways to undermine Ivanka. During the inauguration, for example, Melania reportedly launched “Operation Block Ivanka” and arranged the seating to ensure that you could not see the first daughter on television during the president’s swearing in. Princess Ivanka was blocked by Queen Melania’s head.Extreme pettiness is not a good trait in a human being. However, it can make for excellent content in a memoir. I have high hopes that Melania will fully embrace her dark side after leaving the White House and take down the Trump family in a scandalous tell-all. If she does not dish the family dirt, her memoir risks being extremely anaemic: her time as first lady has not exactly been action-packed, after all. Chapter one: It was Be Best of times and Be Worst of times; I launched an anti-bullying initiative despite being married to the world’s biggest bully. Chapter two: Stormy Daniels compared my husband’s genitals to “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”. Chapter three: I went on a Kenyan safari in a weird colonial hat. Chapter four: I ranted about migrant children and Christmas. Chapter five: I dug up the Rose Garden. Chapter six: I contracted coronavirus.As Melania prepares for the next chapter of her life, it seems that she has already started throwing her nearest and dearest to the wolves in an attempt to clean up her image. On Monday, the New York Post published a fawning piece about the first lady, declaring that she had been done a severe disservice by Stephanie Grisham, her chief of staff and press secretary. One imagines the insiders quoted in the piece are pals of the first lady who have been instructed to launch Operation Rebrand Melania.There has been a lot of mirth about the idea of Melania writing a memoir, but I have a horrible feeling that she is the one who will be having the last laugh. She may not produce anything like Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, but she will make a quick buck and become even richer. Her husband may need to be dragged out of the West Wing kicking and screaming, but Melania is going to strut out smirking and scheming. More

Normal presidents start to think about their legacy long before the final weeks of their time inside the West Wing. But if there’s anything we have learned from the lab rat experiment of the last four years, it’s that Donald Trump is entirely abnormal.Whether he knows it or not – and all the evidence suggests he knows nothing worth knowing – Trump’s legacy is the toxic politics of lies: a permanent campaign of fabrications and falsehoods.No matter that he clearly lost the 2020 election by landslide margins in the electoral college and the popular vote. What matters is the never-ending sense of grievance that someone or something, somewhere – liberals, minorities, judges, reporters – have conspired to wrong Trump and oppress his long-suffering fans.This is the narrative of the fascist story forever: you are not to blame for your suffering because it was contrived by others – immigrants and outsiders, wielding wealth and power in the shadows.Trump did not invent this story and likely has no idea where it came from, other than his own obvious genius. He did not invent the notion that brazen lies can buy you a delusional base. He wasn’t the first to put the bull in the bully pulpit of the presidency.But he was the first to run a White House like a Joe McCarthy witch hunt, unleashing social media to cower an entire party into a posture of pure cowardice.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills of the IRS, the calling-in of his massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud cases of New York state’s prosecutors.These Trumpist Republicans are his legacy, as much as a supreme court stacked against the popular vote, science and all good sense.They are people like Elise Stefanik in upstate New York. Stefanik is a Harvard graduate whose career began alongside Republican moderates such as Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, and Josh Bolten, Bush’s second term chief of staff. But now she’s a full Trumpista, mimicking his campaign style of insults and defending him through his impeachment for corruptly twisting national security to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.They are people like Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator and 2024 presidential hopeful. Cotton is already campaigning against immigrants and says he’ll oppose Biden’s nominee for homeland security because he was part of a giant conspiracy of Democratic donors to sell green cards to the Chinese. In fact the conspiracy involved just three cases, and is the same cash-for-citizenship program that triggered investigations into Trump’s son-in-law and confidant Jared Kushner. But why spoil the soundbite?They are people like Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who spent most of the 2020 campaign sounding like a Trump clone but has now disappeared from public view, even as he continues to stop local officials from enforcing mask-wearing to slow the spread of the pandemic.