The Daily 202: Picking Buttigieg for Transportation shows Biden taking a Swiss Army knife approach to filling Cabinet

A handful of constituents liked the post, but one woman with nine followers wondered “how often does he really get his hands dirty … a mayor filling 1 pothole isnt going to change my opinion.” Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, responded: “should he be in the streets everyday filling potholes or should he be focusing on managing over 1K employees and a 300M budget?” 

On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden nominated Buttigieg to be secretary of transportation – a department with about 55,000 employees, more than half the number of residents in South Bend, and a budget of almost $90 billion.

After winning the Iowa Democratic caucuses in February, the former mayor is now a household name. And it is a name we have all learned to pronounce. Buttigieg, a Harvard man and former McKinsey consultant who speaks half a dozen or so languages, has proved himself to be one of the Democratic Party’s premier communicators. A product of the 9/11 generation, the 38-year-old is the 78-year-old Biden’s youngest Cabinet pick – by far. Assuming his nomination does not get derailed, Buttigieg will be the first openly gay secretary confirmed by the Senate.

Transportation was something of a surprise. In advance of the election, Buttigieg appeared to be angling to become the U.S. representative to the United Nations. Allies and donors were pushing him for that role. After he was passed over for a career diplomat, Axios said Buttigieg was under serious consideration to be ambassador to China. Politico said he was being looked at for Commerce. Reuters and the New York Times said he was being considered for Veterans Affairs.

Biden’s decision to name the former Rhodes Scholar as his roads scholar says something bigger about the way he is stocking his government. Repeatedly, the president-elect has put people in unexpected roles that suggests he sees them as almost interchangeable. This approach opens Biden up to criticism from some quarters that he is not picking subject matter experts, but the fact he keeps doing so shows he does not mind that critique.

For example, Biden considered former U.N. ambassador and national security adviser Susan Rice for the job of secretary of state. But he was concerned she would get blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate. Instead, he announced that Rice will run the Domestic Policy Council. The White House job does not require Senate confirmation, but the portfolio could not be more different than what she would have dealt with at Foggy Bottom. But aides say Biden feels highly confident that the Stanford-educated Rice will excel in any role.

Similarly, Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) lobbied hard to become Agriculture secretary. She sits on the House Agriculture Committee and had a theory of the case for how to reorient the USDA. Fudge said publicly last month that she did not want the job of Housing and Urban Development secretary. But that is where Biden put her.

Likewise, Biden considered California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) to lead the Justice Department. Instead, he picked him to run the department of Health and Human Services.

The president-elect also plans to nominate Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, to be secretary of energy. The department’s mandate is to maintain and safeguard the nation’s nuclear weapons. In fact, the nuclear program consumes about 75 percent of the department’s budget. Granholm is not a scientist and does not have background on that, but she is an outspoken advocate for alternative energy. And the Biden team says she can use the perch to promote research aimed at tackling climate change.

In contrast to past presidents, Biden is almost treating certain Cabinet jobs like this is the British parliamentary system, in which a prime minister shoehorns allies into jobs that often have only a tenuous connection to their past areas of expertise. Another way to think about it is that Biden is taking a liberal-arts approach to filling the Cabinet. Or perhaps Biden sees someone like Buttigieg as akin to a Swiss Army knife with a bunch of blades that can be put to different uses as needed. 

In a statement, Biden said he picked Buttigieg because the former mayor is “a patriot and a problem-solver who speaks to the best of who we are as a nation.” But why Transportation specifically? “Because this position stands at the nexus of so many of the interlocking challenges and opportunities ahead of us,” Biden said. The president-elect added that Transportation is the “site of some of our most ambitious plans,” including a major infrastructure bill and new fuel efficiency standards. Biden said he trusts Buttigieg “to lead this work with focus, decency, and a bold vision.”

For his part, Buttigieg has high hopes that Transportation will not become a bridge to nowhere. This could be a particularly prominent perch if Biden follows through on his promises to pursue a trillion dollars of infrastructure investment. “This is a moment of tremendous opportunity — to create jobs, meet the climate challenge, and enhance equity for all,” Buttigieg tweeted Tuesday.

Ironically, the Biden campaign launched an attack ad against Buttigieg in February that highlighted his relative lack of experience. “When President Obama called on him, Joe Biden helped lead the passage of the Affordable Care Act,” the narrator said. “And when parkgoers called on Pete Buttigieg, he installed decorative lights under bridges, giving citizens of South Bend colorfully illuminated rivers.” The Biden team deleted that ad from YouTube and Twitter before announcing Buttigieg’s selection.

