Trump seen, not heard and files new election lawsuit

 - US President Donald Trump laid a ceremonial wreath at Arlington cemetery in commemoration of the United States' Veterans Day.

 - The president avoided speaking to reporters but kept up his tweeting, claiming "a mountain of corruption & dishonesty" in the US election.

 - President-elect Joe Biden laid his own wreath at a memorial in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Trump administration is reportedly withholding a stack of messages from foreign leaders to Biden

 - The State Department has several messages for president-elect Joe Biden from other world leaders, but the Trump administration is preventing access to them as President Donald Trump refuses to acknowledge Biden's win in the 2020 election, CNN reported on Wednesday.

 - Biden has independently been in contact with other foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, since being projected as president-elect.

 - The State Department typically supports international relations for the president-elect, "which is why many countries began sending messages to State over the weekend," according to the CNN report.

 - The president and others in his circle, including State Secretary Mike Pompeo, have refused to acknowledge Biden as president-elect.

 - When asked about the election results and the transition of presidential power on Tuesday, Pompeo jokingly replied, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."

Republican Georgia secretary of state says no sign of widespread fraud in vote count

Georgia's Republican Secretary of State said on Wednesday there was no sign yet of widespread fraud in his state's vote count, where Democratic president-elect Joe Biden currently has a 14 000 vote lead over President Donald Trump.

Brad Raffensperger, in an interview with CNN, said he has ordered a hand recount because of the closeness of the vote count, but he believed votes had so far been tallied accurately. Biden's current lead, with nearly all votes counted, is 0.3%.

Asked about voter fraud, Raffensperger said: "We have ongoing investigations but we have not seen something widespread."

Upset and not accepting election results, Trump appears to have forgotten he still has to govern

 - US President Donald Trump appears to be neglecting his duties and has mostly been out of sight for the past week. 

 - Since losing the election, he's refused to concede to president-elect Joe Biden and is falsely alleging fraud.

 - Trump has not addressed the growing Covid-19 outbreak and other national concerns.

(PHOTO: Getty Images)

Biden announces long-time aide Ron Klain as White House chief of staff

US president-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday announced he has chosen Ron Klain, a seasoned Democratic operative, as his chief of staff, his first public personnel choice for the White House.

"Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together," Biden said in a statement on Klain, who also served as the Democrat's first chief of staff when he became vice president in 2009.

"His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again," Biden said.

Klain, 59, also worked with Biden when he was chairperson of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Afterwards he served as chief of staff to vice president Al Gore.

Under president Barack Obama, Klain coordinated the White House response to the Ebola crisis in 2014.

 - AFP

Trump presses on with uphill legal struggle hoping to overturn Biden victory

President Donald Trump's campaign on Wednesday took another step in its long-shot legal strategy to upend his election loss with a Michigan lawsuit while Georgia announced a recount and President-elect Joe Biden worked on laying the foundation of his administration.

The Republican president's team went to federal court to try to block Michigan, a US Midwestern battleground state that he won in 2016 but lost to Biden in media projections, from certifying the 3 November election results. Trump trailed by roughly 148 000 votes, or 2.6 percentage points, in unofficial Michigan vote totals, according to Edison Research.

The lawsuit made allegations of voting misconduct, with the focus on the Democratic stronghold of Wayne County, which includes Detroit.

Jake Rollow, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State, said the Trump campaign was promoting false claims to erode public confidence in the election.

"It does not change the truth: Michigan's elections were conducted fairly, securely, transparently, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people," Rollow said in a statement.

 - REUTERS

Biden reassures US allies in calls with leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia

In their first calls with Joe Biden since the US election, the leaders of Japan, South Korea and Australia on Thursday reaffirmed plans to form close ties with the president-elect to tackle issues including climate change and regional security.

The three key Asian allies - Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison - join other global leaders in recognising the Democratic challenger's 3 November victory over incumbent Donald Trump, who has so far refused to concede.

