Power Up: Some Republicans crack door to Biden victory when it comes to national security

Without explicitly saying so, the GOP has signaled a limit to the extent they’ll play along with Trump’s efforts to subvert the democratic process. 

The rhetoric from some of Trump’s allies has not completely changed but it is shifting as reality begins to set in:

• “Well, I think that it probably makes sense to prepare for all contingencies,” Majority Whip Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told CNN’s Manu Raju and Ted Barrett, when asked if Biden should receive classified briefings. “And as these election challenges play out in court, I don’t have a problem with, and I think it’s important from a national security standpoint, continuity … think that makes sense.”
• “President-elect Biden should be receiving intelligence briefings right now,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said. “That is really important. It’s probably the most important part of the transition.”
• She added Biden should also have access to other perks of the transition — like office space — “that the apparent winner receives, and that doesn’t in any way preclude President Trump from pursuing his legal remedies if he believes there are irregularities but it should not delay the transition, because we want the president elect — assuming he prevails — to be ready on day one. And that’s why the intelligence briefings are critical.”

The redline for some Republicans, including the most diehard Trump supporters, appeared to be the issue of national security and access to the presidential daily briefing, which contains the most sensitive classified intelligence. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) both called for Biden to receive intelligence briefings on Thursday. And some expressed concern that Trump’s refusal to cooperate with Biden is only inviting potential chaos and problems from foreign adversaries. 

• “I just don’t know of any justification for withholding the briefing,” Cornyn, a member of the Senate intelligence Committee, said Thursday.
• “I think so, yes,” said Graham after being asked if Biden should be briefed.
• “Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who sits on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the chamber’s main oversight committee, said  he is prepared to intervene if the process to grant Biden access has not begun by a Friday deadline,” our colleague Felicia Sonmez reports. 
• “Our adversaries aren’t waiting for the transition to take place,” former Rep. Mike Rogers) R-Mich.) told the Associated Press’s Steve Peoples and Will Weissert. “This isn’t about politics; this is about national security. ”

?: Last night, Biden officially flipped a fourth state after he was projected as the winner in Arizona, too — the first Democratic nominee to win the state since 1996 — giving him 290 electoral votes to Trump’s 217. 

Along  with the fact that Trump’s campaign has yet to identify any credible signs of widespread voter fraud further dimmed the president’s prospects of undermining the election results. 

• “There was no wholesale fraudulent scheme,” former Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) told reporters. “I am on the ground and I heard nothing about any kind of harvesting of ballots or fraudulent transactions. Sure, there are going to be isolated situations but not on a wholesale basis.”
• “Privately, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, continued to tell allies that Trump is ‘realistic’ about his chances but wants to continue the fight, a person who has spoken to him said. Campaign manager Bill Stepien and other top campaign aides have also briefed Trump on his chances, casting them as uphill and telling Trump it is unlikely he will win,” our colleagues Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey, Matt Viser and Jon Swaine report. 
• “A top Republican source, who has been in touch with Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, said Republicans are eying the certification dates of Arizona on November 30 and Georgia on November 20 — two states with Republican governors where Biden is now leading in the vote tallies — as key moments. If the states certify the results as Biden victories, then Trump will have little recourse but to concede, they believe, though no one knows what the President will do for sure,” per CNN’s Raju and Barrett. 

Even Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security released a statement on Thursday calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history. … There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. ”

Even in defeat, splitting with the president remains an uncomfortable posture for many Republican lawmakers who have spent the last four years embracing Trump. 

• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was perhaps the most prominent Republican figure still embracing a possible Trump victory: “He’s not president right now,” McCarthy told reporters of Biden. “Don’t know if he’ll be president January 20, but whoever is will get the information.”

There were some acts of public defiance over the course of the Trump administration, like when 12 Republican senators voted for a resolution overturning Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border. Or when the GOP-controlled Senate passed a resolution to limit Trump’s power to take military action against Iran without congressional approval. 

But this last act of fealty may be the GOP’s most consequential one, given the high stakes. Former President Barack Obama told 60 Minutes’s Scott Pelley he was less troubled by Trump and “more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion.”

• “It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path,” Obama said in his first interview about his new book, “A Promised Land.”

Noticeably absent from the ensemble of Republicans who have put a deadline on Trump’s bluff: Any potential 2024 Republican candidates for president. “The fact that so few prominent Republicans are willing to break publicly with him, even in defeat, is the latest sign of his enduring hold on the Republican Party — now and into the future,” the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Emily Cochrane write. 

