Power Up: Biden plows ahead while Trump and allies continue to baselessly contest election

That seems like an understatement. Leading Republicans continued to push unfounded conspiracy theories around the election in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, some of whose contests were managed by GOP officials.

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” said a smiling Pompeo, leaving it unclear whether his answer was intended as a joke, according to our colleagues Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker.
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:  There is “no reason for alarm” about Trump and his team continuing to pursue reports of fraud and would not prevent a new administration, “if there is one,” from taking office in January, reports our colleague Felicia Sonmez.
• Senate Rules Committee Chair Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who helps plan the inauguration: “You know, the president wasn’t defeated by huge numbers,” Blunt said Tuesday, Ashley and Phil. “In fact, he may not have been defeated at all.” That’s a different tune for Blunt from over the weekend, when he said it was “unlikely” the Trump team could produce a victory with its legal efforts.
• And all of Georgia’s Republican House members signed a letter to the secretary of state, also a Republican, asking him to review allegations of fraud.

• More norms are being broken: “Rather than congratulating Biden and inviting him to the White House, as his predecessors traditionally have done after an election changed party control, Trump has been marshaling his administration and pressuring his allies into acting as if the outcome were still uncertain.” 

From a senior editor at Red State:

Biden was undeterred, telling reporters he looked forward to soon speaking with the president and extending an olive branch to McConnell, in particular, who Biden worked with as President Obama’s No. 2 and as a longtime Delaware senator.

• “I understand the sense of loss — I get that,” Biden said, according to our colleague Annie Linskey. “But I think the majority of people who voted for the president, I think they understand we have to come together,” Biden said. “I think they’re ready to unite. And I think we can pull the country out of this bitter politics that we’ve seen the last five, six, seven years.”

Biden hasn’t spoken to McConnell, yet: “My expectation is that I will do that in the not-too-distant future,” Biden said, per Annie. “He said he expected to talk with McConnell about his potential Cabinet picks. “That’s a negotiation that I’m sure we’ll have.”

The transition planning is moving full-steam ahead. The president-elect and his team unveiled a list of 500 experts in federal policy that will help lead the transition, a key milestone for any transition team, Lisa Rein reports. But this comes as GSA Administrator Emily Murphy refuses to budge on formally acknowledging Biden’s win, a decision that would turn over millions to the transition team, provide them access to current government officials and dedicated working space in each agency.

There’s more a stake than just minor annoyances: The 9/11 Commission found the shortened transition from the Clinton to George W. Bush administration due to the lengthy legal fight over the election’s outcome “hampered the new administration” and called for improvements in how transitions are organized. For now, Biden’s access to U.S. intelligence is being curtailed, NBC News’s Ken Dilanian and Mike Memoli report. 

• “The electoral landscape is simply not the same. The outcome is not the same. And we have since learned the serious costs of a delayed transition,” Former White House chiefs of staff Andy Card, George W. Bush’s first, and John Podesta, Clinton’s last, wrote in a joint Post op-ed, stressing the current situation bears no parallels to the 2000 election.

That includes access to the Presidential Daily Brief, though Biden said he could do without it: “Obviously, the PDB would be useful, but it’s not necessary,” he said, describing the compendium of high-level intelligence. “I’m not the sitting president now. And so we don’t see anything that’s slowing us down, quite frankly.”

• “We live in an incredibly dangerous world that moves very fast, so having a president truly ready to go on Day One is fundamental to our safety,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, told Ashley and Phil. “There’s no more complicated or important organization on the planet in history than the U.S. government, and taking it over is a massive undertaking. ”

A former GOP House Intelligence Committee chair expressed concern over the situation:

Transition efforts will continue to intensify in the coming days: Biden promised to name “at least a couple” of his Cabinet picks before Thanksgiving. He is also continuing to talk to foreign leaders. As of Tuesday, Biden has spoken to senior leaders from four of of the six Group of Seven 7 nations, and those who he has not spoken to have their congratulations. Out of the much larger Group of 20, only four leaders have yet to publicly acknowledge Biden as the victor. 

• One of the latest calls was with a close Trump ally: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was Biden’s second known call since becoming president-elect. Trump was reportedly so fond of Johnson the gave the prime minister his private cellphone number.
• Even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday congratulated Biden.

• Such budgetary planning is highly unusual for a lame-duck president: “They’re pretending nothing happened,” an administration official told our colleagues. “We’re all supposed to pretend this is normal, and do all this work, while we know we’re just going to have to throw it away.”

NO GROUND GAINED: “Six states where [Trump] has threatened to challenge his defeat continued their march toward declaring certified election results in the coming weeks, as his advisers privately acknowledged that [Biden’s- official victory is less a question of ‘if’ than ‘when.’” Amy Gardner, Tom Hamburger, Jon Swaine and Josh Dawsey report.

• Shot: “Vice President Pence gave a presentation to GOP senators on Capitol Hill about new litigation expected in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia — imploring them to stick with the president, according several Republicans in the room,” our colleagues reported.
• Chaser: “But even some of the president’s most publicly pugilistic aides, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and informal adviser Corey Lewandowski, have said privately that they are concerned about the lawsuits’ chances for success unless more evidence surfaces, according to people familiar with their views,” they reported.
• “Trump met with advisers again Tuesday afternoon to discuss whether there is a path forward, said a person with knowledge of the discussions,” they added. “The person said Trump plans to keep fighting but understands it is going to be difficult. ‘He is all over the place. It changes from hour to hour,’ the person said.”