- Reuters

Georgia's top election official on Wednesday said the state will conduct a recount of all paper ballots cast in the 3 November presidential election.

"Mathematically, you actually have to do a full hand-by-hand recount of all because the margin is so close," Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference.

"We want to start this before the week is up."

CNN PROJECTION: Donald Trump will win Alaska https://t.co/FhzRTNfNOI #CNNElection pic.twitter.com/hHQyy3MM55

— CNN (@CNN) November 11, 2020

'These are dictator moves': Defence officials alarmed as Trump installs more loyalists at the Pentagon

President Trump is continuing to remove senior defence officials and replace them with loyalists, creating growing alarm in the Pentagon that his rapid overhaul of key staff could undermine national security.

Since Trump fired Secretary of Defence Mark Esper on Monday, three other Defence Department officials have either resigned or been sacked.

Acting Under Secretary of Defence for Policy James Anderson quit on Tuesday after clashes with the White House over its attempts to insert controversial figures into top Pentagon positions.

Anderson was replaced by retired US Army Brig Anthony Tata, an ally of Trump and regular guest on Fox News.

Biden plans move into White House as Trump clings to hope

US President-elect Joe Biden will further lay the groundwork for his new administration on Wednesday as President Donald Trump pursues a flurry of longshot lawsuits challenging the election results in an effort to cling to power.

Trump has declined to concede, instead lodging unsupported charges of election fraud that have gained little traction.

Judges so far have tossed out lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia brought by Trump's campaign, and legal experts say the litigation has little chance of changing the outcome of the 3 November election.

Officials say no evidence of fraud, irregularities in US election - report

Election officials in several states in the US have claimed no evidence of fraud has been detected, according to a recent report by the New York Times.

Contacted by The Times, top election officials across the country said the election process was deemed a success.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to accept the results of the 3 November election, claiming without evidence that there was widespread voting fraud involved in the process and that the election was stolen from him. 

Trump along with his campaign have filed numerous lawsuits in key swing states and asked courts to issue injunctions to stop the certification of the results, AFP reported.

According to the report, The Times reached out to senior election officials in every state to find out whether any evidence of illegal voting had been suspected. The Times received direct response from officials in 45 states and spoke to other statewide officials and secretaries of state in the remaining states.  

"There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections," Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state, told The Times.

"The conspiracy theories and rumours and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology."

Democrat Steve Simon, Minnesota’s secretary of state, said: "I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud."

'Nothing's going to stop' transition of power in US, Biden says

President-elect Joe Biden said on Tuesday that nothing would stop the transfer of power in the US government, even as President Donald Trump says without evidence the election was marred by fraud and some of his Republican allies back probes.

Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has backed Trump's right to launch a legal challenge to Biden's victory in several battleground states such as Pennsylvania. Some senior Republicans sought to sow doubt about the outcome.

Mexico's ambassador to US calls Biden 'prospective' President-elect           

Mexico's ambassador to the United States on Tuesday called Joe Biden the "prospective" President-elect, in what could indicate a slight shift in position after the Mexican government said it was too soon to recognise a winner of the US election. Ambassador Martha Barcena published a series of talking points on Twitter titled "Position of the Government of Mexico" containing the new language. It was not immediately clear if the choice of words signalled a shift in Mexico's official stance.

The Democrat former vice president secured the presidency by winning Pennsylvania on Saturday, but Republican President Donald Trump has so far refused to concede, and is pursuing lawsuits in several states in a bid to hold on to power citing "illegal" ballots. State officials have said there were no significant irregularities in the 3 November election.

The Mexican foreign ministry did not offer specific comments on the ambassador's statement, with a ministry official saying it had been issued by the embassy. In response to questions from Twitter users, Barcena later gave several synonyms for the word "prospective".

"Prospective can be translated in several ways, presumed is one of them, virtual would be another, probable, eventual, future," she said in a Tweet. So far, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has held back from congratulating Biden for winning the election even as government leaders in many countries sent their best wishes.

