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      in Elections

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

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

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      in US Politics

      Mark Esper fired as Pentagon chief after contradicting Trump

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      Donald Trump has fired his defence secretary, Mark Esper, in the latest sign that the transition to a new Biden administration in January is going to be turbulent on both domestic and foreign fronts.
      Esper was fired by tweet on Monday afternoon, with the president declaring he was “pleased to announce that Christopher C Miller, the highly respected director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be acting secretary of defense, effective immediately.
      “Chris will do a GREAT job! Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.”
      Esper had been at odds with Trump on a number of issues, most importantly his insistence at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer that there were no legal grounds to deploy active-service troops on the streets of US cities.
      He was also working with Congress on legislation to rename US army bases named after Confederate generals. In a final interview Esper predicted that he would be followed by a “yes man”, adding “And then God help us.”
      Miller arrived at the Pentagon on Monday amid questions about the legality of his appointment. By law, the deputy secretary of defence, currently David Norquist, would become acting secretary in the event of a sudden departure at the top. Furthermore, the law requires that a secretary of defence to have been out of active duty military service for seven years. Miller, a former Green Beret, only left the military in 2014.
      The law can be sidestepped by a vote in Congress, as was done for Esper’s predecessor James Mattis, a retired marine.
      In the face of Trump’s widely reported fury of his intransigence, Esper stopped giving press briefings in the Pentagon in July. He is reported to have written his resignation letter before the election, and Trump may have moved abruptly to prevent his defence secretary from taking the initiative.
      The president insisted he fired Mattis in December 2018, even though Mattis’s critical resignation letter had been widely circulated.
      “The abrupt firing of Secretary Esper is disturbing evidence that President Trump is intent on using his final days in office to sow chaos in our American democracy and around the world,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said.
      In an interview with Military Times given the day after the election and published on Monday, Esper said he was proud of the occasions he stood up to Trump, angrily rejecting the nickname of Yesper, used by critics who saw him as too subservient to Trump.
      “My frustration is I sit here and say, ‘Hm, 18 cabinet members. Who’s pushed back more than anybody?’ Name another cabinet secretary that’s pushed back,” Esper said. “Have you seen me on a stage saying, ‘Under the exceptional leadership of blah-blah-blah, we have blah-blah-blah-blah?”
      He claimed success in “protecting the institution, which is really important to me” and “preserving my integrity in the process”.
      “At the end of the day, it’s as I said – you’ve got to pick your fights,” he added. “I could have a fight over anything, and I could make it a big fight, and I could live with that – why? Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”
      “This is purely an act of retaliation by a president thinking more about his petty grievances than about the good of the country,” said Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It will make the transition to a new administration even more difficult. The message it sends around the world is that Trump is going to continue his disruptive policies for the rest of his time in office.”
      Esper may not be the last head to fall in the national security leadership. CNN cited an unnamed senior official that Esper feared the directors of the FBI and CIA, Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel, would be next to go.
      Though Trump has not conceded defeat in the presidential election, Miller will only have a little more than two months in the role before Joe Biden enters the White House.
      Esper was Trump’s second permanent secretary of defence, after Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general who resigned in late 2018. Mattis was succeeded by Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who spent months in the role but was not formally confirmed by the Senate.
      Trump came close to firing Esper on 3 June when the former Raytheon arms executive publicly contradicted the president over the potential use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military units against protests in Washington and other cities.
      Esper said the circumstances did not justify the use of the act, which can empower a president to send troops into states against the wishes of local authorities. Trump had threatened to invoke the law two days earlier. Following Esper’s remarks, the White House noted it was a decision for the president alone.
      Esper had also given orders for a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division and military police units to return to base after they had been flown to the Washington area. He reversed the withdrawal order after visiting the White House, but the troops were withdrawn a few days later.
      According to reports quoting administration sources at the time, Trump’s aides advised him against firing his second defence secretary, and Esper was urged not to offer his resignation by his own advisers. According to the Wall Street Journal, he had already begun to draft a resignation letter.
      Esper and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, were heavily criticised by former senior defence officials and military leaders, for appearing alongside Trump on 1 June, at a photo op outside a church near the White House, after the surrounding area had been cleared by police and other federal security forces using teargas, mounted police and baton charges.
      Milley later apologised for his appearance, saying he should not have been there.
      In a third source of friction, Esper said he was open to discussion about the renaming of military bases named after Confederate army officers. The White House had ruled out any change to the names.
      Esper became defence secretary in July 2019, succeeding acting secretary Shanahan. Shanahan had taken over following Mattis’s resignation, who left the administration over Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria, abandoning Kurdish allies who had led the fight against the Islamic State.
      After a long silence, Mattis accused Trump of abuse of executive office and making a “mockery of the constitution” in the administration’s response to the George Floyd protests. More

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      in US Politics

      Ivanka Trump will lose White House status and job – what will she do next?