“A nationwide sense of relief grew Tuesday as a second coronavirus vaccine appeared poised for approval just days after thousands of health-care workers received doses of the first one in an unprecedented mass inoculation campaign that has raised hopes for a return to normalcy,” Carolyn Johnson and Karin Brulliard report. “The second vaccine, developed by the biotechnology company Moderna, was ‘highly effective’ in a clinical trial and carried no serious safety concerns, according to a detailed review by the Food and Drug Administration published Tuesday. The agency is likely to authorize the two-shot regimen as soon as Friday … Such an approval would clear the way for the shipment of almost 6 million doses of the Moderna vaccine in the first week — about double the amount of doses being sent out this week … The initially limited supplies of vaccine will not meet demand until well into 2021, and scientists do not yet know whether the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, or others in development, prevent recipients from spreading the virus — or only from being sickened by it.

“The elation was also shadowed by the grim cadence of rising coronavirus case counts and new deaths one day after the nationwide death toll reached 300,000, as infections seeded over the Thanksgiving holiday began to show up in state reports. On Tuesday, over 190,000 new cases and more than 2,800 deaths were reported.“

“As vaccines are rolling out, the coronavirus is on the move as well, not merely spreading but also mutating, and possibly becoming more transmissible,” William Booth and Joel Achenbach report. “There is no evidence that these changes are making the virus deadlier, but new research has provided evidence that the virus is not a static target of vaccines and will need to be watched closely to see how it responds to therapeutic interventions and the human immune system. The issue of mutations sparked headlines across the United Kingdom after a top government official, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, stood in the House of Commons on Monday and announced that more than 1,000 confirmed coronavirus infections in southeast England show a suite of genetic mutations that might be driving the surge in that region. … Scientists who are members of the U.K. Covid-19 Genomics Consortium, which operates government and university laboratories in Britain to track changes to the virus and discovered the variant, stressed that mutations occur all time and that lineages arise and then disappear.”

• The FDA authorized the first rapid test that can be taken at home without a prescription that yields immediate results. It was developed by the Australian company Ellume. (William Wan)
• The U.S. and Pfizer are discussing a deal for tens of millions more vaccine doses in the first half of next year. (NYT)
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said the state has ordered 5,000 more body bags in the face of soaring covid deaths, and there are 60 refrigerated storage units on standby. Officials activated a mutual aid program for coroners, designed to help local authorities cope with mass fatality events. (Hannah Knowles)
• Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan deployed the National Guard to help distribute coronavirus vaccines to hospitals, nursing homes and local health departments, an effort to quell mounting anxieties over the pace of inoculations as the region’s death toll reached its highest weekly average since May. (Antonio Olivo, Ovetta Wiggins and Rebecca Tan)
• The Republican mayor of Dodge City, Kan., stepped down after being deluged with phone and email threats over her support for a mask mandate that her city commission passed 4-1. “Life has dealt out many challenges in our world that have perhaps caused many people to act inappropriately but I do not feel safe in this position anymore and am hopeful in removing myself this anger, accusations and abuse will not fall on anyone else and will calm down,” Joyce Warshaw wrote in her letter of resignation. (NBC News)
• A mysterious gap appeared in Florida’s covid death count in the days leading up to the election. The state quit including long-backlogged deaths in its daily counts on Oct. 24 and resumed including them consistently on Nov. 17. The daily death numbers Floridians saw were thus significantly lower than they otherwise would have been. (Sun Sentinel)
• The three co-chairs of Biden’s coronavirus advisory board have informally divided responsibilities, with small working groups under each of them. Surgeon General-designee Vivek Murthy is focusing mainly on improving testing and the supplies of personal protective equipment. Marcella Nunez-Smith is focused on equity issues and global access. And David Kessler, under consideration to lead the FDA again, is working primarily on vaccines. (Amy Goldstein)
• The Supreme Court ordered lower federal courts in Colorado and New Jersey to reexamine state restrictions on indoor religious services in light of the justices’ recent ruling in favor of churches and synagogues in New York. (AP)
• Tom Cruise erupted with frustration on the set of “Mission: Impossible 7” after crew members appeared to breach coronavirus protocols, telling them that the future of the movie industry was on their shoulders. (Antonia Farzan)
• Tillie Dybing, a 107-year-old Minnesota woman, beat covid-19. She also survived the 1918 influenza, which got her parents sick, and uterine cancer. (CNN)