"This principled position underlines the respect for the US political system and institutions and for both the Democratic and Republican parties as well as for President Donald Trump and prospective President-elect Joseph Biden," Barcena said in the document.

"Mexico is ready to engage in a constructive spirit with the future US administration, based on the enduring ties of friendship and neighbourliness that bind our two nations."

Lopez Obrador has reiterated he would not recognise the election winner until legal disputes were resolved, but said he had "no problem" with Biden.

Reuters

Biden brands Trump's refusal to concede an 'embarrassment'

President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday called President Donald Trump's refusal to concede his election loss an "embarrassment" but dismissed the standoff as unimportant.

"I just think it's an embarrassment, quite frankly," Biden said when asked what he thinks about Trump's refusal to acknowledge defeat in the 3 November election.

"How can I say this tactfully? I think it will not help the president's legacy," Biden told reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

A week after the US election, Trump remained shut up in the White House, pushing an alternate reality that he is about to win and filing lawsuits alleging voter fraud that so far have been backed up by only the flimsiest evidence.

Biden, meanwhile, mostly ignored Trump.

Trump campaign presses legal attack on election, as postal worker recants ballot fraud claims

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's campaign said on Tuesday it would file a lawsuit to stop the battleground state of Michigan from certifying its election results, as congressional Democrats said a witness who had raised accusations of ballot tampering in Pennsylvania recanted his allegations.

The Michigan lawsuit will request that election results in the state not be certified until it can be verified that votes were cast lawfully, Trump campaign attorney Matt Morgan told reporters on a conference call.

It was the latest in a string of lawsuits the Trump campaign has filed since Democrat Joe Biden captured the presidency. Biden's victory in the 3 November election was propelled by wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that there was widespread voting fraud.

Judges have already tossed lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia brought by the campaign, and legal experts say Trump's litigation has little chance of changing the outcome of the election.

 - REUTERS

Trump to make first public appearance since election called for Biden

US President Donald Trump will visit Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday, the White House said, in what would be the president's first public appearance since the US presidential contest was called for his Democratic rival Joe Biden over the weekend.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump will visit the cemetery to mark Veterans Day, White House spokesperson Judd Deere told Reuters.

Since Election Day on 3 November he has made few public appearances and seems to have all but shelved normal presidential duties.

A week after losing the US election, President Donald Trump remained shut up in the White House on Tuesday, pushing an alternate reality that he is about to win and blocking Democrat Joe Biden's ability to prepare the transition.

"WE WILL WIN!" the Republican president tweeted, adding: "WE ARE MAKING BIG PROGRESS. RESULTS START TO COME IN NEXT WEEK. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

The message referred to Trump's unprecedented decision for a US president to dispute a lost election, refusing to concede to his opponent and mounting a string of flimsy court challenges in states where Biden won.

Several suits have been thrown out almost immediately and the remainder clearly have no chance of overturning Biden's slim but convincing victories in multiple states.

US elections: Pandor says Trump uncertainty unsettling for world

International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor said the uncertainty in the US as President Donald Trump refuses to concede losing the elections was unsettling for the world.

In an interview with News24, Pandor said she believed President-elect Joe Biden has his work cut out for him following the bruising election last week.

Republicans back Trump's right to challenge Biden's victory

President Donald Trump will push ahead on Tuesday with longshot legal challenges to his election loss, as Republican US lawmakers and state officials defended his right to do so.

Pennsylvania Republican state lawmakers called for an audit of results in the state that on Saturday enabled Democrat Joe Biden to secure the more than 270 votes in the Electoral College he needed to win the presidency.

Trump has made baseless claims that fraud was marring the results. The count has been delayed by a surge in mail-in ballots prompted by voters' desire to avoid infection from the coronavirus pandemic.

Judges have tossed out lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia, and experts say Trump's legal efforts have little chance of changing the election result.

