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      in US Politics

      Q&A: what does the General Services Administration's decision mean?

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      The US government’s General Services Administration on Monday ascertained Joe Biden is the apparent winner of the 2020 presidential election, allowing for the presidential transition to officially begin.
      Donald Trump on Monday tweeted he had directed his team to cooperate on the transition, but he vowed to continue fighting the election results.
      What does the GSA’s decision mean? And why is the step a crucial one in the transfer of power?
      What is the GSA?
      The GSA is a huge agency that keeps the federal government functioning day to day. In order for a presidential transition to officially begin, the GSA had to recognize a presidential winner – or rather, ascertain the “apparent successful candidate” in the general election. The Presidential Transition Act and other federal policies do not specify how that process should work, but the process is meant to be apolitical.
      In typical election years, it occurs without fanfare or discussion shortly after the race is called by major news outlets. In 2016, the agency began making office space available for the winning candidate’s team as early as August, and the transition was able to begin after Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump the day after the election.
      Why was the move delayed this year?
      The agency and its director, Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, said it was important to wait to see how litigation by Donald Trump’s campaign and recounts in the days following the election could affect the election results.
      In a letter informing Biden of the agency’s move on Monday, Murphy said she “looked to precedent from prior elections involving legal challenges and incomplete counts” in imposing a delay.
      Republicans defending Murphy have pointed out that transition was delayed in 2000 as the court battle between Al Gore and George W Bush over the results in Florida played out. But Biden’s team has pointed out that in that case, only 500 votes separated the two candidates in that state. Even in states where Trump is contesting the result, Biden is leading Trump with thousands of votes.
      Before Murphy ascertained Biden the winner, House Democrats had sent her a letter asking her to clearly explain the reasons for her delay by Monday.
      What does the news mean?
      The GSA move allows Biden and his team to access classified briefings and meet with government officials. It also gives Biden officials access to office space and funds to pay the transition team. Prior to the GSA’s move on Monday, the Biden-Harris team had been raising money to fund the transition process, absent access to government-allocated funds.
      With the GSA’s approval, Biden’s team can also move over to government email and receive help from the Department of Homeland Security to protect the privacy of incoming officials as they plan out, for example, national security strategies. Until now, the team had also lacked cybersecurity support to shield email and other communication amid concerns that Russia, China, or other foreign adversaries could intercept classified information.
      Why is it so crucial?
      The Biden administration will face a host of urgent and unprecedented challenges when taking office on 20 January, as coronavirus cases across the US rise and Congress has not agreed on a relief package to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic.
      Biden had warned last week that “because of the lack of ascertainment by the GSA, my transition team hasn’t been able to get access to the information we need to be able to deal with everything from testing and guidance to the all-important issue of vaccine distribution and vaccination plan”.
      Last week, as the Biden-Harris team attempted to begin the transition process despite the GSA holdup, they reached out to Trump administration officials who had recently left their posts, in an attempt to glean key information while being locked out of official briefings. More

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      in Elections

      Trump campaign cuts ties with attorney Sidney Powell after bizarre election fraud claims

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      Perhaps Sidney Powell has gone too far even for Rudy Giuliani this time.
      The Trump campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.
      “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on Sunday.
      Trump himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
      There was no immediate clarification from the campaign and Powell did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
      The statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
      “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
      It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
      The statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims, but that Powell had provided none.
      Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favour of Biden.
      However, her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye malfunction.
      In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
      “Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
      The status of that lawsuit was unclear on Sunday night.
      Powell, a former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
      Since then, a federal judge has rejected her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and has responded quizzically to some of her arguments, including her suggestion at a hearing several weeks ago that her conversations with Trump about the Flynn case were privileged.
      She has supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the prosecution, a request that remains pending before US district judge Emmet Sullivan. More

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      in US Politics

      Spy Jonathan Pollard expected to fly to Israel after US lifts parole

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      Jonathan Pollard, a US citizen jailed for 30 years after being convicted of spying in one of the most dramatic espionage cases of the cold war, is expected to fly to Israel after being released from parole.
      The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, welcomed the lifting of travel restrictions, his office said in a statement on Saturday, adding that he had “consistently worked towards securing Pollard’s release”.
      “The prime minister hopes to see Jonathan Pollard in Israel soon, and together with all Israelis, extends his best wishes to him and his wife Esther,” the statement said.
      The US justice department on Friday announced Pollard’s parole would not be renewed, freeing the former spy from strict restrictions that have kept him in the country since he left jail five years ago.
      Pollard’s lawyer, Eliot Lauer, also suggested his client would soon depart for Israel: “We are grateful and delighted that our client is finally free of any restrictions, and is now a free man in all respects. We look forward to seeing our client in Israel.”
      Having been arrested by FBI agents in 1985 after unsuccessfully seeking refuge at the Israeli embassy in Washington, Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. He had pleaded guilty to handing thousands of classified documents to Israel.
      The initial shock between the US and its close ally, and Pollard’s continuing imprisonment, has long strained relations between the two countries.
      Pollard’s release was the latest in a series of gestures by the departing Trump administration towards Netanyahu’s government.
      This week the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, became the first top US diplomat to officially visit an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. He later declared that products from settlements – considered illegal under international law – could be labelled “Made in Israel”, despite being made in the occupied Palestinian territories.
      Netanyahu has long pushed for Pollard’s release. During the longtime leader’s first term in the late 1990s, Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship. Netanyahu later made a personal plea to allow him to attend his father’s funeral. The US denied that request. Repeated attempts to persuade US presidents to grant him clemency have failed.
      In his statement on Saturday, Netanyahu thanked his ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, for “responsibly and sensitively leading the contacts with the [Trump] administration”. More