• “When you look at the number of votes that he got, you look at the kind of enthusiasm that he engenders, I mean — he’s going to be a very, very significant figure whether he’s in the White House or not,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) told them. “I don’t know who else would be considered the leader, if not for him.”

But Trump himself might be among that group of 2024 presidential hopefuls. Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported over the weekend that Trump was privately telling advisers that he’s “thinking about running for president again in 2024.” A Trump campaign aide joked to Power Up last week that Trump would announce his 2024 presidential bid on Biden’s inauguration day. 

And the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reports Trump is “is talking seriously about announcing that he is planning to run again in 2024, aware that whether he actually does it or not, it will freeze an already-crowded field of possible Republican candidates.”

• “And, Republicans say, it will keep the wide support he showed even in defeat and could guarantee a lucrative book deal or speaking fees,” per Haberman.
• “The president has told some advisers that if the race is certified for Mr. Biden, he will announce a 2024 campaign shortly afterward.”

It’s not just the Biden blockade that’s creating national security dilemmas: Trump’s focus on cleaning house at the Pentagon and the CIA by firing those  he’s viewed as insufficiently loyal, along with fears he will reveal highly classified information to attack adversaries, has ignited concerns for current, former and future administration officials. 

• “ … no new president has ever had to fear that his predecessor might expose the nation’s secrets as President-elect Joe Biden must with Trump, current and former officials said. Not only does Trump have a history of disclosures, he checks the boxes of a classic counterintelligence risk: He is deeply in debt and angry at the U.S. government, particularly what he describes as the ‘deep state’ conspiracy that he says tried to stop him from winning the White House in 2016 and what he falsely claims is an illegal effort to rob him of reelection,” our colleague Shane Harris reported earlier this week. 
• “People with significant debt are always of grave concern to security professionals,” Larry Pfeiffer, a veteran intelligence officer and former chief of staff to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, told Shane. “The human condition is a frail one. And people in dire situations make dire decisions. Many of the individuals who’ve committed espionage against our country are people who are financially vulnerable.”
• Reminder, Trump is in hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. 

Happening next?: After ousting Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Monday and removing other key Pentagon staffers and replacing them with Trump loyalists, Trump is now also “mulling whether to fire [CIA Director Gina] Haspel, the agency’s first female director,” the New York Times’s Julian Barnes. 

• “Some officials and presidential allies believe that Ms. Haspel failed to do enough to stop the whistleblower’s complaints about Mr. Trump’s July 2019 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which prompted impeachment, from moving forward. Others have also grown frustrated with her opposition to declassifying documents related to Russia’s 2016 election interference.”
• “White House aides are divided over Ms. Haspel’s removal. Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, opposes it, though other officials are pushing for her dismissal, the officials said. Allies of the president have had “a real issue of trust” with Ms. Haspel for more than a year, a senior administration official said,” per Barnes.

LATEST ON THE COUNT: Biden is now projected to win 290 electoral votes. If his lead holds in Georgia (as expected), he’ll finish with 306 — the exact same total Trump won the White House with four years ago. Biden will also accomplish that while winning the popular vote. (Trump also technically only received 304 votes, thanks to faithless electors.)

SIGNED, SEALED AND CERTIFIED: “Biden’s election is not official until the states certify their votes and the electoral college formally casts its ballots in mid-December. Trump’s campaign has sought to derail that process by filing lawsuits alleging problems with the election and seeking to stop the certification in some states,” Daniela Santamariña and Elise Viebeck report.

Here are the key dates to remember:

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT GEORGIA: “Election officials in Georgia have begun their first statewide recount to manually verify every one of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the presidential race in the state, where Biden has a lead of about 14,000 votes,” Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports.

• Why this is happening: “Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) ordered the recount as a part of the state’s risk-limiting audit process, which is required under a 2019 election overhaul law that Raffensperger supported. Originally, the requirement was to select a random, statistically significant sample of ballots to be reviewed by auditors to make sure ballots were accurately counted.”
• This means there could actually be another recount: “That’s because under Georgia law, the losing candidate can request a recount of the results if the margin is less than 0.5 percent of votes cast. But that request can come only after the statewide results are certified, which can come only after this audit is done.”

But it’s all very unlikely to change the results: “Election experts have said that recounting the presidential votes probably would not change the outcome because recounts do not typically change the results by more than a few hundred votes,” our colleague writes.

TURNOUT WAS THE HIGHEST IN A CENTURY: “More Americans voted in the 2020 election than in any other in more than 100 years. Nearly 65 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot — a figure that will increase as more votes are tabulated,” Kevin Schaul, Kate Rabinowitz and Ted Mellnik report.