Trump campaign adviser Bossie tests positive for Covid-19 -source

The adviser charged with leading President Donald Trump's post-election legal challenges, David Bossie, has tested positive for Covid-19, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday.

Bossie, a prominent conservative activist who leads advocacy group Citizens United, tested positive on Sunday, joining White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Housing Secretary Ben Carson as victims of the latest coronavirus outbreak to touch the White House. Bossie was picked to lead the legal challenges to Trump's election loss.

- Reuters

OPINION | The issue of land in SA: Will Biden speak up for his ‘favourites’ again?

Gabriel Crouse asks whether US president-elect will speak on the issue of contentious issue of land expropriation without compensation like he did on the issue of apartheid in 1986. 

US Supreme Court begins arguments over fate of Obamacare law

The conservative-majority US Supreme Court on Tuesday began hearing arguments in a challenge by Republican-governed states backed by President Donald Trump's administration aiming to invalidate the Obamacare healthcare law.

President-elect Joe Biden has criticised Republican efforts to throw out the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as the law is formally known, in the midst of a deadly coronavirus pandemic and hopes to buttress Obamacare after taking office on January 20.

The justices were hearing a scheduled 80 minutes of arguments by teleconference in an appeal by a coalition of Democratic-governed states including California and New York and the Democratic-led House of Representatives to preserve Obamacare.

The case represents the latest Republican legal attack on the 2010 law, which was the signature domestic policy achievement of Democratic former President Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president. The Supreme Court in 2012 and 2015 fended off previous Republican challenges to it.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority after the Republican-led Senate last month confirmed Trump's third appointee, Amy Coney Barrett. Most legal experts think the justices will stop short of a seismic ruling striking down Obamacare.

- Reuters

EXPLAINER | Citizen Trump will face legal woes

Since taking office in January 2017, President Donald Trump has been besieged by civil lawsuits and criminal investigations of his inner circle.

With Democrat Joe Biden capturing the presidency on Saturday, according to all major US television networks, Trump's legal woes are likely to deepen because in January he will lose the protections the US legal system affords to a sitting president, former prosecutors said.

Here are some of the lawsuits and criminal probes that may haunt Trump as he leaves office.

ANALYSIS | Trump’s lens for vote questions seems myopic

United States President Trump and his supporters are convinced that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from them. As they question the outcome, Trump and his backers are repeating allegations of illegally cast ballots and widespread election fraud as well as a US media conspiracy to prematurely project an election winner.

And in the wake of a race that featured very close outcomes in several battleground states, Trump wants Americans to believe that he’s been treated unfairly by election administrators and the US media.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell became the highest-ranking Republican to publicly back Trump’s efforts to question the election outcome Monday, saying on the Senate floor, “In the United States of America, all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal allots must not be counted. The process should be transparent and observable, and the courts are here to work through concerns.

”Yet, when faced with the exact same scenario in 2016, when Trump was declared the winner and not the loser, the reactions from Trump and Republicans were quite the opposite, raising the question: how could things be so completely different just because the projected winner is not Trump?

Trump once again falsely claims 'I won!' in response to a tweet from Georgia's governor

 - Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp wrote in a tweet on Monday that the state's election results will "include legally cast — and ONLY legally cast ballots."

 - US President Donald Trump shared Kemp's tweet, writing, "This is good news, it means I won!"

 - President-elect Joe Biden is currently leading in the state and the overall presidential race was called by Insider and Decision Desk HQ on Friday morning and other major newspapers and networks on Saturday morning.

 - Last week, the president claimed victory amid the nail-biting election, as states continued to count ballots and before news outlets began to project Biden's victory over the weekend.

 - "We were getting ready to win this election," Trump said early Wednesday morning at the White House. "Frankly, we did win this election."

Why can't Trump accept his defeat?

Washington – With his defeat in the US presidential election, Donald Trump finds himself fighting against being tagged with a label he frequently applies to rivals, but which runs completely counter to his own brand: "loser".