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      in US Politics

      Coronavirus taskforce briefing: Fauci urges vigilance as vaccine is in sight

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      Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious diseases expert, has promised that “the cavalry is on the way” in the form of a coronavirus vaccine but urged one last great national effort to stop the spread.
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      Fauci was speaking at the White House coronavirus taskforce’s first press briefing since July. He was joined by Vice-president Mike Pence and response coordinator Deborah Birx, but there was no sign of Donald Trump or his controversial adviser Scott Atlas.
      The taskforce broke its long silence as the virus surges to new highs, infecting more than 158,000 Americans – and killing in excess of 1,100 – every day. The total death toll now stands at a quarter of a million. Trump, little seen in public and refusing to accept election defeat, has been accused of all but giving up on the fight.
      Taskforce members said they did not support a new national lockdown or school closures. But Fauci noted the “extraordinarily impressive” efficacy of vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna in clinical trials and told reporters that he wants to “put to rest any concept that this was rushed in an inappropriate way. This is really solid”.
      Fauci continued: “We now, as the vice-president said, are telling you that help is on the way, which has two aspects to it. It means that we need to actually double down on the public health measures as we’re waiting for that help to come, which will be soon. We’ll be getting vaccine doses into people at a high priority at the end of December.”
      “We’re not talking about shutting down the country. We’re not talking about locking down. We’re talking about intensifying the simple public health measures that we all talk about: mask wearing, staking distance, avoiding congregant settings, doing things to the extent that we can outdoors versus indoors. If we do that, we’ll be able to hold things off until the vaccine comes.”
      Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added: “Now I’ve used that metaphor that the cavalry is on the way. If you’re fighting a battle and the cavalry’s on the way, you don’t stop shooting. You keep going until the cavalry gets here, then you might even want to continue fighting.”
      White House coronavirus taskforce briefings were an almost daily occurrence during the first surge of the virus in April, with Fauci and Birx becoming household names. But they fell away during the summer as the president fought the election campaign, suffered his own infection and increasingly derided Fauci. He brought in a new adviser, Atlas, who has falsely attacked the science of face masks and state measures to reduce infections.
      Pence said Thursday’s briefing was taking place at Trump’s request, but he took no questions either about the virus or his boss’s refusal to acknowledge that Biden won the election.
      The taskforce acknowledged that infections and hospitalisations are rising across the country. Pence acknowledged that the test positivity rate over the past 30 days has risen from 5% to 10%, and in some parts of the country is much higher. Birx, pointing to a graphic, added: “This is more cases, more rapidly than what we had seen before.”
      But Pence also insisted that the country is much better prepared in terms of personal protective equipment and other resources than it was at the start of the outbreak, as well as a system and kits to distribute a vaccine.
      “America has never been more prepared to combat this virus than we are today,” said the vice-president. “The day after one of these vaccines is approved we’ll be shipping vaccines to the American people and within a day after that we’ll be seeing those vaccines injected into Americans.”
      He added: “We’re getting there, America.”
      On Thursday the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) urged Americans to avoid travel over the Thanksgiving holiday. Birx added her voice calling for “decreasing those friends and family gatherings where people come together and unknowingly spread the virus. Every American needs to be vigilant in this moment because we know that when you are, we can mitigate this virus and stop this spread together.”
      But Pence also ruled out the type of mass closures of businesses that America witnessed in the spring. “President Trump wanted me to make it clear that our taskforce, this administration, and our president does not support another national lockdown, and we do not support closing schools.”
      The pointed remark about schools came a day after New York officials announced public schools would once again close after the city’s positivity rate hit 3%.
      Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, argued that it is possible for schools to safely conduct in-person instruction. He insisted: “They can do it safely, and they can do it responsibly. The infections that we’ve identified in schools, when they’ve been evaluated, were not acquired in schools. They were actually acquired in the community.”
      The big threat in transmission is “not the public square, but family gatherings” where people get comfortable and remove their masks, Redfield added.
      Alex Azar, the health secretary, said Pfizer would seek an emergency use authorisation Friday from the Food and Drug Administration for its coronavirus vaccine. The application and clinical trial data will be reviewed by an independent board of scientists before approval is granted. Azar added: “Hope and help are on the way.”
      Moderna is expected to file for emergency approval for its vaccine candidate in the coming weeks. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration in 'staggering' isolation at UN on health issues

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      The outgoing Trump administration’s final days at the United Nations have resulted in a deepening of US isolation on social and health issues, with only a handful of allies including Russia, Belarus and Syria.
      In one vote this week, the US was entirely alone in backing its own amendment to a seemingly uncontroversial resolution about efforts to treat medical complications from childbirth. It called for the removal of references to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Population Fund.
      No other nation agreed, with 153 voting against the amendment and 11 abstaining.
      A UN diplomat said the spectacle of a western ally and a superpower so totally isolated was “staggering”.
      “It’s amazing that they decided they want to put their isolation on record, on full display, like that,” the diplomat said.
      Debates at the UN general assembly this week have been on social and humanitarian affairs and human rights issues, on which the US mission stepped up its largely unsuccessful campaign to remove mention of reproductive health from UN documents. The Trump administration sees the phrase as synonymous with abortion.
      The US backed eight amendments to resolutions on issues such as violence against women and girls, trafficking of women and girls, female genital mutilation, and early, child and forced marriages.
      Apart from the move to delete a reference to the WHO, which Donald Trump has blamed for the coronavirus pandemic, the proposed amendment involved removing references to providing reproductive health services to female victims of violence and oppression.
      Each time the amendments were decisively voted down in the general assembly, with the US drawing only a very small group of between four and 14 supporters. Its only consistent allies were Russia, Belarus, Syria, Qatar and the Pacific island states of Nauru and Palau.
      In one resolution about providing healthcare to women and girls during the pandemic, the US wanted to change the phrase “designating protection and healthcare services as essential services for all women and girls, especially those who are most vulnerable to violence and stigma”. The US mission demanded the deletion of the words “services as essential services”.
      “We’ve seen the US approach harden on these issues over the past four years, but I think this year was uniquely challenging as they clearly decided they were going to put their foot down on sexual reproductive health services language, across every single kind of relevant human rights resolution,” a UN diplomat said.
      After failing to change the wording of resolutions in negotiations before a vote was taken, the US took the added step of tabling amendments from the floor of the assembly, even though they were doomed to fail.
      “It is kind of an aggressive move normally used by Russia, but this year US decided to do it too,” the diplomat said.
      The US permanent representative, Kelly Craft, said the US objected to wording in the UN resolutions designed to “promote the global abortion industry”.
      “The US could not be clearer,” Craft said in a tweet. “There is no international right to abortion. Abortion is not healthcare. Abortion is not safe in any circumstance.”
      Explaining a vote on a French-Dutch resolution on sexual violence that mentioned reproductive health, the US delegate Jennifer Barber said: “It is particularly hypocritical that a resolution on violence against women promotes access to something that results in the loss of millions of baby girls every year.”
      Craft and Barber are from Kentucky and were backed for their position by the powerful Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, despite having minimal or no international experience. Barber is a specialist in Kentucky tax law. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump fires director of US cybersecurity agency that refuted voter fraud claims

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      Donald Trump has fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election and pushed back on the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
      Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.
      The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.
      Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
      Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.
      Trump mentioned the Cisa statement in his tweet firing Krebs. The president’s tweets also repeated many of the baseless election fraud claims he has made in recent weeks.
      Several top Democrats were swift to condemn the president’s decision to fire Krebs.
      On CNN, senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “Chris Krebs’ federal service is just the latest casualty in President Trump’s four-year-long war on the truth.”
      Angus King, the Maine senator who is among the candidates who may be appointed Director of National Intelligence in the upcoming Biden administration, called Krebs “a dedicated public servant who has helped build up new cyber capabilities in the face of swiftly-evolving dangers.
      “By firing him for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”
      Adam Schiff, the Democratic California congressman who chairs the House intelligence committee, said that Trump’s move is “ pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.
      And Mark Warner, a Democratic senator of Virginia and co-chair of the Senate cybersecurity caucus, said Krebs “is an extraordinary public servant and exactly the person Americans want protecting the security of our elections”.
      “It speaks volumes that the president chose to fire him simply for telling the truth,” he said, echoing many of his Democratic colleagues.
      Ben Sasse, a Republican senator of Nebraska also chimed in. “Chris Krebs did a really good job,” he said. “He obviously should not be fired.”
      Two other DHS officials – Bryan Ware, Cisa’s assistant director of international affairs, and Valerie Boyd, DHS assistant secretary of international affairs – were also reportedly forced out last week.
      Krebs tweeted from his personal account that he was “honored to serve”.
      Twitter quickly flagged the tweets in which the president announced Krebs’ firing for containing “disputed” claims about the election.
      Unwilling to accept reality and concede the election, Trump has doubled down on conspiracy theories about election fraud. His administration has blocked the Biden transition team from receiving briefings, but now that Krebs is no longer working in an official capacity, the incoming administration may be able to glean non-classified briefings from the former cybersecurity official. More