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      in US Politics

      Pompeo makes baseless claims about ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’

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      The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has predicted “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” on a day when US allies offered their congratulations to the president-elect, Joe Biden.
      Pompeo made his remarks to reporters at the state department on Tuesday, and gave a slight smile after referring to a “second Trump administration” – leaving it unclear whether he was joking.
      He did not refer to the fact that Biden has been projected as the winner, and held a lead of 4.7m nationwide in the vote count so far, while being ahead in the four critical battleground states.
      Instead, Pompeo focused on the various legal challenges being pursued by the Trump administration, none of which so far have been found to have any merit.
      “We’re ready,” Pompeo went on. “The world is watching what’s taking place. We’re gonna count all the votes. When the process is complete, there’ll be electors selected. There’s a process – the constitution lays it out pretty clearly. The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the state department is functional today, successful today and successful with a president who’s in office on January 20 a minute after noon, will also be successful.”
      The state department is not currently communicating with the Biden team and all government agencies have been told to proceed with their budgets as if Trump had been re-elected, to the outrage of Democrats.
      “Secretary Pompeo shouldn’t play along with baseless and dangerous attacks on the legitimacy of last week’s election,” said Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House foreign affairs committee. “The state department should now begin preparing for President-elect Biden’s transition.”
      Pompeo said he was receiving “calls from all across the world”, but did not say who from. The leaders of America’s main allies, including Canada, the UK, France, Ireland and Germany have congratulated Biden in phone calls on Monday and Tuesday.
      “They understand that we have a legal process. They understand that this takes time,” the secretary of state said, comparing the situation now to the 2000 election. In 2000, George W Bush was leading by 537 votes in Florida, when the supreme court intervened to stop vote counting. Biden is ahead by tens of thousands of votes in four states.
      Echoing Trump’s line – which has become the party line for Republicans – Pompeo said: “We must count every legal vote, we want to make sure that any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted – that dilutes your vote, if it’s done properly. Got to get that right. When we get it right, we’ll get it right. We’re in good shape.”
      When a journalist asked whether Trump’s refusal to concede discredits US promotion of democratic norms abroad, Pompeo replied irritably: “That’s ridiculous and you know it’s ridiculous, and you asked it because it’s ridiculous.”
      He added: “We want the law to be imposed in a way that reflects the reality of what took place, and that’s what I think we’re engaged in here in the United States and it’s what we work on every place all across the world.” More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump's latest endeavor? Asking his supporters to pay his debts

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      Donald Trump has set up a retirement GoFundMe. Well, not exactly – he doesn’t call it a retirement GoFundMe, but his “election defense fund”.
      Those donating may believe that the money will be used towards challenging the election result, but may have missed that their contributions are earmarked for paying off Trump’s re-election debts. It seems to be the latest episode in the Trump team’s comedy of errors.
      As Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge the election result by baselessly claiming that Biden’s victory was won through voter fraud, he is also calling on his base for help. Donations can be made to two different funds – Trump’s personal fund, and his joint fund with the RNC.
      “President Trump needs YOU to step up to make sure we have the resources to protect the integrity of the election!” the wording on both funds says, which is featured in a huge pop-up on Trump’s re-election webpage. It continues: “Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to the Official Election Defense Fund and to increase your impact by 1,000%!”
      It is unclear who matches the donations.
      But if you scroll down, past the information about the “Left-wing MOB” trying to “undermine our election”, you’ll see some fine print. On Trump’s personal fund, it dictates that of all donations raised, only 50% will go towards a recount effort, and that “50% of each contribution, up to a maximum of $2,800 ($5,000), [will] be designated toward DJTFP’s 2020 general election account for general election debt retirement until such debt is retired”.
      On his joint fund with the RNC, the donations work as follows: “60% of each contribution first to Save America, up to $5,000/$5,000, then to DJTP’s recount account, up to a maximum of $2,800/$5,000. [And] 40% of each contribution to the RNC’s operating account, up to a maximum of $35,500/$15,000.”

