Presidential Transition Highlights: Recounts in Wisconsin Reaffirm Biden’s Victory

[This briefing has ended. Follow our live updates of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition.]

Recount in two Wisconsin counties reinforces Biden’s victory.

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Election workers count mail ballots and absentee ballots in Milwaukee. The Wisconsin commission has estimated that a statewide recount would cost $7.9 million. Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Wisconsin’s two largest counties have concluded recounts requested by the Trump campaign, with the results slightly increasing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s margin of victory and reaffirming his win over President Trump in this month’s election.

Dane County certified its election results on Sunday, and Milwaukee County certified its totals on Friday. The Wisconsin Elections Commission is scheduled to meet on Tuesday.

The conclusion of the recount adds yet another loss in the Trump campaign’s effort to upend Mr. Biden’s win. The president’s team has been dealt a series of losses in court in several key states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.

As Mr. Trump continued to propagate baseless claims of voter fraud in Wisconsin and across the country, his campaign requested recounts in two heavily Democratic counties. But it had little effect on the final results.

In Milwaukee County, Mr. Biden’s ticket received 317,527 votes. Mr. Trump’s ticket received 134,482, according to county results. Both totals increased slightly compared with an earlier count, and Mr. Biden gained 132 votes.

Dane County, which includes the city of Madison and the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin, found that 260,094 votes were cast for Mr. Biden, while 78,754 were cast for Mr. Trump. Compared with earlier results, the final tally included 91 fewer ballots for Mr. Biden and 46 fewer for Mr. Trump — a net gain of 45 for Mr. Trump.

Before the recount totals were announced, Mr. Trump signaled that he would continue to fight the results. “The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday,” he wrote Saturday on Twitter. “We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has estimated that a statewide recount would cost $7.9 million. Milwaukee County estimated that its recount would cost about $2 million, and Dane County estimated about $740,808. According to state law, Mr. Trump’s team will be expected to foot the bill because the margin between the candidates exceeded 0.25 percent.

Both Milwaukee County and Dane County live-streamed their recounts. Mr. Trump has insisted that his campaign observers were unable to watch vote counts, a claim that has been disputed.

Biden names all-female communications team with Jen Psaki as press secretary.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Sunday announced an all-female White House communications staff, with Jennifer Psaki, a veteran of the Obama administration, in the most visible role as White House press secretary.

“Communicating directly and truthfully to the American people is one of the most important duties of a president,” Mr. Biden said in a statement, drawing an implicit contrast with the Trump administration’s use of the White House briefing room to disseminate falsehoods and try to undermine the credibility of the news media.

The transition team also announced that Kate Bedingfield, 39, who served as a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, will serve as the White House communications director. Karine Jean Pierre, who previously served as the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org, will be the principal deputy press secretary. Pili Tobar, a former immigrant advocate with the group America’s Voice, will serve as the deputy White House communications director.

Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden on the campaign, will serve as the senior adviser and chief spokeswoman for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Ashley Etienne, a former senior adviser to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will serve as the communications director for Ms. Harris.

“President-elect Biden has a history of advocating on behalf of women in the U.S. and around the world, and today’s announcement is a continuation of that work,” Ron Klain, the incoming chief of staff, said in a statement.

Ms. Psaki, 41, previously served as the White House communications director for President Barack Obama and as the State Department spokeswoman under Secretary of State John Kerry.

On Twitter, Ms. Psaki said she saw her job as trying to “rebuild trust of the American people” and noted that many of the women on the team, including herself, were also mothers of young children. She said she planned to “think outside of the box” about how to use the podium to make the Biden-Harris agenda more accessible to the public. She did not say whether she planned to reinstate the daily press briefing.

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Biden’s doctor says he has hairline fractures after twisting his ankle playing with his dog.

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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. visited Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists in Newark, Del., on Sunday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. visited an orthopedic specialist in Newark, Del., on Sunday afternoon after he twisted his ankle playing with his one of his dogs over the holiday weekend, according to his office, an injury that his doctor said resulted in hairline fractures that would require him to wear a boot for several weeks.

Although initial X-rays showed no obvious fracture, a “follow-up CT scan confirmed hairline (small) fractures of President-elect Biden’s lateral and intermediate cuneiform bones, which are in the midfoot,” Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the director of executive medicine at GW Medical Faculty Associates, said in a statement distributed by Mr. Biden’s office.

Mr. Biden left the doctor’s office Sunday just before 6:30 p.m., after a visit that lasted just over two hours, and then went to an imaging center for a short time for the additional CT. A Biden spokesman said the president-elect had scheduled the follow-up on Sunday to avoid disrupting his schedule on Monday.

Mr. Biden is already operating on a crunched transition time frame, after the head of the General Services Administration did not formally acknowledge the presidential election results for weeks after Election Day, temporarily depriving Mr. Biden of access to federal resources and preventing his advisers from beginning coordination with Trump administration officials.

A van was maneuvered to block reporters and photographers from seeing Mr. Biden as he entered the doctor’s office.

The dog Mr. Biden was playing with when he was injured is Major, a German shepherd the Bidens had fostered and then adopted in 2018. They have another German shepherd, Champ, and have announced plans to get a cat when they move into the White House next year, as well.

Who will fill out Biden’s cabinet? Here’s what we know so far.

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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after speaking in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. moved quickly last week to name the first two members of his cabinet, picking one of his closest confidants to be the nation’s top diplomat and choosing an immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a first.

But as he fills out the rest of his team, the task will become more complicated. Whom Mr. Biden will tap to be the next attorney general is among the most talked about — and politically fraught — decisions that he will make as civil rights issues roil the country and some Democrats expect investigations into President Trump and his associates.

Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general in the final years of the Obama administration, had long been considered the front-runner.

Mr. Biden could instead pick Lisa Monaco, the former homeland security adviser for President Barack Obama.

But both women are up against Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor who served as the head of the department’s civil rights division in the Clinton administration. Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, is also under consideration for the job.

To lead the Pentagon, candidates include Michèle A. Flournoy, a senior defense official for President Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama; Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a former deputy energy secretary and National Security Council member; and Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired Army general and head of the U.S. Central Command, people close to the process said. The Biden team could also tap Jeh C. Johnson, who served as a top Pentagon lawyer before becoming secretary of homeland security under Mr. Obama.

Over at the C.I.A., Michael J. Morell, a former acting C.I.A. director, could be nominated to that position. Others under consideration are Sue Gordon, a former principal deputy director of national intelligence who was pushed out by Mr. Trump; Vincent R. Stewart, a retired lieutenant general who led the Defense Intelligence Agency; and Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, a former C.I.A. analyst and White House national security aide.

The Biden transition team is also considering Darrell Blocker for the job, according to former intelligence officials. Mr. Blocker served undercover in the C.I.A. for 28 years, working as the deputy director of the counter terrorism center and leading the agency’s training center. Tapping a veteran with deep ties to throughout the C.I.A. would be a popular move with the agency’s work force, which has been buffeted by Mr. Trump’s criticisms for the last year, according to former C.I.A. officers. Mr. Blocker’s candidacy was first reported by Fox News.

Thomas E. Donilon, a former national security adviser to President Obama who has been mentioned as a leading candidate for the post, told Mr. Biden’s team some time ago that he did not want to return to government right now, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Donilon was nonetheless offered the C.I.A. position and turned it down, according to the source. A transition spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Biden could pick Roger W. Ferguson Jr., an economist who was vice chair of the Federal Reserve, to lead the National Economic Council or a new board overseeing the recovery from the recession.

Other names under consideration for the position include Bruce Reed, a former chief of staff to Mr. Biden, and Austan Goolsbee, an economist who was chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Gene Sperling, a veteran economic adviser dating to the Clinton administration, is another possibility, as is Brian Deese, who was deputy director of the National Economic Council under Mr. Obama.

To coordinate the response to the pandemic, Jeffrey D. Zients, who was director of the National Economic Council under Mr. Obama, could become Mr. Biden’s “Covid czar.” That job could also go to Vivek H. Murthy, the former surgeon general who helps lead Mr. Biden’s transition panel on the virus.

Other names seen as top contenders for cabinet posts include:

  • Mary D. Nichols, California’s climate and clean air regulator, could lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

  • Contenders to lead the Agriculture Department include Representative Marcia L. Fudge, an African-American Democrat from Ohio; Heidi Heitkamp, a former senator from North Dakota, and Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who served as agriculture secretary for Mr. Obama.

  • Ernest J. Moniz, Mr. Obama’s energy secretary, could reprise his role, or the job could go to Arun Majumdar, who runs the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford.

  • Top contenders to run the Transportation Department include Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff and a former mayor of Chicago, and Eric M. Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles.

  • Names being discussed to take over the Department of Housing and Urban Development include Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California; Alvin Brown, a former mayor of Jacksonville, Fla.; and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta.

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In his first one-on-one interview since losing to Biden, Trump baselessly cast more conspiracy theories.

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President Trump said on Sunday that he was frustrated that law enforcement agencies had not done more to pursue his false claims of voter fraud.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Sunday that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department might be “involved” in what he again groundlessly called a fraudulent presidential election, hinting that the nation’s law enforcement agencies were biased against his fading efforts to remain in office.

“This is total fraud. And how the F.B.I. and Department of Justice — I don’t know, maybe they’re involved — but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was a total fraud,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

“Missing in action. Can’t tell you where they are,” Mr. Trump said, a note of resignation in his voice. “I ask, ‘Are they looking at it?’ Everyone says, ‘Yes they’re looking at it.’”

“These people have been there a long time,” he added. “Some of them have served a lot of different presidents.”

Mr. Trump’s roughly 45-minute conversation with Ms. Bartiromo, who has been sympathetic to his charges, was his first one-on-one interview since his defeat to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump sounded at once angry but also resigned to the growing reality that Mr. Biden will be sworn in as president on Jan. 20.

In often rambling remarks, Mr. Trump offered vague charges of “thousands of dead people voting,” discarded ballots and blocked poll watchers. He also claimed that Mr. Biden won with implausibly large margins in African-American areas.

“There’s no way Joe Biden got 80 million votes,” he said. “There’s no way it happened.”

No significant evidence has been found to support the president’s claims, and several judges in multiple states have quickly dismissed lawsuits by his legal team alleging fraud.

Skipping over that reality, Mr. Trump complained that the media had not taken his fraud claims more seriously and alleged that foreign leaders had expressed sympathy for his plight.

“You have leaders of countries that call me, say, ‘That’s the most messed up election we’ve ever seen,’” Mr. Trump claimed. But no foreign leader has endorsed Mr. Trump’s claims about the election, and dozens have offered both public and private congratulations to Mr. Biden.

With several important federal deadlines coming up for the election process, including a Dec. 8 deadline for states to resolve all election disputes, Mr. Trump declined to say when his time fighting the results would be up. “I’m not going to say a date,” Mr. Trump said.

Asked whether he would appoint a special counsel to investigate the election, Mr. Trump said that he “would consider” doing so but quickly changed the subject.

And asked whether the Supreme Court, now governed by a conservative majority, was likely to rule on the election outcome, Mr. Trump sounded pessimistic.

“It’s hard to get into the Supreme Court,” he said, adding that his lawyers had told him, “It’s very hard to get a case up there.”

“This is disgusting,” Ms. Bartiromo said. “And we cannot allow America’s elections to be corrupted.”

“Do you believe you will win this?” she asked.

Mr. Trump did not answer directly.

Mr. Trump’s interview came amid continued pushback against his baseless claims.

Christopher Krebs, the former government official who had overseen cybersecurity efforts for the 2020 election, reaffirmed his confidence in the integrity of the vote and called Mr. Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud “farcical.”

“The American people should have 100 percent confidence in their vote,” Mr. Krebs said in an excerpt from a “60 Minutes” interview that is to air Sunday night. “The proof is in the ballots, the recounts are consistent with the initial count, and to me that’s further evidence, that’s further confirmation.”

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, also said he did not think the election was rigged.

“I don’t think it was rigged,” Mr. Blunt said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think there was some element of voter fraud as there is in any election.”

He added: “I don’t have any reason to believe the numbers are there that would have made that difference.”

Mr. Blunt’s comments came as an increasing number of Republican lawmakers have begun to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory. But many, including the party’s leaders, still refuse to do so.

Mr. Blunt, who leads the Senate committee responsible for overseeing the presidential inauguration, also said it was likely that there would be fewer attendees at the event this year and that it was also likely that attendees would be required to wear masks.

A brazen assassination in Iran could limit Biden’s options. Was that the goal?

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Protestors burning pictures of President Trump and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Tehran on Saturday after the top Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

The assassination of the scientist who led Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon threatens to cripple President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal before he can even begin his diplomacy with Tehran.

And that may well have been a main goal of the operation.

Intelligence officials say there is little doubt that Israel was behind the killing. And the Israelis have done nothing to dispel that view. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long identified Iran as an existential threat, and named the assassinated scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as national enemy No. 1.

But Mr. Netanyahu also has a second agenda.

“There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” he declared shortly after it became clear that Mr. Biden — who has proposed exactly that — would be the next president.