REALITY CHECK: “Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election,” the Times’s Nick Corasaniti, Reid J. Epstein and Jim Rutenberg report.

• Key quote: “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 rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”

Case in point: A Pennsylvania postmaster said that allegations of voter irregularities by Richard Hopkins, a postmaster in Erie, Pa., were fabricated, Shawn Boburg and Jacob Bogage report.

• The allegations were used by top national Republicans to claim widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

Why is this happening? Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.

Don’t poke the bear: McConnell and Republican senators appear to afraid of angering Trump’s base in Georgia — where Biden leads the vote count, though it may be headed for a review because of the close margin — who they need to turn out for a pair of runoffs elections on Jan. 5. They need Republicans to get excited about reelecting GOP Sens. David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler because if both of them lose, Democrats will have the Senate majority with Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris, as the tiebreaker.

• Key quote: “These runoffs have become the political equivalent of ‘Braveheart’ where everyone paints their face blue and just charges across the field,” Ralph Reed, a Georgia-based Republican and founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told Robert Costa, Paul Kane and Erica Werner. “If we can get the Trump vote back out in the suburbs, we should be able to get this done. But it will be very hard and extremely competitive.”
• A very telling stat: “Only four of the 53 Republican senators have congratulated Biden since he was projected as the winner Saturday. Asked to do so, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, ‘No, there’s nothing to congratulate him about.’”
• Another key quote: “The president is the proverbial elephant in the room. He’s a bully, and people who have seen what’s happened to those who have gone against him don’t want it to happen to them,” said former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford (R), a Trump critic. “So people who otherwise would be pretty clear-thinking and fair, or at least equitable, toss all that to the side and become sycophants to the president or his base for one simple reason — political preservation.”

Sens. Perdue and Loeffler have joined in Trump’s questioning of the results in Georgia, even calling for the ouster of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican.

Today’s Times front page:

PURGE AT THE PENTAGON: “The Trump administration launched a dramatic shake-up at the senior levels of the Pentagon, installing three White House loyalists in influential roles and intensifying turmoil a day after Trump abruptly fired his defense secretary,” Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, Josh Dawsey and Paul Sonne report.

The message is clear: “He sees the Pentagon as the leader of the resistance to his agenda,” an administration official told our colleagues of Trump’s views.

• Who’s in and who’s out: “In addition to Christopher C. Miller, who was chosen Monday as the new acting defense secretary, the officials in new positions are Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist and former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Anthony J. Tata, whose nomination to be undersecretary of defense for policy crumbled over the summer amid scrutiny by Democratic lawmakers of his tweets and remarks promoting conspiracy theories and calling former president Barack Obama a terrorist.” 

Meanwhile, CIA Director Gina Haspel’s fate is also unclear. 

• But: “Interviews with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday revealed broad support for the embattled spy chief, who has drawn the president’s ire amid her refusal to carry out some of his demands related to the Russia investigation,” Politico reports.
• “Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Intelligence panel, said there was no reason to fire Haspel other than Trump’s personal preferences. ‘Obviously any director serves at the pleasure of the president, and I’m not the president,’ Rubio said in a brief interview after a 90-minute closed-door briefing with Haspel at the Capitol on Tuesday. ‘But if you ask me my opinion, I think she’s done a good job,'” Politico wrote.
• Donald Trump Jr. disagrees, tweeting this last night:

• Reading the tea leaves from oral arguments: “Two key members of the court — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — said plainly during two hours of teleconferenced arguments that Congress’s decision in 2017 to zero-out the penalty for not buying health insurance did not indicate a desire to kill the entire law,” our colleagues write. Their two votes plus the remaining liberal members would be enough to save the law.

FAUCI SAYS THERE MIGHT BE A VACCINE BY SPRING: “We’re talking probably by April, the end of April, I would think,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, told CNN’s Jake Tapper of when a novel coronavirus vaccine could be widely available to the American people. Some of the most vulnerable could even be vaccinated by the end of the year.

But this won’t spare us from what’s happening right now: “In multiple states, hospital leaders warned that the current spike is straining resources and sidelining the very staffers needed to face growing numbers of sick people. From Maryland to Iowa, local officials have pleaded for tighter restrictions that might help slow the virus’s accelerating spread,” Brady Dennis, Jacqueline Dupree and Marisa Iati report.

• The harrowing reality: “On Tuesday, the country hit another one-day record, logging more than 135,000 new coronavirus cases, along with 1,403 additional deaths. At least five states, including Missouri and Wisconsin, set single-day highs for fatalities. At least five more, including Illinois and Pennsylvania, set single-day highs for new cases. Almost nowhere in the country are caseloads actually subsiding.” 

POPE JOHN PAUL II KNEW OF MCCARRICK ALLEGATIONS: “An unprecedented Vatican internal investigation has found that Pope John Paul II knew about and overlooked sexual misconduct claims against Theodore McCarrick, instead choosing to facilitate the rise of an American prelate who would be defrocked and disgraced two decades later,” Chico Harlan, Michelle Boorstein and Sarah Pulliam Bailey report from Rome.

• What else we learned from the Vatican’s report: “It also portrays Pope Benedict XVI as trying to handle the cardinal quietly and out of the public spotlight, and Pope Francis as assuming that his successors had made the right judgments. It shows how American bishops sanitized reports of what they knew and all but ensured that warnings would arrive at the Vatican unsubstantiated or dismissible. In Rome, church leaders found every rationale for believing a ‘good pastor’ over a victim.” 

PONDERING LIFE’S SMALL MIRACLES: