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      Federal court rejects Trump election lawsuit in Pennsylvania

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      Donald Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat in court Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel.The case had been argued last week in a lower court by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who insisted during five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani failed to offer any tangible proof of that in court.The US district judge Matthew Brann had said the campaign’s error-filled complaint, “like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together” and denied Giuliani the right to amend it for a second time.The 3rd US circuit court of appeals called that decision justified. The three judges on the panel were all appointed by Republican presidents. including Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor appointed by Trump. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign’s request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called “breathtaking”.In fact, Pennsylvania officials had certified their vote count Monday for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in US presidential elections.Trump has said he hopes the supreme court will intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when its decision to stop the recount in Florida gave the election to Republican George W Bush. On November 5, as the vote count continued, Trump posted a tweet saying the “US Supreme Court should decide!”Ever since, Trump and his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and filed a flurry of lawsuits to try to block the results in six battleground states. But they’ve found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used to vote from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.Trump perhaps hopes a supreme court he helped steer toward a conservative 6-3 majority would be more open to his pleas, especially since the high court upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots through 6 November by only a 4-4 vote last month. Since then, the Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett has joined the court.“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after Friday’s ruling. “On to SCOTUS!”In the case before Brann, the Trump campaign asked to disenfranchise the state’s 6.8 million voters, or at least the 700,000 who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas.“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote in his scathing ruling on 21 November. “That has not happened.”A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania supreme court this week seeks to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. The Democratic governor Tom Wolf’s administration is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state’s legislature and congressional delegation from being seated in the coming weeks.On Thursday, Trump said the 3 November election was still far from over. Yet he offered the clearest signal to date that he would leave the White House peaceably on January 20 if the electoral college formalized Biden’s win.“Certainly I will. But you know that,” Trump said at the White House, taking questions from reporters for the first time since election day.On Friday, however, he continued to baselessly attack Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities with large Black populations as the source of “massive voter fraud”. And he claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had uncovered computer memory drives that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” apiece.All 50 states must certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14 December, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by 8 December. Biden won both the electoral college and popular vote by wide margins. More

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      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

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      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      in Elections

      Trump fails to answer questions or formally concede in bizarre 90-second briefing – video

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      Donald Trump and Mike Pence appeared in the White House briefing room for less than two minutes for Trump to tout the stock market’s good day – despite Trump having not taken a question from reporters in about three weeks.
      There was almost no notice of the briefing. CNN’s Jim Acosta said White House staff were suddenly shouting at journalists to get into their seats because the president wanted to walk into the briefing room. After Trump’s departure, a reporter was heard to say: ‘Well, that was weird as shit’.
      The General Services Administration on Monday declared Joe Biden the apparent winner of the US election, clearing the way for the formal transition to begin, after weeks of Trump refusing to concede, violating the traditions of the transition of power at the White House
      Trump agrees to begin transition as key agency calls Biden winner
      Fox News hosts distance themselves from Trump
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      Revealed: Trump officials rush to mine desert haven native tribes consider holy

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      Since January, San Carlos Apache tribal member Wendsler Nosie Sr has been sleeping in a teepee at a campground in south-eastern Arizona’s Oak Flat, a sprawling high desert oasis filled with groves of ancient oaks and towering rock spires.
      It is a protest in defense of “holy ground” where the Apache have prayed and performed ceremonies for centuries.
      A dozen south-western Native American tribes have strong cultural ties to Oak Flat. But the Trump administration, in its waning days, has embarked on a rushed effort to transfer ownership of the area to a mining company with ties to the destruction of an Aboriginal site in Australia, the Guardian has learned.
      “We were in the fourth quarter with two minutes left in the game. And then Trump cheated so now we only have one minute left,” said Nosie, who was a football quarterback in high school. “Everybody has to mobilize now to fight this.” More

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      Trump agrees to begin transition as key agency calls Biden apparent election winner

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      The General Services Administration has declared president-elect Joe Biden the apparent winner of the US election, clearing the way for the formal transition from Donald Trump’s administration to begin after weeks of delay.
      The GSA said on Monday that it had determined that Biden was the winner of the 3 November race after weeks of Trump refusing to concede and violating the traditions of the transition of power at the White House.
      Trump said on Twitter he had directed his team to cooperate on the transition, but vowed to continue fighting the election results, despite the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud. Hours later, he said: “Will never concede to fake ballots & ‘Dominion’.”
      Emily Murphy, who heads the GSA, said she made the determination based on “the law” and “facts.”
      “Please know that I came to my decision independently, based on the law and available facts. I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any executive branch official including those who work at the White House or GSA with regard to the substance or timing of my decision,” Murphy wrote in a letter to Biden.
      Murphy had faced growing pressure from Democrats and some Republicans to allow the transition to begin, as Trump’s efforts to challenge the results in numerous battleground states failed.
      A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday tossed a Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to prevent certification in that state. And on Monday, Michigan certified Biden’s victory, despite an unprecedented push by the president last week to undermine that move to allow for an audit of ballots in Wayne county, where Biden won by more than 330,000 votes.
      GSA certification is a process that in typical election years occurs without fanfare or discussion shortly after the race is called by major news outlets.
      Murphy’s refusal to declare Biden the winner weeks after the election prevented the transition team of Biden and Vice president-elect Kamala Harris from accessing federal funding and meeting with government officials to prepare for inauguration on 20 January.
      The delay was particularly concerning given the urgent and unprecedented tasks facing the federal government amid a significantly worsening pandemic and economic crisis. The US must also begin work to prepare a national rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. There were also major concerns about the potential national security implications of a delayed transition, which blocked Biden from accessing classified briefings.
      After Murphy’s letter was made public, Trump tweeted, “We will keep up the good fight and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”
      The Trump legal team dismissed the certification as “simply a procedural step” and insisted it would fight on.
      Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the Biden transition, said in a statement Monday that the move by the GSA “is a needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our nation, including getting the pandemic under control and our economy back on track”.
      He added: “In the days ahead, transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration’s efforts to hollow out government agencies.”
      With GSA permitting the formal transition to start, more Republicans started to acknowledge the reality that Biden is president-elect.
      “President Trump’s legal team has not presented evidence of the massive fraud which would have had to be present to overturn the election,” said Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana. “I voted for President Trump but Joe Biden won.”
      A majority of GOP senators have refused to recognize Biden’s win, arguing that Trump should be allowed to pursue his cases in court, despite the lack of evidence of any widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the race. Since the Associated Press and other news organizations across the country declared Biden the winner on 7 November, five days after polls closed, Trump and his allies have continued to spread misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine the legitimacy of mail-in voting and falsely asserting that the election was “stolen”.
      Audits, recounts and the Trump campaign’s court cases, however, have resulted in no meaningful changes to the election results, and in some cases, Biden’s lead has only increased. Judges repeatedly thr ew out the Trump campaign team’s cases.
      But the false accusations of fraud did lead some election officials to seek to delay certification of the vote. The city commissioner’s office in Philadelphia, where counting took days, reported facing death threats, and Trump supporters have staged protests outside election offices across the US.
      Murphy’s letter came on the same day that Biden announced his selection for several key cabinet roles. The president-elect said he would be nominating Tony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser and John Kerry as “climate tsar”, suggesting a return to the priorities of the Obama era.
      Biden also selected Alejandro Mayorkas for homeland security secretary. If he is confirmed, he would be the first Latino and migrant to have the position. He has further chosen Avril Haines to be the first female director of national intelligence and Janet Yellen to be the country’s first female treasury secretary. More

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      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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      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