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      Biden Assails Trump Over Handling of Russia Hack

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden Assails Trump Over Handling of Russia Hack“This assault happened on Donald Trump’s watch when he wasn’t watching,’’ President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said.“The attacker succeeded in catching the federal government off guard and unprepared,” President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on Tuesday at a news conference in Wilmington, Del.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesDec. 22, 2020Updated 9:54 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. accused President Trump on Tuesday of “irrational downplaying” of the widespread hack of the federal government and American industry, saying that the current administration was denying him needed intelligence and warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion into American systems to “go unanswered” after he takes office.“This assault happened on Donald Trump’s watch when he wasn’t watching,’’ Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Delaware. “It is still his responsibility as president to defend American interests for the next four weeks, but rest assured that even if he does not take it seriously, I will.”The direct critique was a remarkable departure from the usual one-president-at-a-time tradition, in which incoming presidents are careful about not second-guessing the actions of the incumbent. But Mr. Trump’s refusal to recognize Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory, and his effort to subvert the results, has clearly poisoned elements of the transition process.In recent days Mr. Biden’s aides have come to realize that the scope of the intrusion — which landed the Russians inside the email system used by top Treasury officials, and won them access to the networks of the Energy, Commerce and Homeland Security Departments and dozens of American companies — could pose a threat in the opening days of the new administration.Mr. Biden acknowledged as much, indirectly, when asked about his statement that he could not ensure government systems could be trusted when he take office.“Of course I can’t,’’ he said. “I don’t know what the state of them is. They’re clearly not safe right now.”Privately, members of his staff have said that while they have received briefings on the subject, they have been bare-bones. And the shutdown of recent cooperation between the transition team and the Defense Department has encompassed the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command — the quasi-civilian and military sides of the nation’s foreign offensive and defensive operations.“There’s still so much we don’t know including the full scale of the breach or the extent of the damage it has caused,’’ Mr. Biden said. He was alluding to the quiet internal warnings that Russia may have been able to place “back doors” in government systems and, in the worst case, manipulate data or sabotage systems.“It was carried out by using sophisticated cybertools, and the attacker succeeded in catching the federal government off guard and unprepared,” Mr. Biden said.Unlike Mr. Trump, he left no doubt he believed that Russia was responsible, noting that both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William P. Barr have said as much publicly, even if Mr. Trump would not. And he said once there was a formal determination of responsibility, a task that could take intelligence agencies weeks, “we will respond and probably respond in kind.”The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 22, 2020, 9:33 p.m. ETTrump demands changes to coronavirus relief bill, calling it a ‘disgrace.’Birx says she will retire after Biden transition.In a shift, Twitter won’t transfer followers of official White House accounts when Biden takes office.That vow is likely to prove easier to issue from the Wilmington stage than it will be to execute from the Situation Room. Mr. Biden’s first encounter with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will be on another topic: The two men will have 16 days to negotiate an extension of up to five years of New Start, the nuclear arms control treaty that expires in early February.That will force Mr. Biden to be striking a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on a newer type of threat.Moreover, while the United States is awash in digital targets, Russia is a far less connected society, making an “in kind” response more difficult. And it is hardly a state secret that the United States already spies on Russian systems, and has turned off computers at the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed disinformation group that was involved in the 2016 election interference. Last year, The New York Times reported that the U.S. had also implanted malware into Russia’s electric power grid — as a warning to Moscow after the discovery that Russia had put malware in the U.S. grid.“Of course the U.S. intelligence community does these every day and twice on Sundays,’’ Dmitri Alperovitch, the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank, and the former chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, where he specialized in Russian cyberoperations.Speaking on Deep State Radio, a podcast, he said, “we have all used supply chain attacks, and we can’t say it’s OK for us and not for others.”In fact, the Russians often cite such U.S. operations to argue that American outrage over espionage and even more extensive cyberattacks is manufactured.Mr. Biden said that the United States should be “getting together with our allies to try to set up an international system that will constitute appropriate behavior in cyberspace” and “hold any other country liable for breaking out of those basic rules.”Such efforts are hardly new. Mr. Obama tried a basic agreement with President Xi Jinping of China late in his term, after the Chinese were caught removing 22.5 million security clearance files from the Office of Personnel Management, another hack that went largely undetected for a year. The accord quickly fell apart after Mr. Obama left office.A parallel effort inside the United Nations also quickly frayed. While another one is expected to issue a report in 2021, much of the debate has been hijacked by Russia and China to focus on limiting dissent on the internet and pressing for the “true identity” of everyone online — which would make it easier for them to sniff out dissidents.But the more immediate problem for Mr. Biden may be finding, and securing, vulnerable elements of the software supply chain that Russia exploited when it bored into network management software made by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas firm, and corrupted its updates with malware. That is one of several ways Russia is believed to have entered such an array of agencies and corporations.Amid the investigation into the Russian hack, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a report based on a two-year, still unfinished review of the risks to the United States of a supply chain attack.The report concluded that supply chain risks “could have far-reaching and potentially devastating impacts,” a bit of an understatement as the government feverishly digs through its systems for evidence of Russian compromise.Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump’s Team Eyes the Exits