The Republican is pursuing legal action in several battleground states, though his lawyers have so far failed to substantiate claims of fraud and observers see the possibility of the courts overturning the result of the vote as vanishingly small.

Yet, according to scholars and mental health professionals, the same authoritarian qualities that defined Trump's rise to power and his presidency make it almost impossible for him to digest a graceful concession to Democratic president-elect Joe Biden.

This, they warn, could make the post-election, pre-inauguration period a particularly unstable time for the country.

Trump refuses to concede, Biden leads on Covid

Washington – US President Donald Trump, who is refusing to concede election defeat, injected new volatility on Monday by firing his defence secretary, while president-elect Joe Biden made good on a promise to focus on leading the country out of the Covid-19 crisis.

With construction already starting in central Washington for the 20 January inauguration ceremony, an awkward and potentially chaotic transition period is under way.

Trump, in a move unprecedented for a US president, insists that the 3 November election was stolen from him.

Biden could lose out on security information, personal protection if Trump does not concede

 - President-elect Joe Biden's team could lose out on key information that they would need to obtain before he formally takes office if Trump continues to not recognise him as president-elect. 

 - Trump has repeatedly refused to concede the election.

Barr urges probes of vote irregularities as Trump mounts legal assault

WASHINGTON – US Attorney General William Barr told federal prosecutors on Monday to look into "substantial" allegations of irregularities in last week's election, prompting the top lawyer overseeing voter fraud investigations to resign in protest.

Barr sent his letter after days of attacks on the integrity of the election by President Donald Trump and Republican allies, who have alleged without evidence that there was widespread voter fraud.

Trump has not conceded the election to Democrat Joe Biden who on Saturday secured more than the 270 votes in the Electoral College needed to win the presidency.

Barr told prosecutors that "fanciful or far-fetched claims" should not be a basis for investigation and that his letter did not indicate the Justice Department had uncovered voting irregularities affecting the outcome of the election.

But he did say he was authorising prosecutors to "pursue substantial allegations" of irregularities of voting and the counting of ballots.

Richard Pilger, who for years has served as director of the Election Crimes Branch, announced in an internal email that he was resigning from that post after he read "the new policy and its ramifications".

Biden's campaign said Barr was fuelling Trump's far-fetched allegations of fraud.

"Those are the very kind of claims that the president and his lawyers are making unsuccessfully every day, as their lawsuits are laughed out of one court after another," said Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to Biden.

 - REUTERS

(PHOTO: Mandel Ngan/AFP)

In a new lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania on Monday, the campaign of United States President Donald Trump sued Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, and a handful of county boards of elections, alleging they had run an unfair election in the state.

The Trump campaign is asking the court to issue an emergency order stopping election officials from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the state, and a permanent injunction requiring county election boards to invalidate ballots that were allowed to be “cured”.

“Curing” a ballot is a completely legal process; if a voter sends their mail ballot without a secrecy envelope or signature, an official calls to tell them they are allowed to vote by provisional ballot.

Trump has refused to concede defeat in the US presidential election, even though Biden declared victory on Saturday after US media networks projected him as the winner.

The Trump campaign has made unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud and launched legal challenges in several key battleground states.

- Al Jazeera

The World Health Organization chief on Monday welcomed efforts to strengthen the Geneva-based body through reform and said it was looking forward to working closely with the administration of US President-elect Joe Biden.

WHO's funding must become more flexible and predictable to end a "major misalignment" between expectations and available resources, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, citing reform efforts by France, Germany and the European Union.

"We still have a lot of work left to do, but we believe that we're on the right track," Tedros told health ministers as the annual meeting resumed of the WHO, which groups 194 countries.

US President Donald Trump on Monday said Defence Secretary Mark Esper had been "terminated" and that Christopher Miller, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will be acting Secretary of Defense starting immediately.

"Mark Esper has been terminated," Trump said on Twitter. "I am 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."