      This essentially means that depending on the size of your donation, a large portion of any donation won’t go to the “recount” bid but will instead go to the Super Pac sponsoring the bid, and the Republican party. The bottom line: Trump spent a little more money than he had for his re-election – to the tune of $1.6bn – and now he wants help paying for it. It’s sort of cute, like when a wealthy college student asks if you can sponsor their year abroad petting monkeys in Borneo.
      The man who literally left his supporters waiting out in the cold is now passing round the begging bowl in the cold light of day. Some have complained of being repeatedly asked to give donations, receiving as many as 28 messages in a day.
      Perhaps we should have some empathy. Trump did, after all, get Covid-19 and then lose his job during a pandemic. Should we be laughing at a man so broke he didn’t make enough money to pay more than $750 in tax for the last two years – and nothing for the 10 to 15 years before that?
      But then, let us remember how he dished out self-help advice to ordinary Americans after his Covid diagnosis. “Don’t let it defeat you! We have … some really great drugs and knowledge,” he said at the time, while attempting to slash subsidised healthcare as he simultaneously received a tax-payer funded cocktail of experimental medicines not available to the average American.
      (The drugs did seem to work – the president recovered quickly despite being, as one person put it, “in three high-risk categories: elderly, obese and low-income”.)
      Anyway. If his supporters want to pledge money to help the man pay off his debts, why not? Love can be many things: blind, tough, profligate. Trump has a rough patch coming up, with a reported $900m in personal debts, on top of his re-election costs. He could always just cash in on his condos, golf courses and towers, of course, which could bring him in about $1bn. But then where would the poor man go to spend his retirement? More

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      in Elections

      DoJ officials condemn Barr's approval of voter fraud inquiries without evidence

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      Current and former US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has stoked further discord around the president’s refusal to concede electoral defeat by approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite little evidence of any wrongdoing.
      Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to the 93 US attorneys across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by senior figures inside and outside the DoJ.
      In the most dramatic response, the top DoJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned from his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.
      In a statement, Pilger pointed out that for the past 40 years the justice department had abided by a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, with criminal investigations only carried out after contests were certified and completed.
      Barr’s memo tears up that rule by giving federal prosecutors the go-ahead to investigate what he called “apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”. His action was specifically aimed at closely fought presidential contests in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
      Complaints about unsubstantiated irregularities have been received by the justice department from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
      Outside the DoJ, there was widespread unease that Barr has once again mobilised the might of the justice department in a politicised direction. The memo was interpreted as casting doubt on the propriety of the election, which on Saturday was called for Joe Biden following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.

      Vanita Gupta, a former head of the civil rights division of the DoJ under Barack Obama, denounced Barr’s tactics as “scaremongering”.
      “Let’s be clear, this is about disruption, disinformation and sowing chaos,” she said on Twitter:
      Gupta, now chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s aim was “stoking division, polarization and lies”, in order to “undermine confidence in outcome with Trump voters and ultimately a Biden administration”.
      Other former prosecutors, legal scholars and election experts debated how serious Barr’s move was likely to be. Steve Vladeck, a specialist in national security law at the University of Texas, stressed that the DoJ had no power to block states from certifying election results – only judges could do that.
      But Vladeck went on to describe the Barr memo as “ominous” in that it “perpetuates the illegitimacy narrative” that has been embraced by Trump and senior Republicans in the hope of clouding Biden’s victory.
      Preet Bharara, who Trump fired in 2017 as US attorney for the southern district of New York, gave a similarly nuanced response. For now, he said, he was “more disgusted than scared” by Barr’s intervention.
      “But stay tuned.”
      Barr specifically refers in his memo to the 40-year-old non-intervention policy over which he has now run roughshod. He denigrates it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”, and says it was never a “hard and fast rule”.
      Later in the letter, he softens his advice to federal prosecutors, urging them to follow “appropriate caution” in line with the DoJ’s commitment to “fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship”.
      “Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” he says.
      Those sentences prompted some speculation that Barr was merely going through the motions to placate Trump. The president has by all accounts been on the warpath since the election was called for Biden, ordering his administration to take any action to forward the lie that the election has been stolen.
      But such a theory of Barr’s conduct is countered by the fact that this is not the first time he has attempted to push prosecutors into intervening in the election. Three weeks before election day, he made a similar gambit to lift the decades-old restriction on intervening in the middle of a race.
      Having been appointed by Trump to be the nation’s most senior prosecutor in February 2019, Barr has shown himself willing to side openly with the president in apparent breach of the time-honoured independence of his office. One notable example was his handling of the publication of the Mueller report into collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, which was criticized as spin on behalf of the president.
      More recently, Barr has mirrored Trump’s attempts to sow doubt on the election. In particular, the attorney general has intensified baseless claims from the White House about rampant fraud in mail-in voting – a form of electoral participation that has long been practiced by some states and that was widely used this year.
      Barr went as far as to lie on live television about an indictment for an electoral crime in Texas. Officials were forced to retract the statement, as the supposed incident never took place.
      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 remained in lockstep with Trump, showing no sign he is prepared to break with a president whose resistance to accepting defeat shatters a norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been central to US democracy since 1800.