“Top lawmakers met for an hour in the afternoon and then again in the evening, a sign that talks are reaching a critical stage,” Mike DeBonis, Seung Min Kim and Jeff Stein report. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hosted the three other most senior congressional leaders — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — in her office. Negotiators expressed optimism after hours of meetings, although they revealed few details. … McConnell cited ‘significant progress’ … 

“Lawmakers face a Friday night deadline to pass legislation before a government shutdown, and they are also trying to assemble an economic relief package to provide jobless aid and small-business assistance. … The House is scheduled to meet on Wednesday, with votes expected at 3 p.m., in one potential sign that lawmakers are preparing to act if necessary on an agreement. And committee staff had been told to be prepared to review legislative text on Tuesday night … Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also spoke for more than an hour about the spending legislation and coronavirus relief package around noon on Tuesday.”

• Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. The poverty rate jumped to 11.7 percent in November, up 2.4 percentage points since June, according to new data from the University of Chicago and Notre Dame. (Heather Long)
• Economic pain has entered a new phase as the pandemic rages on in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Del. Wilmington residents’ median annual household income of barely $48,000 trails the $68,703 national figure, according to the Census Bureau. The city’s Black and Latino households never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and earn just half what their White counterparts do. (David Lynch) 

“McGowan and Campbell were installed in 2018 as two of the youngest political appointees in the history of the world’s premier public health agency, young Republicans returning to their native Georgia to dream jobs,” the Times reports. “But what they witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic this year in the C.D.C.’s leadership suite on the 12-floor headquarters here shook them: Washington’s dismissal of science, the White House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages and the siphoning of its budget. In a series of interviews, the pair has decided to go public with their disillusionment. …

“Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell, both 34, say they tried to protect their colleagues against political meddling. … [But] the White House insisted on reviewing — and often softening — the C.D.C.’s closely guarded coronavirus guidance documents … The documents were vetted not only by the White House’s coronavirus task force but by what felt to the agency’s employees like an endless loop of political appointees across Washington. … ‘Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,’ Mr. McGowan said. 

“Episodes of meddling sometimes turned absurd, they said. In the spring, the C.D.C. published an app that allowed Americans to screen themselves for symptoms of Covid-19. But the Trump administration decided to develop a similar tool with Apple. White House officials then demanded that the C.D.C. wipe its app off its website, Mr. McGowan said.” 

• Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga enjoyed an upscale steak dinner at a party with celebrities and politicians this week, flouting official guidance to avoid meals with more than four people. “I very much regret it,” he says. (Simon Denyer)
• United Airlines said it will ask domestic and international travelers this month to provide key contact information to aid contact tracing. (Lori Aratani) 
• Poor ventilation at a quarantine hotel in South Australia may have led to a cluster of covid cases that prompted a government lockdown. The outbreak was initially blamed on security breaches. (Erin Cunningham)

“Biden’s recent agenda has been driven, to a degree not always obvious, by his desire to take control of the Senate,” Annie Linskey reports. “Last week, he privately urged civil rights leaders to delay pushing for criminal justice reform by a few weeks so their rhetoric would not be used by Georgia Republicans to target Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. … Along with the Democratic National Committee, the Biden operation has spent about $5 million on the Georgia runoffs … and is paying for about 50 staff members to continue working in the state. In addition, the campaign has shifted about a dozen staffers who focus on data analytics, and Biden has been raising money directly for Ossoff and Warnock.”

• At a rally yesterday in Atlanta, Biden took aim at Georgia’s Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, over their support for the Texas lawsuit that would have overturned the results of the election in their own and three other swing states. (Felicia Sonmez)
• Biden will take his oath of office on a Capitol stage next month, but he wants you to stay home. The inaugural planning committee said the president-elect will be sworn in on the west side of the Capitol, but attendance will be limited. “A parade of some sort will be staged, but it is likely to be more virtual than physical, featuring people from across the country.” (Matt Viser)

“A historic crush of e-commerce packages is threatening to overwhelm U.S. Postal Service operations just weeks before Christmas and runoff elections in Georgia that will decide control of the U.S. Senate, according to agency employees and postal industry tracking firms,” Hannah Denham and Jacob Bogage report. “As Americans increasingly shop online because of the coronavirus pandemic, private express carriers FedEx and UPS have cut off delivery service for some retailers, sending massive volumes of packages to the Postal Service. That has led to widespread delays and pushed the nation’s mail agency to the brink. Postal employees are reporting mail and package backlogs across the country, and working vast amounts of overtime hours that have depleted morale during another surge of coronavirus infections nationwide. … The Postal Service [said it] hired more than 50,000 seasonal workers, added transportation and packaging tracking, and expanded Sunday deliveries for cities with especially high volumes. …

“Already, more than 1.2 million voters have requested mail-in ballots in Georgia, according to the U.S. Elections Project, and more than 260,000 ballots have been returned, including more than 100,000 through the Postal Service, the mail agency reported in federal court. Since Nov. 28, it has processed 74.5 percent of those ballots on time, but only 68.2 percent on the six days when it processed at least 10,000 ballots.”

Some House members plan on challenging the electoral college results when Congress formally tabulates the vote on Jan. 6. In a phone call yesterday afternoon, hours after he finally acknowledged Biden’s win, McConnell dismissed that plan. “In his private remarks, McConnell referenced the vote forced by then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) after the 2004 election. Boxer was the sole senator, along with a handful of House Democrats, who objected to the counting of electoral votes in Congress in January 2005 certifying President George W. Bush’s reelection. McConnell on Tuesday told his caucus members that doing something similar next month would be a terrible vote for Republicans because it would cast lawmakers as either for or against Trump,” Kim and Rachael Bade report.

McConnell was backed up by fellow GOP leaders John Thune (S.D.) and Roy Blunt (Mo.). Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said there was no pushback on the call. Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the third-ranking member of GOP leadership, said he hasn’t heard of any Republican senators willing to join an effort to contest the results. But Trump backers in the House say they have multiple options.

• Trump attacked McConnell at 1 a.m. for acknowledging that Biden won. “Mitch, 75,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot). Too soon to give up,” the president tweeted. (Timothy Bella)
• The president of Mexico finally congratulated Biden. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has still not done so. (Isabelle Khurshudyan and Kevin Sieff)

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he does not plan to challenge the election results on Jan. 6, but he’s using his final days as the head of the powerful Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to hold a hearing into what he calls “election irregularities.” Johnson invited several witnesses who have promoted claims of voter fraud that have been rejected by courts. Democrats invited Christopher Krebs, the former federal cybersecurity official who was fired by Trump after he said the election had been secure. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) urged that the hearing not take place: “I don’t see the purpose of a hearing other than to stir up controversy.” (Michael Kranish, DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian)

• North Carolina state Sen. Bob Steinburg (R) urged Trump to suspend civil liberties, invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops on U.S. soil and declare a national emergency to keep power. Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase (R) also called for Trump to declare martial law on Tuesday, echoing a suggestion by former national security adviser Michael Flynn. (Katie Shepherd)
• Police say a former Houston police captain held an air-conditioning repairman at gunpoint over a false claim that he had 750,000 fake ballots. The ex-officer was paid more than $250,000 by a right-wing organization to pursue far-fetched voter-fraud conspiracy theories. (Andrea Salcedo)
• Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis was fired as a prosecutor in Colorado in 2013. “Ellis ‘failed to meet the employer’s expectations’ and ‘made mistakes on cases the employer believes she should not have made,’ according to a document from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Another record says Ellis, who held the title deputy district attorney at the Weld County District Attorney’s Office, was fired for ‘unsatisfactory performance,'” the Colorado Sun reports.

“The president-elect was able to connect with people over this sense of unity,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who will be his deputy White House chief of staff, told Glamour magazine. “In the primary, people would mock him, like, ‘You think you can work with Republicans?’ … Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that.”

“That message was formally delivered Tuesday morning in a demand letter delivered to the town of Palm Beach and also addressed to the U.S. Secret Service asserting that Trump lost his legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago because of an agreement he signed in the early 1990s when he converted the storied estate from his private residence to a private club,” Manuel Roig-Franzia and Carol Leonnig report. “The legal maneuver could, at long last, force Palm Beach to publicly address whether Trump can make Mar-a-Lago his legal residence and home, as he has been expected to do, when he becomes an ex-president … The contretemps sets up a potentially awkward scenario, unique in recent history, in which a former Oval Office occupant would find himself having to officially defend his choice of a place to live during his post-presidency. It also could create a legal headache for Trump because he changed his official domicile to Mar-a-Lago, leaving behind Manhattan. … 

“The current residency controversy tracks back to a deal Trump cut in 1993 when his finances were foundering, and the cost of maintaining Mar-a-Lago was soaring into the multimillions each year. Under the agreement, club members are banned from spending more than 21 days a year in the club’s guest suites and cannot stay there for any longer than seven consecutive days. Before the arrangement was sealed, an attorney for Trump assured the town council in a public meeting that he would not live at Mar-a-Lago.”