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump’s Team Eyes the ExitsFarewell, henchmen.Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.Dec. 22, 2020, 7:52 p.m. ETCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesOh, how the mighty have fallen.In February 2019, William Barr strode into the Department of Justice as the 85th attorney general. He was on his second tour of duty, having first held the post under President George H.W. Bush. Despite some observers’ concerns about his criticism of the Russia investigation and, more generally, his expansive view of presidential authority, Mr. Barr assumed office with the reputation of a seasoned, wise man, a grown-up in an administration teeming with unruly brats. At the very least, he was an upgrade over then Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, the Trump toady installed as an emergency seat warmer when Jeff Sessions was ousted.On Wednesday, Mr. Barr will slouch out of the cabinet with his ethical compass shattered, his reputation soiled and his dignity in flames. For fans of democracy, his departure should be met with rejoicing.Back in the Bush days, Mr. Barr held that the attorney general’s “ultimate allegiance must be to the rule of law” rather than to “the president who appointed him,” as he said in a 1992 speech. This time around, his tenure seemed aimed at assuring Mr. Trump that he’d been kidding about all that. Whether misrepresenting the Mueller report to cover the president’s backside, ordering federal law enforcement to remove peaceful demonstrators from in front of the White House or eroding public confidence in the electoral process, Mr. Barr has repeatedly made clear where his true loyalties lie. Hint: not with the American people.Unlike many Trump lackeys, the secretary wasn’t merely sucking up to the president — though there was plenty of that. He also used Mr. Trump’s autocratic proclivities to advance his own long-held vision of executive power. He was seen by many as the administration’s most dangerous henchman.Despite all he did for the president, Mr. Barr still wound up on the naughty list after refusing to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and for not working hard enough to smear Joe Biden’s son Hunter. On Dec. 14, the president tweeted that Mr. Barr would be stepping down “just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.”Perhaps dissatisfied with the violence already done to his legacy, the secretary submitted a resignation letter that should be required reading for aspiring sycophants. He gushed about how “honored” and “proud” he was to have played his part in Mr. Trump’s “unprecedented achievements” — achievements “all the more historic” for occurring “in the face of relentless, implacable resistance” and a vicious “partisan onslaught,” the “nadir” of which were the “baseless accusations of collusion with Russia. Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program.” On and on he fawned, cementing his place in the bootlickers hall of fame.With the cord cut, Mr. Barr has been inching away from the president the past couple of days. On Monday, he said he saw no need to appoint special counsels either to oversee the D.O.J.’s inquiry into Hunter Biden’s taxes or to investigate Mr. Trump’s election-fraud fantasies. Sorry. This is where too little meets too late.The attorney general will not be the only Trumpie to retreat amid a gag-inducing swirl of fawning, preening, base stoking and earth salting. Also last week, in discussing the transition with career officials in the education department, Secretary Betsy Devos called on them to “resist.” Declaring that her goal had always been “to do what’s right for students,” she pleaded with the troops to follow her noble example even after she is gone.This is pretty rich coming from an education chief most likely to be remembered for championing the interests of for-profit colleges above those of students. It also seems doubtful that officials will embrace Ms. Devos’s self-congratulatory lecture after she spent the past four years clashing with them and blaming them for making it hard to get things done.Over at the Pentagon, Trump appointees are reportedly being less than helpful in getting the incoming Biden administration up to speed. Meetings have been postponed, and the friction has broken into public view. Last week, acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller disputed a report by Axios that he had ordered a departmentwide halt to transition cooperation. He insisted the camps had mutually agreed to take a break until after the new year. The Biden team called this balderdash, and the transition’s executive director slammed the Pentagon for “recalcitrance.” This is hardly the kind of seamless handoff of power that inspires confidence in America’s national security.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is having a bumpy final stretch of a different sort. In a Friday radio interview, he noted that “we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians” behind the recently exposed mass hack of U.S. government agencies and businesses. On Saturday, the president undercut him with a tweet, based on nothing, suggesting that China may have been the culprit. Mr. Pompeo has yet to comment on his boss’s alternative theory.Credit…Pool photo by Nicholas KammCredit…Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesThis humiliation came just a few days after Mr. Pompeo’s holiday-party debacle. Dismissing Covid-19 safety recommendations — including those issued by his own department — the secretary invited hundreds of guests to an indoor bash at the State Department last Tuesday. Only a few dozen people showed up. Mr. Pompeo canceled his scheduled speech, which raised some eyebrows until it was announced Wednesday that he was in quarantine after being exposed to the coronavirus.Way to own the libs, Mr. Secretary.Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, seems set on departing in a blaze of disinformation and belligerence. Since the election, she has been working overtime, including frequent appearances on Fox News, to promote the president’s risible tale of voting fraud. At a news conference last month, Ms. McEnany — who has been pulling double duty as a top Trump campaign surrogate — went so far over the line with her fraud fiction that Fox News’s Neil Cavuto felt compelled to cut away from her remarks. Give the gal points for shamelessness.Of course, none of these underlings are likely to come close to the boss in executing a graceless, puerile, destructive exit. As the clock ticks down, the president is furiously casting about for a way to cling to power — Anyone up for a Christmas coup? — even as he works to divide and weaken the nation that has fired him. If he can’t have his way, he’s up for smashing as many toys as possible on his way out.So much for Mr. Trump — or his people — ever growing into the job.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden, Election

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden or the ElectionThe departing attorney general, William P. Barr, again broke with President Trump on his unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and the need to appoint a special counsel to investigate the president-elect’s son.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReynoldsDec. 21, 2020Updated 9:12 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr distanced himself again from President Trump on Monday, saying he saw no reason to appoint special counsels to oversee the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., or to investigate Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.At a news conference to announce charges in an unrelated terrorism case, Mr. Barr, who is stepping down in two days, said that he did not “see any reason to appoint a special counsel” to oversee the tax investigation into the younger Mr. Biden.“I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Mr. Barr said. “To the extent that there is an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally.”He also said that he would name a special counsel to oversee an inquiry into election fraud if he felt one were warranted. “But I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Mr. Barr said.After Mr. Trump’s loss to Mr. Biden, the president and his allies have seized on conspiracy theories about election fraud and considered legally questionable actions to cast doubt on the validity of the outcome or even seek to overturn it. Mr. Barr’s statements, in his final days on the job, seemed to signal that there was no appetite at the Justice Department to be drawn into any such efforts.But it is unclear how much pressure Mr. Trump might put on Mr. Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the current deputy attorney general, who will lead the department on an acting basis for the remaining weeks of the president’s term and whose approach to dealing with Mr. Trump is unknown.At a minimum, Mr. Barr’s statements on Monday give Mr. Rosen cover not to appoint special counsels to look into voter fraud or Hunter Biden, and would make the optics of any decision to go ahead with such appointments more difficult for both Mr. Rosen and Mr. Trump.Mr. Rosen has not signaled his specific intentions. But he has held discussions about the ramifications of appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation into Hunter Biden, according to a person familiar with those conversations who is not authorized to publicly discuss them.He said in an interview with Reuters last week that he would make decisions on all issues, including the potential appointment of a special counsel, “on the basis of the law and the facts.”Mr. Barr’s comments are certain to further poison his relationship with Mr. Trump, who believes that the attorney general should have more forcefully used the Justice Department to attack Mr. Biden and his family in the weeks before the election and to cast doubt on the results after the votes were cast.Long been regarded as Mr. Trump’s most loyal and effective cabinet member, Mr. Barr, a believer in strong presidential power, brought the Justice Department closer to the White House than any attorney general since John Mitchell, who ran President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign and was deeply involved in Watergate.Mr. Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s investigation into the intersection of Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign amounted to a gift to the president. He presented it in the best possible light for Mr. Trump before its public release and ultimately concluded that the president had not obstructed justice, despite his efforts to shut down the inquiry.The Justice Department’s independent inspector general found that the senior officials at the bureau had sufficient reason to open the investigation. A judge later called Mr. Barr’s summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, misleading.Convinced that the F.B.I. had overstepped its authority in investigating the Trump campaign, Mr. Barr asked a federal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to look into the origins of the Russia investigation. In October, the attorney general appointed him to be a special counsel with a mandate to continue exploring whether the inquiry was wrongfully opened.Mr. Barr broke with longstanding norms when he spent the months leading up to the election echoing Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots would result in widespread voter fraud. In strikingly political remarks for an attorney general, he later said the country would be “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if the president were not re-elected.He also approved the withdrawal of criminal charges against Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, and overruled prosecutors who requested a long sentencing recommendation for Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s longtime advisers.But his relationship with the president fractured after the election after he said in an interview this month that he had not seen voter fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Tensions between them escalated after it became clear that Mr. Barr had kept the investigation in Mr. Biden’s son under wraps during the presidential race. While it is department policy not to discuss investigations that could affect the outcome of an election, Mr. Trump accused his attorney general of disloyalty for not publicly disclosing the matter during the campaign.With the president growing more furious and his allies constantly attacking Mr. Barr on social media and cable news for his perceived disloyalty, the president said last week that Mr. Barr would depart on Wednesday.Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election have grown more frantic since he announced that Mr. Barr would step down. On Friday, he discussed with aides in the Oval Office about naming Sidney Powell to be a special counsel overseeing a voter fraud inquiry. Ms. Powell, who worked as a lawyer for his campaign, has promoted unfounded conspiracy theories that Venezuela rigged the presidential election using doctored voting machines.Ms. Powell met briefly with Mr. Trump on Monday, a person briefed on their discussion said. Separately, the president met with a group of House Republicans, including Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who is pushing a congressional challenge of electoral votes from a half-dozen battleground states that were won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Brooks said that he and “people with firsthand knowledge of voter fraud” met over the course of several hours with Mr. Trump and others. “All in all, our effort to object to states that have such flawed election systems as to render them untrustworthy is full speed ahead,” Mr. Brooks said.The president has raised the possibility of an executive order to have the Department of Homeland Security seize and examine voting machines for evidence of tampering. His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has also sought to have the department seize the machines, an idea rejected by homeland security officials.On Monday, Mr. Barr said he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government.”White House lawyers have told Mr. Trump that he does not have the authority to take these actions, but his allies have pushed the president not to heed their advice.Now Mr. Rosen will have to contend with the possibility that Mr. Trump will run a parallel pressure campaign on the Justice Department.Mr. Rosen, a longtime corporate lawyer with no experience as a prosecutor, had never worked at the Justice Department before he became Mr. Barr’s top deputy in May 2019. His previous government service includes a stint as general counsel of the Transportation Department and of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, as well as as the No. 2 official of the Transportation Department under Mr. Trump.The question of how far an attorney general can and should go to further Mr. Trump’s political agenda has defined the tenures of both Mr. Barr and his most recent predecessor, Jeff Sessions. But Mr. Rosen will be stepping into the role at a time when the question is as intense as it has ever been.Unlike Mr. Barr and Mr. Sessions, Mr. Rosen does not have a long relationship with the department and no one is sure how much he is inclined to be a check on the president and protect the long-term interests of the department.Mr. Rosen worked largely in Mr. Barr’s shadow at the department. After Mr. Barr announced that he would leave, Mr. Rosen said that he was “honored at the trust and confidence” that Mr. Trump had placed in him to lead the department and that he would “continue to focus the implementation of the department’s key priorities” and maintain “the rule of law.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Biden Cabinet Leans Centrist, Leaving Some Liberals Frustrated

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionFriday’s UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden Cabinet Leans Centrist, Leaving Some Liberals FrustratedStill a work in progress, the president-elect’s personnel choices are more pragmatic and familiar than ideological. It’s what he campaigned on, but the left had hoped for more.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s initial personnel choices suggest a pragmatic approach to governing and a reliance on familiar faces.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMichael D. Shear and Dec. 19, 2020Updated 7:46 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — His economic and environment teams are a little left of center. His foreign policy picks fall squarely in the Democratic Party’s mainstream. His top White House aides are Washington veterans.Taken together, the picture that emerges from President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s initial wave of personnel choices is a familiar, pragmatic and largely centrist one.That fits with the implicit deal that the former vice president and longtime senator offered Democrats during the 2020 primaries — that he was neither as progressive as Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, nor a product of Wall Street like Michael Bloomberg, the Republican-turned-Democrat who failed in his last-minute attempt to offer a moderate alternative to Mr. Biden.Still a work in progress, Mr. Biden’s cabinet is designed to be an extension of his own ideology, rooted in long-held Democratic Party principles but with a greater focus on the plight of working-class Americans, a new sense of urgency about climate change and a deeper empathy about the issues of racial justice that he has said persuaded him to run for the presidency a third time.His nominees are a reflection of the image that his campaign conveyed and that powered his defeat of President Trump. They are diverse in ways that appeal to liberals, young voters and people of color. And they are moderate like the swing voters who helped him win in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.“That’s him,” said Bill Daley, who served as White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. “That’s his whole campaign.”For his cabinet, Mr. Obama assembled outsize personalities like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary who was a holdover from the George W. Bush administration.Mr. Biden’s cabinet so far has no one likely to draw the same kind of high-octane attention. His choices have decades of quiet, behind-the-scenes policymaking experience, matching Mr. Biden’s pledge to return basic competence to the government after four years of Mr. Trump’s chaotic administration.His nominees and choice of top White House aides make only a nod to the progressive movement in the Democratic Party that helped Mr. Biden win the election. That has left some of the party’s liberals frustrated by what they say is the creation of a new administration dominated by old thinking, unprepared to confront the post-Trumpian world of deeper racial and economic inequities and more entrenched Republican resistance.There is no one yet in Mr. Biden’s cabinet carrying the torch for the policies that he campaigned against during the primaries: free college for everyone, a costly Green New Deal, an anti-Wall Street agenda, universal health care and steep increases in the minimum wage.The danger, said Faiz Shakir, who managed Mr. Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is that Mr. Biden does not pay sufficient attention to the struggle of working-class people, whose fortunes have declined under the economic policies of presidents from both parties. He said a return to the Democratic status quo, before Mr. Trump’s presidency, was not enough.“One of the concerns is that you want to pierce the bubble of how our Democratic elites have thought about politics and policymaking and urge them to go bolder,” Mr. Shakir said. “And now we’re relying on a lot of people’s instincts who’ve been honed, quite frankly, during a different era of politics.”Varshini Prakash, the executive director and a founder of the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on climate change, praised Mr. Biden’s environmental picks as a welcome “departure from the leave-it-to-the-markets way of thinking that defined the early 2000s.”But she said she hoped Mr. Biden would do more to promote younger people whose experience is not defined by previous generations.“It is still an older, whiter, male-er group in general,” she said. “We are never going to develop the leadership we need for decades to come if we keep appointing people who are in their 60s and 70s who have served in multiple administrations already.”It can be difficult to divine the precise policy direction of an administration from the selection of a dozen cabinet members. Whatever the views of the individual secretaries, their mandates once in office will now be defined by the new president’s promises and policies.Xavier Becerra, Mr. Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, has previously embraced “Medicare for All” proposals. Now he will be called on to support the president-elect’s plan for improving Obamacare.But Mr. Biden has already signaled a more populist bent than Mr. Obama did. He talks about strengthening unions and creating working-class jobs with significant spending increases to build new roads, bridges and highways and repair the old ones. On Saturday, he said he would make climate change a focus of the economic recovery from the coronavirus, calling for the construction of 1.5 million energy-efficient homes and 500,000 new electric-vehicle charging stations, and for the creation of a “civilian climate corps” to carry out projects. The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 18, 2020, 2:59 p.m. ETBiden officials say they didn’t agree to a ‘holiday pause’ in Defense meetings, pushing back against Pentagon officials.Pence, Pelosi and McConnell receive a coronavirus vaccine. Biden is set to get an injection on Monday.Lara Trump served on the board of a company through which the Trump political operation spent more than $700 million.His economic advisers believe in helping marginalized workers, expanding labor rights, addressing income inequality and bringing an end to gender and racial discrimination in the workplace.And like previous presidents, Mr. Biden has already signaled that he wants to firmly control policymaking from inside the White House, installing close confidants and people with years of experience who will work down the hall from the Oval Office.Ron Klain, a veteran Democratic operative, will be Mr. Biden’s chief of staff.Credit…Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe fingerprints of Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff and a longtime aide to Mr. Biden, are already evident in the selection of White House advisers with the kind of stature and experience to face off with the cabinet secretaries during debates over complex and difficult issues.Susan Rice, who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, will oversee domestic policy for Mr. Biden, who chose her not for her substantive expertise, but because of her ability to wrangle competing interests in a sprawling and often unruly government bureaucracy.Ray LaHood, a Republican who served as transportation secretary for Mr. Obama, said that dynamic was also evident in Mr. Biden’s decision to put John Kerry, the former secretary of state, and Gina McCarthy, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency, in charge of climate policy in the White House.“Every big major legislative or other issue was run out of the White House,” Mr. LaHood said, recalling the Obama White House. And, he predicted, it will be the same in the Biden administration. Some important pieces of the cabinet puzzle have yet to fall into place.Mr. Biden has not chosen an attorney general to oversee the Justice Department, which will be at the center of the president-elect’s promise to expand voting rights, overhaul law enforcement and enforce racial justice in the nation’s court system.Nominees for the Labor, Education and Commerce Departments also have yet to be announced, leaving it unclear exactly how Mr. Biden intends to carry out his vision for more investment in schools, safer and more prosperous jobs, and an improved economic environment for business.But some themes are emerging.One of Mr. Biden’s most urgent challenges as president will be to quickly turn around an economy wracked by the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of people out of work and businesses struggling to survive.To do that, the president-elect will lean on an economic team that tilts to the left of their predecessors in the Obama administration.Cecilia Rouse, his pick to lead the Council of Economic Advisers, is expected to focus on the forces that hold people back in the economy and the challenges that workers face, especially in the so-called gig economy.Janet Yellen, his choice to be Treasury secretary, is a labor economist who has long championed efforts to raise wages. Heather Boushey, named to be a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, is a proponent of a higher minimum wage and has fought for providing up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to workers.There is not a deficit hawk among Mr. Biden’s nominees, but neither are there members of the progressive left championed by Mr. Sanders or Ms. Warren. Any member of Mr. Biden’s team might have worked for Hillary Clinton, had she won the presidency four years ago.On foreign policy, Mr. Biden has turned to a group of people with whom he has worked closely, a largely nonideological group who appear willing to execute his vision rather than pursue agendas of their own.