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      Ivanka Trump isn’t just losing her status as first daughter with her father Donald Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden – she’s also losing her job.In her father’s White House, Ivanka Trump works as “advisor to the president”, purportedly focusing on “the education and economic empowerment of women and their families as well as job creation and economic growth through workforce development, skills training and entrepreneurship”.Before that, she “oversaw development and acquisitions” for her father’s real estate company, the Trump Organization, and had a fashion clothing line. She also appeared as a boardroom judge on Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice. But her role in the White House, and the fact that virtually her entire professional history is tied to her father, raise the question: What will she wind up doing?While Ivanka could probably return to the Trump Organization, it may not be the most stable workplace when her father leaves office. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is seeking Trump’s tax returns in a “complex financial investigation”, previously citing public reports on “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization” in their request.The New York state attorney general’s office is also investigating whether the Trump Organization and its agents wrongly inflated the value of Seven Springs estate, a property north of New York City. The state attorney general’s probe came after Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen told Congress that he had inflated his assets’ value, so as to get more favorable loans and insurance policies.But a return to the world of fashion also appears unlikely. Indeed, Ivanka Trump’s eponymous brand is no more. She announced its closure in July 2018, citing “the work I am doing here in Washington”. The circumstances preceding the announcement, however, weren’t promising. Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom dropped her line in 2017, claiming “poor performance”. There was also a campaign targeting online retailers, asking them to drop the brand in protest of Trump administration policies. More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans back Trump challenge to Biden election victory

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      Donald Trump’s resolve not to accept the result of the presidential election appeared unshaken on Sunday, as he continued to promote conspiracy theories about the vote, with little outward sign that anyone in his inner circle was prepared to talk him into conceding.
      CNN cited White House sources saying that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had broached the subject of concession, and that his wife, Melania, was also advising that “the time had come for him to accept the loss”. But other outlets shot down CNN’s reports, even as the first lady tweeted in support of her husband.
      Trump continued to tweet false claims that the election had been stolen, and the only public statements from those close to him were adamantly in favour of staying.
      Top Republicans either amplified Trump’s baseless claims of widespread vote rigging or remained silent, with only a tiny number of moderates following tradition and congratulating Joe Biden.
      “Keep fighting for every legal and live vote,” South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the president, advised him on Fox Business, pointing to a variety of legal challenges Trump’s lawyers were planning to launch on Monday.
      “If we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially. There is a lot at stake here.”
      Legal challenges are routine in the aftermath of an election, as are recounts where margins are small. There will be a recount in Georgia. But there is no modern precedent for such processes leading to major changes in the results. International and US observers, and Republican state officials, have said there is no evidence of widespread irregularities despite the challenges of holding an election at the height of a pandemic.
      Even after congratulations to Biden flooded in from almost every foreign government, Republican loyalists lined up on Fox News – which has called the election for Biden – to portray the result as a media construct.
      “The media is desperately trying to get everyone to coronate Joe Biden as the next president, but that’s not how it works,” Texas senator Ted Cruz said. “The media does not get to select our president. The American people get to elect our president.
      “I believe President Trump still has a path to victory and that path is to count every single legal vote that was cast, but also not to count any votes that were fraudulently cast.”
      A statement from former Republican president George W Bush issued on Sunday said: “I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night. I also called Kamala Harris to congratulate her on her historic election to the vice-presidency.
      “Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country. The president-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans.”
      Only two Republican senators have so far sent their congratulations to the president elect: former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She said honouring Americans’ choice “in who leads us has always defined us and is the source of our exceptionalism. We must uphold that legacy.”
      Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Romney referred to Biden as “president-elect”, something other Republicans have avoided. But he said he was not even going to try to talk Trump down from his insistence that he won the election.
      “You’re not going to change the nature of President Trump in these last days, apparently, of his presidency. He is who he is and he has a relatively relaxed relationship with the truth, and so he’s going to keep on fighting until the very end.”
      However, Romney acknowledged the harm the president’s obduracy was doing.
      “Look, I know the eyes of the world are on us. The eyes of our own people are on the institutions that we have. The eyes of history are on us,” the Utah senator said.
      Most Republican members of Congress remained silent on the question of the president’s concession, well aware that even after Trump leaves the White House, he and his supporters could unleash their wrath anyone seen as disloyal. More

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      in US Politics

      Who will tell Trump to go? Not Melania or Jared, reports say

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      As Donald Trump spent Sunday morning visiting one of his golf clubs and doubling down on bogus election fraud claims, conflicting reports emerged about whether the president’s family and top advisers were advising him to admit defeat.
      The disparate reports likely reflected a White House in deep turmoil, some officials digesting the scale of their defeat in the presidential election but others, especially Trump himself, cling to a false narrative that the election was somehow stolen.
      Citing two sources, CNN reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, had spoken to him about conceding. Another source told CNN Trump’s wife, Melania, told him that it was time to accept Joe Biden’s victory.
      Melania Trump was then yet to make a public statement on the election but had reportedly voiced her opinion in private.
      “She has offered it, as she often does,” CNN reported this source as saying.
      Later on Sunday she tweeted support for her husband, saying: “The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal – not illegal – vote should be counted.”
      Shortly after noon, the New York Times said a White House official disputed CNN’s reporting on Kushner. This official claimed that Kushner had advised Trump to seek “legal remedies”.
      Axios also reported on Kushner’s counsel. “A second source close to Kushner confirmed he had not advised Trump to concede,” the news site said.
      Any advice would appear to have had little impact on Trump himself, who continued to tweet false and baseless allegations of electoral fraud and had yet to call Biden to concede the race, a longstanding tradition in US politics. There was little sign that the president’s two oldest sons, Eric and Don Jr, were advising him to concede.
      Both the Times and Axios described behind-the-scenes conversations.
      According to the Times, White House advisers and staffers convened on Saturday at Trump campaign headquarters. After campaign officials explained that any legal strategy likely would not change election results, Kushner asked some to explain this to Trump. When they asked Kushner if he should also be part of this conversation, Kushner reportedly said he would participate in subsequent discussions.
      According to Axios, a source claimed there were some uncomfortable conversations in Trump’s circle, and that the majority accepted that Biden had won.
      A spokeswoman for Melania Trump did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
      Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has emphatically pushed for legal intervention. CNN also reported that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who tested positive for Covid-19 this week, had discussed next moves with Trump’s legal team.
      Regardless of Trump’s view of the outcome, there has been no communication between the White House and Biden’s camp.
      Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders told CNN’s State of the Union that while “a number of Republicans from the Hill have reached out … I don’t believe anyone from the White House has.” More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede

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      Joe Biden spent his first full day as US president-elect determined to hit the ground running, as he faces one of the most daunting challenges of any new occupant of the White House.
      The Democrat, who defeated Donald Trump to win election as the 46th president, immediately began work on what is likely to be a turbulent transition as he confronts the fast-spreading coronavirus, high unemployment, systemic racism, the climate crisis and a bitterly divided nation.
      Yet even as the silent machinery of a transfer of power kicked inexorably into gear, Trump still refused to concede defeat, insisting he would press ahead with legal challenges from Monday. There is no evidence of widespread election irregularities. On Sunday, former president George W Bush joined those recognising Biden as the winner.
      Biden, a 77-year-old former US senator from Delaware who was vice-president to Barack Obama, was declared the victor of a closely fought and divisive pandemic-era election on Saturday morning, triggering euphoria in major cities as people honked car horns, danced in the streets and turned Trump’s TV catchphrase against him: “You’re fired!”
      It was also hailed by observers around the world as a return to political orthodoxy after the disruptive experiment represented by aggressive “America first” nationalism and administrative chaos during Trump’s four-year presidency.
      In an outdoor victory speech to hundreds of supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden struck a starkly different note, stating: “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify.”
      He added: “This is the time to heal in America.”
      The vice-president-elect, the California senator Kamala Harris, wore a white suit and blouse, symbolising the women’s suffrage movement, and praised Biden’s “audacity” for choosing a woman as running mate.
      “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said.
      Biden listed goals including building prosperity, securing healthcare, achieving racial justice and saving the climate. But he said his first priority would be controlling Covid-19 with a plan “built on a bedrock of science … to turn this pandemic around”.
      Even as the nation was gripped by the election, the virus soared to record highs with an average of more than 100,000 cases per day. On Monday Biden will announce his own Covid-19 task force. His transition effort has a website, BuildBackBetter.com, and a Twitter account, @Transition46. But it is unclear what, if any, cooperation he can expect from the outgoing Trump administration. More

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      in US Politics

      How can Biden heal America when Trump doesn’t want it healed? | Robert Reich

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      It’s over. Donald Trump is history.
      For millions of Americans – a majority, by almost 5m popular votes – it’s a time for celebration and relief. Trump’s cruelty, vindictiveness, non-stop lies, corruption, rejection of science, chaotic incompetence and gross narcissism brought out the worst in America. He tested the limits of American decency and democracy. He is the closest we have come to a dictator.
      Democracy has had a reprieve, a stay of execution. We have another chance to preserve it, and restore what’s good about America.
      It will not be easy. The social fabric is deeply torn. Joe Biden will inherit a pandemic far worse than it would have been had Trump not played it down and refused to take responsibility for containing it, and an economic crisis exacting an unnecessary toll.
      The worst legacy of Trump’s term of office is a bitterly divided America.
      Judging by the number of ballots cast in the election, Trump’s base of support is roughly 70 million. They were angry even before the election (as were Biden supporters). Now, presumably, they are angrier.
      The nation was already divided when Trump became president – by race and ethnicity, region, education, national origin, religion and class. But he exploited these divisions to advance himself. He didn’t just pour salt into our wounds. He planted grenades in them.
      It is a vile legacy. Although Americans have strongly disagreed over what we want the government to do, we at least agreed to be bound by its decisions. This meta-agreement required enough social trust for us to regard the views and interests of those we disagree with as equally worthy of consideration as our own. But Trump continuously sacrificed that trust to feed his own monstrous ego.
      Elections usually end with losing candidates congratulating winners and graciously accepting defeat, thereby demonstrating their commitment to the democratic system over the particular outcome they fought to achieve.
      But there will be no graciousness from Trump, nor a concession. He is incapable of either.
      He will be president for another two and a half months. He is still charging that the election was stolen from him, mounting legal challenges and demanding recounts, maneuvers that could prevent states from meeting the legal deadline of 8 December for choosing electors.
      If he continues, America could find itself in a situation similar to what it faced in 1876, when claims about ballot fraud forced a special electoral commission to decide the winner, just two days before the inauguration.
      I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump refuses to attend Biden’s inauguration and stages a giant rally instead.
      He’ll send firestorms of aggrieved messages to his followers – questioning Biden’s legitimacy and urging that they refuse to recognize his presidency. This will be followed by months of rallies and tweets containing even more outlandish charges: plots against Trump and America by Biden, Nancy Pelosi, “deep-state” bureaucrats, “socialists”, immigrants, Muslims, or any other of his standard foes.
      It could go on for years, Trump keeping the nation’s attention, remaining the center of controversy and divisiveness, sustaining his followers in perpetual fury, titillating them with the possibility he might run again in 2024, making it harder for Biden to do any of the national healing he’s promised and the nation so desperately needs.
      How can Biden heal the nation when Trump doesn’t want it healed?
      The media (including Twitter, Facebook, and even Fox News) could help. They have begun to call out Trump’s lies in real time and cut off his press conferences, practices that should have started years ago. Let’s hope they continue to tag his lies and otherwise ignore him – a fitting end to a reality TV president who tried to turn America into a reality warzone.
      But the responsibility for healing America falls to all of us.
      For starters, we’d do well to recognize and honor the selflessness we have observed during this trying time – starting with tens of thousands of election workers who have worked long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances.
      Add to them the hospital workers across the nation saving lives from the scourge of Covid-19; the thousands of firefighters in the west and the emergency responders on the Gulf coast battling the consequences of climate change; the civil servants getting unemployment checks out to millions of jobless Americans; social workers dealing with family crises in the wake of evictions and other hardships; armies of volunteers doling out food from soup kitchens.
      These are the true heroes of America. They embody the decency of this land. They are doing the healing, rebuilding trust, reminding us who we are and who we are not.
      Donald Trump is not America.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US More