Mr. Netanyahu believes a covert bomb program is continuing and would be unconstrained after 2030, when the nuclear accord’s restraints on Tehran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wants expires. To critics of the deal, that is its fatal flaw.

The question is whether the deal Mr. Biden has outlined was shot to pieces along with Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s S.U.V. in the mountain town of Absard, east of Tehran.

The answer lies largely in how Iran reacts in the next few weeks.

If Iran holds off on significant retaliation, then the bold move to take out the chief of the nuclear program will have paid off, even if the assassination drives the program further underground.

And if the Iranians retaliate, giving Mr. Trump a pretext to launch a return strike before he leaves office in January, Mr. Biden will be inheriting bigger problems than just the wreckage of a five-year-old diplomatic document.

Both those options seem fine with Mr. Trump’s departing foreign policy team, which is trying to lock in the radical reversal of Iran policy that has taken place over the past four years.

Robert Malley, who leads the International Crisis Group and was a negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, said the administration’s plan was to “make it all the more difficult for its successor to resume diplomacy with Iran.” He expressed doubts that such a strategy would work.

“The center of gravity in Iran is still with those who want to wait until Biden is president,” Mr. Malley said.

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While Republicans in Washington indulged Trump’s claims of fraud, local and state Republicans pushed back.

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A crowd outside Detroit’s Department of Elections, where workers counted ballots this month.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election.

The election that Ms. Barton as the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills had helped oversee. The election that she knew to be fair and accurate because she had helped make it so.

“Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” she asked the campaign official.

If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Mr. Trump’s fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote.

The three weeks that followed tested American democracy and may leave lasting scars. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. now faces a country where many of his constituents consider him illegitimate.

The Trump team seized on any routine mistakes to advance the cause. In Rochester Hills, votes in one precinct were posted in the absentee tally and then also posted in the in-person total without first being removed from the absentee count.

The mistake was quickly caught and rectified before the results became official, but Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, claimed that “we found 2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats, that were Republican ballots, due to a clerical error.”

Ms. Barton took to social media to rebut the “categorically false” assertion. “As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process,” Ms. Barton said in a video she posted to Twitter.

Soon she found herself the target of profane and threatening emails and telephone calls, and while she took comfort that she was safe because her husband is a sheriff’s deputy, they nonetheless upgraded the security system at home.

As an election official, she spent much of the last four years talking with other officials about cyberthreats to American democracy. Never, she said, did she realize that the real threat this year would come from within.

“We have to step back and say how do we restore public confidence in a system that is completely torn down,” she said.

Biden team wants to tackle child care, elder care, preschool in one overarching plan.

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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. delivered an address at the Queen theater in Wilmington, Del.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has no shortage of ideas about how to transform caregiving. One striking feature of his team’s plan: It does not address elder care separately from child care, or divide plans to support family caregivers from those for paid caregivers. Rather, it takes on Medicaid benefits for older and disabled adults, preschool for toddlers and better jobs for home care workers, all in one ambitious, $775 billion-over-a-decade package.

“It approaches the care economy in a holistic way, across the age spectrum,” said Ai-jen Poo, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has long pushed many of those measures.

The same families who need child care to stay employed are often responsible for aging relatives, she pointed out, and many work as paid caregivers themselves.

Elements of the Biden plan, announced last summer, will sound familiar. But the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis have spotlighted the halting, fragmented way the United States approaches these issues, compared with other industrialized democracies.

Advocates see this emergency as both ruinous for families and workers, and as an opportunity to tackle long-deferred needs. Policies like converting the anemic federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates only unpaid leave, into 12 weeks of paid leave, as Mr. Biden has proposed, could help propel the nation’s labor force back to work.

Despite its integrated approach, the Biden plan does call for certain programs most likely to benefit older people and their caregivers. For example, it proposes a tax credit for as much as $5,000 to reimburse families for expenses associated with unpaid caregiving.

The Biden plan would also give family members Social Security credits for the time they spend out of the work force caring for loved ones.

Finally, it tackles the issues that have led to persistent churn in the mostly female work force that provides elder care and child care, including low wages, lack of benefits like health insurance and sick leave, and the need for further training.

The Biden team asserts that the nation can pay the tab for this vast undertaking over 10 years, by rolling back tax breaks for real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and increasing tax compliance for other high earners.

It also argues that the plan will create three million new caregiving and education jobs, and increase employment by five million by allowing unpaid caregivers (most of them women, again) to re-enter the work force.

Debate is certain to ensue over the price tag nonetheless.

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