“It’s like his Senate staff,” said Leon E. Panetta, a former Clinton White House chief of staff and C.I.A. director and defense secretary in the Obama administration. “I don’t think you can say that they come with a set of ideological ideals. They come ready to serve the president, and people need to understand that Joe Biden to a large extent is going to call the shots here.”Mr. Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, first worked for Mr. Biden as a Senate committee staff member in the 1990s and more than anyone else is an extension of his brain on foreign policy. In public remarks of his own, Mr. Blinken has generally reflected Mr. Biden’s views, including a belief in the value of American global leadership, alliances and military strength.Mr. Biden’s choices for director of national intelligence, national security adviser and defense secretary are all seen as skillful managers and bureaucratic operators; none are associated with strong political views or distinct policy agendas. “It’s a solid, sensible, centrist foreign policy team that’s likely to work well together and be well aligned to the president’s priorities,” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.Troops in Fort Drum, N.Y., this month after returning from Afghanistan.Credit…John Moore/Getty ImagesEarly in his presidency, as he weighed his Afghanistan strategy, Mr. Obama felt pressure for a substantial troop increase from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates. Mr. Biden is unlikely to face such tensions within his own team.Volunteers at the Centre Street Food Pantry in Newton Center, Mass., near Boston, prepared bags of groceries for families in need. The food bank has fed people at twice its usual volume because of the pandemic.Credit…Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesMr. Biden has said that addressing the threat from climate change is one of his top four priorities, along with confronting the Covid-19 pandemic, helping the economy to recover and moving toward racial justice in the United States. He is likely to provide another broad overview of his goals in his Inaugural Address and offer more detail in his first address to Congress shortly after taking office.But achieving the kind of sweeping change he has promised will be more difficult if Democrats fail to win two Senate runoffs in Georgia early next month. Republicans only have to win one of the two races to maintain control of the Senate and the power to block much of Mr. Biden’s agenda.And even if Democrats win, the party’s margins in both the Senate and the House will be razor thin, making it far less likely that Congress will embrace bold and costly policy proposals. Tom Ridge, a former Republican governor in Pennsylvania who served as secretary of Homeland Security for President George W. Bush, said many of the solutions will come from the departments led by Mr. Biden’s cabinet.“I don’t know of a modern president who, on the date of being sworn in, was confronted with the range of challenges that he and this administration confront the moment he takes office,” Mr. Ridge said. “These are tough, challenging problems. At this point in time, it’s good to have experienced hands.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Buttigieg Recalls Discrimination Against Gay People, as Biden Celebrates Cabinet’s Diversity

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyButtigieg Recalls Discrimination Against Gay People, as Biden Celebrates Cabinet’s DiversityPete Buttigieg would be the first openly gay cabinet secretary, one of the firsts that President-elect Joe Biden cited in introducing him as his transportation secretary.Pete Buttigieg, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s nominee for transportation secretary, spoke on Wednesday in Wilmington, Del., of his own “personal love of transportation ever since childhood.”Credit…Pool photo by Kevin LamarqueMichael D. Shear and Published More

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      Biden’s Inaugural Will Be Mostly Virtual, but Money From Donors Will Be Real

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden’s Inaugural Will Be Mostly Virtual, but Money From Donors Will Be RealThe president-elect’s allies have begun an ambitious fund-raising campaign for the celebration of his swearing-in. Big donors will get “virtual signed photos” — and a chance to generate good will.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration will be mostly virtual, with in-person events scaled back because of the coronavirus pandemic.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesKenneth P. Vogel and Dec. 16, 2020WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “V.I.P. participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.Far fewer tickets than normal are being distributed for people to attend the actual swearing-in ceremony outside the Capitol on Jan. 20, which is organized and funded by the government.To create an air of celebration, Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee said it was raising private funds to pay for virtual events that will echo the Democratic convention this year, which featured a 50-state roll call from spots around the nation. There are also plans for a “virtual concert” with major performers whose names have not yet been released — and possibly for an in-person event later in the year.The contrast between the constraints of putting on inaugural festivities in the midst of a public health crisis and fund-raising as usual underscores how donations to an inaugural are not just about getting good seats for the swearing-in or tickets to the glitziest black-tie balls. They are also a way for corporations and well-heeled individuals to curry favor with a new administration, a reality that prompted liberal groups on Wednesday to ask Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee to forgo corporate donations.President Trump’s inauguration nearly four years ago took the practice to a new level. It became an access-peddling bazaar of sorts, and aspects of its record fund-raising and spending emerged as the subjects of investigations.Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee is promising corporations that give up to $1 million and individuals who contribute $500,000 — the largest amounts the committee said it would accept — some form of “V.I.P. participation” in the virtual concert.This special access is among the perks detailed on a one-page sponsorship menu from the committee that circulated among donors on Wednesday. Perks include “event sponsorship opportunities,” as well as access to virtual briefings with leaders of the inaugural committee and campaign, and invitations to virtual events with Mr. Biden and Jill Biden, the future first lady, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.Top donors will also get a fitting memento for the coronavirus era — “virtual signed photos” with the president-elect and the first lady, as well as Ms. Harris and her husband, replacing the traditional in-person rope-line photo opportunities for which donors usually pay handsomely at fund-raisers and other political events.Incoming presidents have long raised private funds to organize and pay for inaugural festivities beyond the swearing-in ceremony, which is hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and funded with taxpayer money.Top donors typically get intimate in-person access at parties and dinners to celebrate with members of an incoming president’s campaign and administration.Among the corporate giants who have indicated they are ready to donate despite the lack of in-person events is Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. The company is contributing $1 million to Mr. Biden’s inauguration, an amount it said is consistent with its past contributions to inaugural committees. Representatives from Bank of America and Ford Motor Company also said their companies intended to donate.“We have supported inauguration events over many administrations on a nonpartisan basis because we view it as part of our civic commitment for an important national event,” Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America, said in a statement. “The private sector has traditionally done so and we expect to provide support for ceremonies in January as appropriate, given the health crisis and other factors that may impact it.”A number of corporations that have been major donors to past presidential inaugurations — like Coca-Cola, Google and United Parcel Service — said this week that they still had not decided how much, or whether, to donate, though Google noted it had provided “online security protections for free” to the inaugural committee.“As you know this is a very different year and as such we have not yet made a decision,” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, said in a statement.A spokeswoman for the investment bank JPMorgan Chase, which has donated to past inaugurations, said that instead of giving to Mr. Biden’s committee, it would be donating to food banks in Washington and the hometowns of Mr. Biden (Wilmington, Del.) and Ms. Harris (Oakland, Calif.) “to help those impacted by the pandemic.”The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 17, 2020, 10:00 a.m. ETHere’s a look at the economy Biden will inherit next month.Dominion demands that Sidney Powell retract ‘baseless and false allegations’ about voting machines.Pence will be vaccinated publicly on Friday, the White House says.An inauguration spokesman would not say how much had already been raised, or what the fund-raising goal was.Funds raised for inaugurations cannot be transferred to federal campaigns or party committees. Past inaugural committees have donated unspent funds to charities including those engaged in disaster relief, as well as groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence.The effort by Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee to raise funds from corporate donors prompted puzzlement and objections from liberal activists, who have expressed concern about what they see as the Biden team’s coziness with corporate interests.A coalition of about 50 liberal groups released a letter to the inaugural committee on Wednesday urging it to forgo donations from corporations to prevent them “from wielding undue influence,” and questioning the need for such donations, given the likelihood that Mr. Biden’s inauguration would cost less than previous inaugurations.“The drive to raise so much money without a clear use for it is perplexing, and the appearance of doing so is disconcerting,” said the letter, which was organized by Demand Progress, a group that has also urged Mr. Biden not to hire corporate executives and consultants or lobbyists.Federal law does not require the disclosure of donations to inaugural committees until 90 days after the event, and limited disclosures about expenditures are not required until months after that. But the Biden inaugural committee said it intends to disclose the names of at least its larger donors before Jan. 20.There are no legal limits on the sizes of donations that inaugural committees can accept, and there are few restrictions on who can give.Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee announced last month that it would voluntarily forgo donations from fossil fuel companies, registered lobbyists and foreign agents, in addition to limiting corporate donations to $1 million and individual donations to $500,000.Those restrictions are less stringent than the ones adopted by former President Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration. His inaugural committee refused corporate donations and said it limited individual donations to $50,000, though he loosened the rules for his second inauguration in 2013.While Mr. Trump’s team said it would not accept contributions from lobbyists for his 2017 inauguration, its fund-raising was otherwise mostly unrestricted, resulting in a record $107 million haul.The Biden team has so far released few specifics regarding plans for the inauguration, other than a statement on Tuesday urging people not to travel to Washington to attend the event given the pandemic and noting that the “ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited.”In an expression of just how unusual the event will be, the Biden inaugural committee named Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, as an adviser to help with decisions on what kinds of events it can hold.“We are asking Americans to participate in inaugural events from home to protect themselves, their families, friends and communities,” Dr. Kessler said in a statement.In a typical inauguration year, a congressional committee that organizes the swearing-in ceremony typically distributes 200,000 tickets to lawmakers for seats on the platform, risers and seating close to the West Front of the Capitol, which are then distributed to constituents and friends who want to attend.But this year, the committee announced it would give just two tickets to the outdoor festivities to each of the 535 members of Congress, for them and a guest to attend.Beyond this event, it is largely up to the Biden inauguration committee, where officials have said in recent days they are still working to “reimagine” and “reinvent” the inauguration.There will still be some kind of an inauguration parade, but it will be considerably pared down and will most likely feature video or live shots of groups performing from spots across the country.The inaugural committee this week disclosed that it had retained Ricky Kirshner, a New York-based entertainment industry television and events producer. His past experience includes the Super Bowl halftime show this year that featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, as well as past Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors events, and the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, among many other events.Major donors will also get “V.I.P. tickets” to some kind of future event to celebrate the start of the new administration in person, according to the one-page menu of donor perks.But given the continued uncertainty associated with the pandemic, that event is listed as “date to be determined.”Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Kamala Harris Deserves a More Important Job

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      Credit…Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOpinionKamala Harris Deserves a More Important JobShe could be at the forefront of helping a part of America that’s been left behind.Credit…Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistDec. 15, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ETI was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said. “There was just one problem: The library was closed on Sundays.”The parking lot was full of cars with kids doing their homework and adults doing their office work — using the wireless connectivity spilling out of the empty building because their rural homes lacked high-speed broadband. Alas, stories abound of rural Americans going to Subway sandwich shops and Dairy Queens in search of free Wi-Fi.And that is why I want to talk today about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the start-up gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country.President Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team.It would provide a vision for American renewal and signal that Democrats were no longer going to cede rural America to Republicans but were instead going to seize it from them. And it would make Harris a super-relevant vice president from Day 1.A school in Summertown, Tenn., recognizes some students don’t have internet access at home.Credit…Brett Carlsen for The New York TimesIn Tucson, Ariz., school buses are equipped with Wi-Fi and parked in poor neighborhoods so access is available.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesDemocrats must not kid themselves. Biden won this election by narrowly winning the suburbs and urban centers in key battleground states, where just enough people decided that they wanted to “de-Trump” the White House but not “defund” the police.That is, a lot of suburban voters rejected Trump personally but also rejected far-left Democratic ideas that had percolated up in the last few years. Democrats won the presidency but took a beating from those same suburban voters in many statehouse, U.S. House and U.S. Senate races.If Democrats go into 2022 — let alone 2024 — appealing only on the cities and suburbs, they’re crazy. They will be highly vulnerable if the G.O.P. is led by a smarter, less offensive populist than Donald Trump.Most important, lifting rural America is the right thing to do for all of America and fulfills Biden’s vision of a nation that “grows together” in every way.That concept remains in the DNA of the Democratic Party, which in my home state, Minnesota, is still known as the “D.F.L.” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The party needs to reconstitute that coalition.“One way to do that is by reconnecting with its populist roots — when it really was a party focused on the empowerment of workers and farmers and ordinary citizens,” argued Harvard’s Michael Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” “Trump gave populism a bad name. Democrats should provide an alternative to Trump’s xenophobic, plutocratic populism by showing how populism can be a source of civic activism, engagement and renewal across urban and rural America.”That should be Harris’s mission, and it’s one worthy of a vice president. And it starts in rural America.“I fear the word ‘rural’ connotes a geography that is not my problem,” Beth Ford, president of Land O’Lakes, the influential farmer-owned cooperative headquartered in Minnesota, said to me. But, in fact, spreading connectivity and technology to rural America “is an American issue, an American competitiveness issue and an American national security issue,” she argued.Persistent “underinvestment in rural America will leave us less secure and less prosperous as a nation” — and less competitive with China, which is rapidly connecting its rural heartland, Ford said. “Some 35 percent of farmers lack enough bandwidth to run the equipment on their farms, ensure their kids get a good education and that Grandma has access to telemedicine.”What should a Biden-Harris rural strategy look like? It would start with showing up regularly. “Showing up” and “just listening to people” with respect goes a long way in rural America, Duluth’s mayor, Emily Larson, remarked to me. Actually, nothing earns more respect than listening to people respectfully.“Rural areas have their own social networks,” Larson said, but they’re different from the metropolitan ones. “Here, people will show up for you in the middle of the night, but they don’t post about it on Facebook.”On policy specifics, the Biden-Harris team should commit that in four years every rural community in America will have access to broadband — the basic infrastructure needed for an inclusive modern economy.Dunne suggests a new federal loan program that would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops (and ease regulations) so rural public-private coalitions can build broadband networks with a minimum 100 megabits per second of speed for downloading and uploading all kinds of remote learning tools, work tools and telehealth tools. Representative James Clyburn has already won passage of a bill in the House with a similar approach.Every rural community in America needs access to broadband to succeed.Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesTraveling with Dunne last year to Red Wing, Minn., to see how gigabit networks can support high-tech start-ups and traditional farmers, I wrote about a couple of inventors we met who had created a robotic rooster that patrols the poultry house for dead birds and tills the bedding, but with an unexpected byproduct: The birds exercise more and gain weight faster, because they are constantly running away from or pecking at the robot.While these “Poultry Patrol” robots work autonomously 80 percent of the time, said Dunne, “there are significant periods when they need to be remotely operated and receive coding updates from afar, which is only possible with very fast broadband.”But while better connectivity is necessary, it’s not sufficient. “We also need to ensure investment in digital skills training in rural communities and incentives for tech companies to hire remote workers in small towns,” added Dunne. “Today rural America represents 15 percent of the nation’s work force, but only 5 percent of digital economy jobs of the future. But the pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the idea that digital economy jobs can be created anywhere.”Kamala Harris is a natural for that task. Who better to bridge Silicon Valley and the rural valleys of America?She is also a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive American heartland, because rural America is not white America. According to a report by the Urban Institute, “one in five Americans lives in rural communities, and more than one in five (22 percent) rural residents are people of color.” I wrote last year about Willmar, Minn., a town that was all white back in the 1950s and today is nearly half Hispanic, Somali, Asian and Native American.In Minnesota, small towns like Willmar that can manage inclusion and diversity are the ones now thriving, because they can attract new labor and home buyers when so many of the young white adults have left for the big cities.Harris will soon be the first woman, the first Black and the first Indian-American vice president, which certainly resonates with a lot of urban voters. However, if she could make herself the person in the Biden cabinet who always shows up FIRST to listen in rural America and the FIRST to appreciate its concerns and the FIRST to make sure its concerns are addressed, she and the Democrats could make themselves competitive in a lot more rural counties.Even if it is just 10 or 15 percent more competitive, it might be enough to deprive today’s deeply warped Trump-led G.O.P. from taking back the White House or the House in the next four years — and maybe force it back to sanity. The Republican Party needs shock therapy, and nothing would shock this G.O.P. more than losing its automatic hold on rural America.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Defying Trump, McConnell Seeks to Squelch Bid to Overturn the Election

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDefying Trump, McConnell Seeks to Squelch Bid to Overturn the ElectionSenator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and pleaded with Republicans privately not to join an effort by House members to throw out the results.“The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, said on Tuesday.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 6:13 p.m. ETBreaking with President Trump’s drive to overturn his election loss, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on his victory and began a campaign to keep fellow Republicans from joining a doomed last-ditch effort to reverse the outcome in Congress.Although Mr. McConnell waited until weeks after Mr. Biden was declared the winner to recognize the outcome, his actions were a clear bid by the majority leader, who is the most powerful Republican in Congress, to put an end to his party’s attempts to sow doubt about the election.He was also trying to stave off a messy partisan spectacle on the floor of the House that could divide Republicans at the start of the new Congress, forcing them to choose between showing loyalty to Mr. Trump and protecting the sanctity of the electoral process.“Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20,” Mr. McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”A short time later, on a private call with Senate Republicans, Mr. McConnell and his top deputies pleaded with their colleagues not to join members of the House in objecting to the election results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College’s decision, according to three people familiar with the conversation, who described it on the condition of anonymity.A small group of House members, led by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, plans to use a constitutional process to object to the inclusion of five key battleground states that day. There is almost no chance they will succeed. But if they could persuade at least one senator to join them, they could force a vote on the matter, transforming a typically perfunctory session into a bitter last stand for Mr. Trump.So far, no senator has committed to joining them. In seeking to prevent anyone from doing so, Mr. McConnell argued that a challenge would force senators to go on the record either defying Mr. Trump or rejecting the will of the voters, potentially harming those running for election in 2022. He dispatched his top deputy, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, to lobby lawmakers one by one.The remarks were a decisive shift for Mr. McConnell. They came only after members of his leadership team in the Senate — and even the chamber’s chaplain — began softening the ground by congratulating Mr. Biden on Monday evening and Tuesday morning.Though he never repeated them, Mr. McConnell had allowed Mr. Trump’s false allegations of election fraud and fantastical claims that he had been the true winner to circulate unchecked for more than a month, defending the president’s right to challenge the election outcome in court. Allies insisted privately that he would ultimately honor the results, but did not want to stoke a year-end conflict that could hurt the party’s chances in two Georgia Senate runoffs and imperil must-pass legislation.That calculus changed late Monday, after electors across the country cast their ballots for Mr. Biden, cementing his 306 to 232 Electoral College victory. By Tuesday morning, Mr. McConnell and his leadership team were openly acknowledging the results and creating the political space for other Republicans to begin belatedly recognizing Mr. Biden as the winner.The Senate leader also spoke by phone with Mr. Biden, apparently for the first time since his former Senate colleague won the presidency more than five weeks ago.“I called to thank him for the congratulations, told him although we disagree on a lot of things, there’s things we can work together on,” Mr. Biden told reporters, adding that it was a “good conversation.”Mr. Biden won the Electoral College vote on Monday.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn normal times, such a call would have drawn little notice. But Mr. Trump’s push to deny his loss has created a charged political moment for Republicans, spotlighting rifts within the party and placing Mr. McConnell in a particularly dicey position.Polls suggest a clear majority of Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s fabrication that the election was fraudulent, and they are likely to follow the president’s words, not those of Mr. McConnell. Meanwhile, many of the president’s allies in the House continue to support his challenges to the results, with more than 60 percent of them signing on last week to a legal brief endorsing the failed effort by Texas to overturn results in key battleground states. The House’s top leaders were mostly silent on the question on Tuesday, and their aides did not respond to questions about Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Trump himself showed no signs of backing down, repeating his false allegations on Twitter just after Mr. McConnell spoke: “tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud.” Mr. Trump also shared a news article about Mr. Brooks’s efforts, raising the possibility that he could begin pressuring members of the party to join in, stoking an even bigger fight in the weeks ahead.Moving to head off potential backlash, Mr. McConnell told reporters pressing him to rebuke Mr. Trump’s rhetoric that he did not have “any advice” for Mr. Trump. Earlier in the day before congratulating Mr. Biden, he had used his speech on the Senate floor to lavish praise on the president’s record on foreign and domestic policy.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 15, 2020, 6:45 p.m. ETBiden will name Gina McCarthy as the White House’s climate coordinator.Dominion’s C.E.O. defends his firm’s voting machines to Michigan lawmakers, denouncing a ‘reckless disinformation campaign.’Biden will nominate Jennifer Granholm for energy secretary.The blowback was immediate from the party’s outspoken right flank anyway and foreshadowed the return to an old dynamic briefly abated during the Trump years in which Mr. McConnell was a favorite punching bag for conservatives. Mark Levin, the talk radio host and strident supporter of Mr. Tump, declared that Mr. McConnell had been “AWOL” from “challenging the lawless acts of the Biden campaign and Democrats.”“Trump helped you secure your seat, as he did so many Senate and House seats, and you couldn’t even wait until January 6th,” Mr. Levin wrote on Twitter. “You’ve been the GOP ‘leader’ in the Senate for far too long. It’s time for some fresh thinking and new blood.”Nor did Mr. McConnell earn much love from the few voices of Republican dissent that have raised alarms in recent days that Mr. Trump’s defiance of democratic norms — and the acquiescence of much of his party — would do lasting damage both to the G.O.P. and to the country.One of them, Representative Paul Mitchell of Michigan, who is retiring, went as far as to quit the party on Monday in protest. Another, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, said on Tuesday that merely recognizing Mr. Biden’s victory was not enough for his party.“How many Republicans will say that what the president is saying is simply wrong and dangerous?” Mr. Romney said on CNN. “We need to have people who are strong Trump supporters say that as well, or you are going to continue to have this country divided, which is pretty dangerous.”Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a senior Republican committee leader and former head of the party’s campaign arm, argued that fears like Mr. Romney’s were somewhat overwrought, but reflected a general loss of trust by many Americans in the electoral process.“We need to accept our institutions. They worked in 2016,” Mr. Cole said in an interview. “They worked again in 2020.”Elected officials, he said, need to “be honest with your voters.”“You have to recognize when you are not successful, and you move on and accept the election results,” he said. “The American people, I hope, will do that.”In the Senate, at least, that view appeared to be gaining currency.In a statement, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and a defender of the president, said that “absent new information that could give rise to a judicial or legislative determination altering the impact of today’s Electoral College votes, Joe Biden will become president of the United States.” An aide said he had no plans to join Mr. Brooks in challenging the results.Another leading contender for that task, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, seemingly threw cold water on the idea as well. Though Mr. Johnson plans to convene a hearing on Wednesday to give Mr. Trump’s specious arguments of voting fraud an airing in Congress, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he thought the outcome was legitimate and he did not plan to object to the Electoral College results.Still, other possible contenders remained. One was Tommy Tuberville, the newly elected Alabama Republican. Another possible candidate, those watching the process said, was Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, one of the two Republicans competing in January runoffs that will determine which party controls the Senate next year. Those races will play out the day before the joint session to ratify the presidential election results convenes in Washington.Ms. Loeffler’s office did not respond to a question about Mr. Biden on Tuesday, but on Twitter, she suggested she was not ready to accept the result.“I will never stop fighting for @realDonaldTrump because he has never stopped fighting for us!” she wrote.Luke Broadwater More