      McConnell, who is likely to continue to control the Senate for the Republicans unless Democrats can win two runoff elections in Georgia in January, has declared his loyalty to Trump.
      He said: “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” More

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      in US Politics

      Can Joe Biden and Kamala Harris unite America after Trump – video explainer

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      When Joe Biden formally takes over the presidency in January he will face some of the greatest crises to hit the US in recent history: a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, a devastated economy, a rapidly overheating climate and a deeply fractured nation.
      The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino looks at how Biden and the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, plan to ‘heal’ the country after four years of Trumpism – and the challenges they will face with the prospect of having to navigate these times without a majority in the Senate
      How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video More

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      in US Politics

      Trump was always destined to lose – and he has only himself to blame | Walter Shapiro

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      Believing himself a political genius without parallel in world history (admittedly, not the president’s strongest subject), Donald Trump saw no need to change anything. There was never an acknowledgment of the gravity of office, never a plea for national unity and certainly never a stutter-step towards the center.
      In 2017, Trump the Master Builder couldn’t even bring himself to cut a deal with eager Democrats to rebuild highways, bridges and tunnels. Long hours confined to the Oval Office – with only national security briefing books for diversion – allowed Trump to hone his mastery of bizarrely capitalized, often misspelled and consistently bilious tweets. He was an insult comedian who didn’t realize that he had access to the nuclear codes.
      The result was that the Trump inaugural honeymoon lasted about as long as a Tinder date. He hit a dismal 43% approval rating in the polling averages in February 2017 – and never consistently rose above it during the rest of his presidency. In comparison, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W Bush all boasted approval ratings around 60% during similar periods when the unemployment rate hit rock bottom.
      Politically, everything that Trump touches has been a disaster for the Republicans.
      Trump’s bumbling endorsements even helped the Democrats win a 2017 Senate seat in deep red Alabama. In theory, the Republican party should have been poised to hold their own in the 2018 congressional elections with a buoyant economy and massive tax cuts to brag about. But Trump – displaying his trademark manhandling of politics – instead made 2018 a referendum on his person and on phantom caravans of bloodthirsty migrants heading for the Mexican border.
      The results: Nancy Pelosi became House speaker and congressional Democrats roared through the suburbs, electing legislators in unlikely places like Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City. With 26 Democratic-held Senate seats on the ballot in 2018 (compared with just nine Republican seats), the Republicans were in a position to create an enduring Senate majority under Mitch McConnell. Instead, thanks largely to Trump, they gained a paltry two seats.
      Even before the pandemic, the seeds were planted for Trump to become just the fourth incumbent president in a century to be defeated for re-election.
      Voters over 65, a key demographic group that gave him an edge in 2016, had begun to abandon the president in mid-2019, even before the coronavirus. Despite the predicted “Democrats in disarray” headlines, shared rage against Trump allowed Joe Biden to unite the party after decisively winning the South Carolina primary. And it was Trump himself who hired Brad Parscale as his initial 2020 campaign manager, setting in motion a hapless re-election effort that blew through $1bn and left the Trump forces scrounging for lost coins under seat cushions to pay for October TV ads.
      Trump’s only political success over four years was cowing the Republican party into submission. Instead of distancing themselves from an incompetent president, Republican officials hitched their wagon to his supposed star power. As a result, Republicans became a party that is not only anti-science, but anti-public health. Which is certainly an unorthodox stance in the middle of a pandemic.
      The truth is that the Trump presidency was always destined to end badly. Trump’s narcissism does not allow him to change, because doing so would force the admission that his radiant being has a few minor flaws. How could Trump see the light when he believes he is the light? So instead he headed for the darkness of defeat still pretending that it was 2016 and Hillary Clinton was on the ballot.
      Walter Shapiro is covering his 11th presidential campaign for the New Republic and is a lecturer in political science at Yale More

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      in US Politics

      Trump's longshot election lawsuits: where do things stand?

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      Since election day, Donald Trump and other Republicans have filed a smattering of lawsuits in battleground states that have provided cover for Trump and other Republicans to say that the election still remains unresolved.
      Legal experts have noted these suits are meritless, and even if they were successful, would not be enough to overturn the election results. Indeed, judges in several of these lawsuits have already dismissed them, noting the Trump campaign has failed to offer evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud.
      Here’s where some of the key lawsuits stand:
      Pennsylvania
      One of the main rallying cries for Trump and his supporters has been that they were not allowed to observe vote counting in Philadelphia, the overwhelmingly Democratic city that helped Biden carry Pennsylvania.
      That’s not true. The Trump campaign did secure a court order to allow observers to get closer to the vote counting process, but there’s no evidence observers were excluded and Philadelphia had a 24/7 livestream of its counting. When the campaign went to federal court arguing that its observers didn’t have access to vote counting, a campaign lawyer was forced to admit there was a “non-zero” number of campaign observers watching the vote count.
      Pennsylvania Republicans and the Trump campaign are also still pushing the US supreme court to reject mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day and arrived at election offices by 6 November. Pennsylvania law requires ballots to arrive by the close of polls on election night, but the Pennsylvania supreme court, where Democrats have a majority, pointed to mail delays and the pandemic to justify the extension. Several other states in the US allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after election day but are postmarked before.
      Republicans have been trying to get these ballots rejected since early September, when the Pennsylvania supreme court extended the receipt deadline by three days. The number of late-arriving ballots is thought to be relatively small, so even if the supreme court were to ultimately reject them, it would not be enough to overturn Biden’s lead of nearly 45,000 votes in the state.
      Trump and Republicans have also pursued a number of cases to try and get courts to reject mail-in ballots where voters made a mistake, but have been unsuccessful in all of their suits. Even if Republicans succeeded, it wouldn’t be enough to overturn the results of the race.
      On Monday evening, the Trump campaign filed another lawsuit in federal court offering a new legal theory – Pennsylvania’s election was illegitimate because it had different processes for voting by mail and voting in person. Many legal experts quickly noted the theory was bogus.
      The suit was “inexcusably late”, said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, who noted the differences between in-person and mail-in voting were known for months.
      “The core theory on which it rests – that there’s some kind of right to have all ballots counted through precisely the same procedures – would effectively invalidate mail-in voting not just in Pennsylvania, but nationwide,” he said. “Yet again, it offers no actual evidence of any impropriety or fraud in how Pennsylvania has counted these ballots. It’s just a transparent effort to throw out legal votes – or, at least, to muddy the waters long enough to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its slate of electors in time.”
      Arizona
      The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Arizona on Saturday that seemed to be based on a discredited conspiracy theory that voters who used Sharpie pens to fill out their ballots would not have them counted.
      The campaign’s suit didn’t specifically mention Sharpies, but contained allegations from voters who said they noticed ink had bled through their ballots, which could potentially cause their ballots not to count if the ballot scanners believed they had cast a vote for more than one candidate in a contest, something known as an overvote. The suit says that poll workers failed to avail voters of the opportunity to cast a new ballot when scanners notified them of the issue.
      The Trump campaign submitted affidavits from two voters who said they were not notified of the chance to fix their ballots. A poll watcher submitted an affidavit saying he observed around 80 instances in which voters were given vague or confusing information about the possibility their vote could be rejected. He said he observed about 40 instances in which the poll worker had pressed the button to submit the ballot on behalf of the voter. Biden leads Trump in Arizona by more than 17,000 votes. More

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      in Elections

      Now what does Giuliani's Four Seasons Total Landscaping farce remind me of? | Marina Hyde

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      We begin in many people’s happy place, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. As you may know, Donald Trump’s losing presidential campaign held a press conference that has passed immediately into the annals of political comedy. And also the annals of horticultural business marketing. Consider this Philadelphia gardening establishment the world’s leading purveyor of seasonal colour.If you somehow missed the Four Seasons Total Landscaping story, it was truly the quattro stagioni of political events. Each time it seemed it couldn’t get any better, there turned out to be some new quarter of it to enjoy. But let me briefly summarise. On Saturday, the current US president tweeted that a “big press conference” would be held that morning at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, his account offered clarification – that wasn’t the hotel, but somewhere called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Double-taking at their satnavs, reporters scrambled to this prestige location in a suburban business park, where Trump branding had been hastily affixed to the roller door of a single-storey building. Then again, the backdrop was really the best of it. Pan out, and the venue lay next door to a sex shop and a crematorium.Clearly this was … unconventional. Yet amazingly, the world’s media would indeed end up being addressed there. Not by Trump, but by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Dead people were always voting in Philadelphia, Rudy claimed. Joe Frazier, and Will Smith’s dad (twice).And as he said all this, he was flanked by a long line of unsmiling campaign guys trying to look like nothing could be more normal than standing in a forgotten corner of suburbia in front of some garden hoses. There are millions of potential captions to the picture. Let’s go with something befitting the tragedy: They Were Four Years In Power.Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference is: why did they carry on with it? Some sort of mistake had clearly been made, so why did they persist and pretend it hadn’t? Many speculate it was down to fear of not obeying the will of the White House idiot, however lunatic the reality of it may appear. Others simply think that by the time the campaign staff stopped screaming, they felt they were in too deep to turn around.Either way, the upshot is the same: no matter the absurdity of any situation, no matter how ridiculous it looks when you get there, there will ALWAYS be a line of guys ready to butch it out like it was their plan along. There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who feel that it is somehow less ridiculous to look completely ridiculous than it is to simply say: “Oh wait, we made a mistake – give us half an hour and we’ll tell you the new venue.” There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who, even if they walked over a cliff, would leave very specific last words echoing behind them. “I meant to do that.”It was at this point, about three days into the story, that I suddenly stopped, mid-laugh. Like a flash, it had dawned on me. Oh I SEE, I thought. How very “United Kingdom”. These days, our country is that press conference. Whether it be butching out the warnings of 7,000-long lorry queues, or pissing off a new US president who already thinks our government is a nasty basket case, Boris Johnson & Co are very much one of those lines of guys. Source of escalating international bemusement or amusement? Yeah, we meant to do that.This morning, it was claimed that Johnson’s congratulatory tweet to Biden was a hastily doctored congratulatory message to Trump – with the remains of the Trump message still slightly visible. Think of it as the Turin shroud of digital incompetence – and accept that some hyper-defensive Whitehall source will turn up to say “actually we meant to do that”.Meanwhile, the government’s insistence on the international law-breaking clauses in its internal markets bill could easily leave the UK with no meaningful EU or US trade deal. On Monday night, John Major warned that the plan “is unprecedented in all our history – and for good reason. It has damaged our reputation around the world.” Still, we meant to do that. “Because of our bombast, our blustering, our threats and our inflexibility,” continued Major, “our trade will be less profitable, our Treasury poorer, our jobs fewer, and our future less prosperous.” I guess we meant to do that.A month and a half from the end of transition, the guys who promised people the sunlit uplands are now building giant car parks like it’s a positive thing. Or to put it another way, they are telling you that the Four Seasons – an international standard of luxury and service – is actually less good than Four Seasons Total Landscaping. We still plan to exit transition in midwinter in a deadly pandemic we’ve known about almost the whole year. They are butching it out.This is statecraft by Clouseau. There’s a bit in The Pink Panther Strikes Again where the inspector finds himself in a home gym and is trying to show off his familiarity with the parallel bars. He take a couple of swings, then loses control in the dismount and contrives not just to be thrown off the bars, but all the way down a long nearby staircase, right into the middle of a genteel drawing room scene. Noting the gaze of the room’s inhabitants, Clouseau picks himself up and declares: “Well, that felt good!”This, but with a trade policy on which our national and international future hinges. Perhaps, like Clouseau, we will agonisingly pratfall our way to eventual Brexit triumph, and not have senselessly angered the new US administration along the way. However, real life not being a carefully plotted movie farce, we might have to accept that the chances are we won’t. Still, you can be sure that whatever happens, some guys will be claiming they meant to do it all.• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More