“‘We will immediately move to ensure that the Trump Organization complies with the court’s order and submits records related to our investigation,’ Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, said in a statement after the ruling,” Shayna Jacobs reports. “The documents and communications at issue could help investigators answer questions about a conservation easement that was granted several years ago at the Seven Springs estate in suburban New York’s Westchester Country, a move that netted Trump’s company a $21 million tax deduction. The materials, which Trump’s lawyers had sought to shield, include messages exchanged between an engineer and a land-use lawyer who worked on Trump’s behalf. The company’s lawyers argued unsuccessfully that those records were covered by attorney-client privilege. The Trump Organization was ordered to provide the documents by Friday, though New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron said he would consider an extension.”

“When Russian hackers first slipped their digital Trojan horses into federal government computer systems, probably sometime in the spring, they sat dormant for days, doing nothing but hiding. Then the malicious code sprang into action and began communicating with the outside world. At that moment — when the Russian malware began sending transmissions from federal servers to command-and-control computers operated by the hackers — an opportunity for detection arose, much as human spies behind enemy lines are particularly vulnerable when they radio home to report what they’ve found,” Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima report.

“The hackers hid well, wiped away their tracks and communicated through IP addresses in the United States rather than ones in, say, Moscow to minimize suspicions. The hackers also shrewdly used novel bits of malicious code that apparently evaded the U.S. government’s multibillion-dollar detection system, Einstein, which focuses on finding new uses of known malware and also detecting connections to parts of the Internet used in previous hacks. But Einstein, operated by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was not equipped to find novel malware or Internet connections, despite a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office suggesting that building such capability might be a wise investment. … 

“The federal government has invested heavily in securing its myriad computers, especially since the extent of the devastating Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management was discovered in 2015, when more than 20 million federal employees and others had their personal information, including Social Security numbers, compromised. But this year’s months-long hack of federal networks, discovered in recent days, has revealed new weaknesses and underscored some previously known ones, including the federal government’s reliance on widely used commercial software that provides potential attack vectors for nation-state hackers. … The Russians reportedly found their way into federal systems by first hacking SolarWinds, a Texas-based maker of network-monitoring software.”

• SolarWinds was warned last year that anyone could access its update server by using the password “solarwinds123″: “Multiple criminals have offered to sell access to SolarWinds’ computers through underground forums,” Reuters reports.
• SolarWinds investors traded a suspiciously large $280 million in stock during the days before the hack was revealed, which sent the share price plunging more than 20 percent. “A former enforcement official at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and an accounting expert both said the trades would likely spark an investigation by federal securities watchdogs into whether they amounted to insider trading,” Drew Harwell and Douglas MacMillan report.

“On their way out of office, the directors of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service established a rule that changed the definition of what determines a habitat under the Endangered Species Act. It was the second major rollback the administration has made to the signature wildlife protection law,” Darryl Fears reports. “Under the new definition, only ‘critical habitat’ that can sustain the species in question can be protected, as opposed to a broader habitat the plant or animal might one day occupy if it is suitable. … Conservationists immediately denounced the change as favoring developers over wildlife that has been put at risk by human activity.” The new rule could open vast swaths of land to agriculture, logging or other development.

“Migratory Western butterflies have reached a record low this year, putting them at the brink of extinction, according to the latest survey of the insects. The annual autumn count, though not finalized, stands at fewer than 2,000 — a significant decline from roughly 30,000 documented in last year’s count and millions on the wing in the 1980s. These numbers, collected by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, come as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced [Tuesday] that it would not be recommending protection for the species under the Endangered Species Act,” National Geographic reports. “While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the monarch meets listing criteria under the Endangered Species Act, it opted not to list the butterfly, citing the need to focus resources on ‘higher-priority listing actions.’”