IS ANYBODY HOME?: “The contrast between the nation grappling with an ongoing global crisis and a president consumed with his own political problems highlighted a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Trump’s assault on the integrity of the U.S. election system: He is leveraging the power of his office in a long-shot bid to stay in the job while ignoring many of the public duties that come with it,” David Nakamura reports.

One example puts Trump’s absence into full relief: “On Thursday, six American service members were killed in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission in Egypt,” our colleague writes. “It was Biden who offered the first public condolences to the families of the service members who died in Egypt.”

• What was Trump doing?: “By that time, Trump had issued nearly four dozen critical tweets and retweets about the election results and Fox News, including a baseless conspiracy theory from a far-right television network that alleged votes had been improperly tallied in Pennsylvania. He also found time to thank actor Scott Baio for posting a photo of a craft store’s candle display, which had been arranged to spell out, ‘Trump is still your president.’”
• The White House response: “Aides disputed the notion that Trump was reneging on his responsibilities as president, releasing a list of executive actions he has taken since the election,” our colleague writes. “‘Any suggestion that the President has given up on governing is false,’ White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. 

MCCARTHY CALLS HIS SHOT: “The House minority leader guaranteed the GOP would win the majority in the 2022 midterms, citing the surprisingly diverse coalition of candidates — women and minorities — that allowed Republicans to exceed expectations up and down the ballot even as Trump lost. The party occupying the White House also typically loses seats in the midterms,” Mike DeBonis and Paulina Firozi report.

• Key quote: “We have never been stronger in the sense of what the future holds for us — we have never been in a stronger position,” McCarthy told our colleagues. “We won this by adding more people to the party. And we won this in an atmosphere where we were the one group that everyone guaranteed we would lose. And we’re the ones who won.”

Democrats will have the House majority, but it could be as few as four seats: “In the aftermath, centrist members have blamed the party’s left flank for counterproductive sloganeering around defunding the police and ending private health insurance, while the left throws their own darts at party leaders,” our colleagues write.

• More finger pointing: “In a memo released Wednesday, a coalition of liberal groups faulted party leaders for “unforced errors,” singling out Pelosi for showing off the freezer full of premium ice cream she keeps inside her San Francisco home during an April talk show interview she gave at the height of the pandemic.” 

The New York Post had some fun with that:

More Dem recriminations: “Some Democratic lawmakers and aides described frustration this week at the failures inside the party — including at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which pursued an aggressive strategy targeting dozens of seats that appeared vulnerable to the political shifts that propelled the 2018 ‘blue wave’ rather than focusing on retrenching and protecting incumbents,” our colleagues write.

• But some lawmakers were simply surprised by the robust Trump-powered turnout: “Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.), who conceded his race Tuesday to Michelle Steel, a Republican member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, said he exceeded the raw number of votes his campaign believed it needed to secure victory. But an unexpected ‘Trump bump’ swamped it.” 

The source of spread isn’t what you might expect: “The surge is being driven to a significant degree by casual occasions that may feel deceptively safe, officials and scientists warn — dinner parties, game nights, sleepovers and carpools,” Karin Brulliard reports.

• Heartbreaking quote: “Earlier in the outbreak, much of the growth in new daily cases was being driven by focal outbreaks — long-term care facilities, things of that nature,” said Nirav Shah, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Maine, where cases have soared in the past two weeks. “Now, the kitchen table is a place of risk.” 

Justice Samuel Alito went off in a charged speech: “He told the Federalist Society last night that the pandemic has resulted in previously ‘unimaginable’ restrictions on individual liberty,” Robert Barnes reports. “Alito’s blunt words are likely to reignite questions about how far Supreme Court justices should go in speeches.”

• Some of his harshest criticisms were reserved his worries about religious liberties: “For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom. It’s often just an excuse for bigotry and can’t be tolerated, even when there is no evidence that anybody has been harmed. … The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs,” Alito said, per Politico’s Josh Gerstein.

Pro-Trump demonstrations in D.C. are planned for this weekend: “The events have been promoted by far-right media personalities, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists — several of whom announced plans to attend. Counterdemonstrations organized by anti-fascist and anti-racism groups are being planned nearby,” Marissa J. Lang and Peter Hermann report.

The Ivy League became the first Division 1 conference to cancel winter sports: “In March, the Ivy League was the first Division I conference to cancel its men’s and women’s postseason basketball tournaments. In July, it became the first major conference to announce it would not hold sports during the fall semester,” Des Bieler reports. The cancellation covers a variety of sports, most notably men’s and women’s basketball.