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills, the massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud casesThis political plague of extreme lies did not start four years ago.George W Bush and Karl Rove won the 2004 election by suggesting that Democrats would open the nation’s doors to Islamist terrorists. That was before the second term was demolished by their own nativists who sunk their plans for immigration reform. Those anti-immigrant forces found a natural home in the so-called Tea party that denied Barack Obama’s citizenship, and later populated Trump’s White House and justice department.The good news is that we already have a vaccine. It’s the best way to protect yourself from demagogues, deception and delusions. It separates fact from fiction. It recalls recent history to place the present in some kind of meaningful context.It’s called the news media, and you can help. You can be an informed citizen by reading established news media first, not your social feed or email. You can share stories from the truth-tellers who have no problem calling out the liars.You can even pay for the truth that journalists deliver every day, no matter how much sewage pours through social media feeds and email inboxes. It doesn’t cost much when you think about how much we’ve paid during these last four years of chaos and corruption.We can’t stop the Trumpistas from Trumping. We can’t stop the rest of them from pretending like they were never big Trump fans in the first place.But we can stop them running away from the facts or their record. We can remind them how they failed to stop Trump’s corruption and this murderous pandemic.We can stop them skewing the political spectrum so far that the Biden team tacks to center ground that is already six steps to the right.We can hold the new White House to its promises at the same time as holding the old Republican party to what used to be its principles.But this work comes at a price. Back in the late 19th century, the French writer Gustave Le Bon wrote that “the crowd” has never rewarded the truth.“They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them,” he wrote. “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”You can reward the truth if you want to. It’s one of the best ways to demolish the legacy of the last four years. More

Scott Atlas has resigned as special adviser to Donald Trump, a White House official said on Monday, after a controversial four months during which he attacked science-based public health measures and clashed repeatedly with other members of the coronavirus taskforce.“I am writing to resign from my position as Special Advisor to the President of the United States,” Atlas said in a letter to Trump dated 1 December, according to Fox News, which first reported his resignation. Atlas later confirmed his resignation in a tweet.Atlas is a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s rightwing Hoover Institution, where he works on healthcare policy. He has no expertise or experience in infectious diseases or epidemiology, yet was nevertheless selected by Trump to advise the president on the pandemic.Atlas joined the White House this summer, where he clashed with top government scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, as he resisted stronger efforts to contain the pandemic.Atlas attacked public health measures such as masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing. He called on residents of Michigan to “rise up” against restrictions put in place by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been the target of a kidnapping plot, leading to calls for his firing.Atlas repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus, which has killed more than 265,000 Americans.He also promoted the idea that the US should aim to achieve “herd immunity”, a so-called strategy that would probably result in millions of deaths, and was repeatedly rebuked by public health and infectious disease experts, in addition to Stanford University and the Stanford faculty senate.His views also prompted Stanford to issue a statement distancing itself from the faculty member, saying Atlas “has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic”.“We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing,” the university said on 16 November. “We also believe in the importance of strictly following the guidance of local and state health authorities.”Atlas has been sharply criticized by public health experts, including Fauci, the leading US infectious disease expert, for providing Trump with misleading or incorrect information on the virus pandemic. He has downplayed the importance of face masks and this month said lockdowns had been “an epic failure” in stopping the virus’s spread.Atlas defended his role in his resignation letter, saying, “I cannot think of a time where safeguarding science and the scientific debate is more urgent.”The resignation comes as the country faces a deadly surge in coronavirus cases and record-high hospitalisations. The US is currently reporting more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day.Dr Celine Grounder, a member of Biden’s advisory panel on the crisis, greeted the news of the resignation with relief.“I’m relieved that in the future, people who are qualified, people who are infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists like me will be helping to lead this effort,” she told CNBC.“You wouldn’t go to a podiatrist for a heart attack and that was essentially what was happening.”Atlas was hired as a “special government employee”, which limited his service to government to 130 days in a calendar year, a deadline he reached this week. More