• Biden has picked Gina McCarthy, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and now runs of the Natural Resources Defense Council, to coordinate the new administration’s domestic climate agenda from the White House. She will be the counterpart to former secretary of state John Kerry, who will coordinate the global elements of Biden’s climate agenda. (Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis)
• Biden said on the campaign trail that he wants the U.S. to stop contributing to climate change by 2050. This would require massive and rapid changes, from your kitchen to your carport. An extremely detailed new study from energy experts at Princeton describes in 344 slides what it would take for America to be “net zero” in 30 years. (Chris Mooney)

“The Trump administration said Tuesday it has finalized an agreement reached last year with El Salvador that will enable the Department of Homeland Security to send asylum seekers from the U.S. border to the Central American nation, instead of allowing them to seek humanitarian protection in the United States,” Nick Miroff reports. “The Trump administration reached similar deals last year with Guatemala and Honduras, after a record surge of Central American families crossed the U.S. southern border seeking protection, overwhelming U.S. courts and processing capacity. … El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have some of the highest homicide rates in the world, and transnational gangs and criminal groups that operate in all three countries practice extortion, forced recruitment of minors and human trafficking to terrorize local populations, sending victims fleeing for their lives.”

• The Mexican Congress passed a law that is expected to sharply limit cooperation with the U.S. in the fight against illicit drugs, as outrage over the detention of Mexico’s former defense minister escalated into a bilateral crisis. (Mary Beth Sheridan)
• U.S. victims of extremist violence in Israel filed a lawsuit alleging that three of Qatar’s leading financial institutions have secretly funneled millions of dollars to Palestinian groups responsible for killing Americans – Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The filing accuses a key U.S. ally in the Middle East of duplicity. (Spencer Hsu)
• An International Criminal Court report said there is “a reasonable basis to believe” that crimes against humanity were committed amid President Rodrigo Duterte’s years-long crackdown on drugs in the Philippines. Extrajudicial killings have left thousands dead. Trump’s praise for Duterte’s conduct has underscored this president’s contempt for human rights. (Siobhán O’Grady) 

Only a tiny fraction of the more than 900 guests invited to an indoor holiday party hosted by the lame-duck secretary of state and his wife showed up last night, following an outcry from public health officials and lawmakers. “Pompeo, whose name was on the invitation and who was scheduled to speak at the event, canceled his speech and tapped a substitute speaker,” John Hudson reports. “About 70 people RSVP’d for the event as of Monday night and even fewer showed up … The event featured drinks, boxed meals and a masked Santa who walked around from table to table to chitchat with adults and children … One spouse of a diplomat said she declined the invitation because her husband was serving abroad and if she had attended and gotten sick, no one would have been able to take care of their children. ‘It was a completely irresponsible party to throw,’ said the woman.”

“During a department-wide virtual meeting to discuss the shift to the new administration, DeVos acknowledged that most of the agency’s thousands of career employees ‘will be here through the coming transition and beyond,’” Politico reports. “‘Let me leave you with this plea: Resist,’ DeVos said. ‘Be the resistance against forces that will derail you from doing what’s right for students.’ … She touted her overhaul of Title IX rules governing sexual assault and misconduct in schools and colleges as one of her major accomplishments. … DeVos’ use of the word ‘resistance,’ in reading from what appeared to be prepared remarks, mimics liberal opposition to Trump. … Department officials announced during the all-hands staff meeting that they have lined up career officials to take over in an interim capacity in roles that will be vacated by an exodus of political appointees in the coming weeks. The Trump administration plans to tap Phil Rosenfelt for the role of acting secretary of Education.”

• White House Counsel Pat Cippollone and other lawyers warned Trump not to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray because it could put him in potential legal jeopardy. (NBC)
• Trump is considering pushing to have a special counsel appointed to advance a federal tax investigation into Hunter Biden, setting up a potential showdown with incoming acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen. (AP)
• Hunter Biden is preparing for his first solo art show next year with New York’s Georges Bergès Gallery. He has said making blown ink abstractions on paper helped him battle addiction. (Page Six)

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) flew to Washington to hang out maskless at a White House Christmas party:

Biden’s pick for Energy secretary might want to do a social media sweep sooner than later:

And the acting secretary of defense got a covid shot:

The bell at the National Cathedral tolled 300 times, in honor of the 300,000 American lives lost to the pandemic: 

Stephen Colbert mocked Republican lawmakers for still refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory:

Trevor Noah said he’s glad the U.S.’s electoral system works, but he’s concerned that its weaknesses were highlighted by Trump’s false claims of fraud: