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- US President-elect Joe Biden will focus on his White House team.
- Announcements are expected soon.
- Donald Trump remains defiant, although he has not been very successful in court.
President-elect Joe Biden will focus on shaping his core White House team on Tuesday as outgoing President Donald Trump forges ahead with his increasingly tenuous legal fight to reverse his defeat in the US election.
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Several of Biden’s top campaign officials have been discussing their roles in the transition and the new administration that he will take on Jan.20, and some of those roles could be announced Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter.
United States Representative Cedric Richmond, who was a national co-chair of Biden’s campaign and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is expected to join the administration in a high-level position, as is Steve Ricchetti, who he has long been a close adviser to Biden. the person said.
Richmond’s measure would free his seat in the Louisiana Congress.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, who was hired earlier this year as Biden’s campaign manager and is the first woman to lead a winning Democratic presidential nomination, is expected to be named deputy chief of staff, media reported.
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Trump court cases
None of the potential candidates responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Biden’s transition team declined to comment.
Biden, a Democrat, will also receive information on threats to national security from his own advisers.
Trump, who has not granted the November 3 election, has prevented him from receiving classified intelligence reports that are usually provided to the successor in a transition.
In an indication of the national security challenges Biden will inherit, Reuters reported Monday night that Trump last week asked for options to attack Iran’s main nuclear site, but ultimately decided not to take the dramatic step.
Meanwhile, Trump, a Republican, will take his faltering effort to overturn Biden’s victory to federal court in Pennsylvania, where another legal setback would likely doom his already risky prospects.
United States District Judge Matthew Brann will hear arguments in a lawsuit the Trump campaign filed on Nov.9 that seeks to prevent the state’s top election official from certifying Biden as the winner.
The Trump campaign, after narrowing the scope of the case, focuses on a claim that voters were improperly allowed to fix rejected ballots due to technical errors such as the lack of a “secret envelope.”
Three more attorneys representing the Trump campaign asked to withdraw from the lawsuit Monday after a prominent regional firm, Porter Wright Morris and Arthur, withdrew from the case last week.
A Trump legal adviser called the afterthought mix “routine.”
So far, Trump’s furious efforts to have courts reject ballots or delay the certification of results in key states have been roundly defeated.
On Monday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said a vote recount would cost roughly $ 7.9 million, money that the Trump campaign in that battlefield state would have to pay upfront if requested.
Trump has remained angry and defiant on social media even as some prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have quietly asserted that Biden should be considered president-elect.
At a press conference on Monday, Biden again asked Trump to cooperate with the transfer of power, arguing that the resurgent Covid-19 pandemic meant that lives were at stake.
“More people can die if we don’t coordinate,” he said.
Biden urged Congress to approve pandemic relief assistance. Talks about such legislation stalled for months before the November 3 elections.
The president-elect will address state governors on Thursday regarding measures to reduce the coronavirus case count and the distribution of vaccines, according to a spokesman for the National Governors Association.
However, Biden insisted that Trump’s refusal to compromise was not inhibiting his transition efforts.
“I find this more embarrassing for the country than debilitating for my ability to get started,” he said.
Biden beat Trump by the same margin of 306-232 on the state-by-state Electoral College that led Trump to proclaim a “landslide” victory in 2016.
Biden also won the national popular vote by at least 5.6 million votes, or 3.7 percentage points, and some ballots are still counted.
Election officials from both parties have said there is no evidence of major wrongdoing. Federal election security officials have denounced the “unsubstantiated claims” and expressed “the utmost confidence” in the integrity of the elections.
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