Biden warns ‘more people may die’ if Trump refuses to cooperate on transition – live

• Donald Trump has been picking fights with state governors as his campaign continues to pursue long-shot lawsuits that are exceedingly unlikely to change the election results. Lawyers have been withdrawing from Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuit challenging the results.
• Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, said that Senator Lindsey Graham was among the members of his party who encouraged him to disqualify legally cast ballots. Republicans have largely stood behind Trump as he refuses to concede, stalling the transition process. Those who haven’t have attracted the president’s wrath on Twitter.
• Joe Biden urged the Trump administration to work with him to coordinate a coronavirus response. “More people may die, if we don’t coordinate,” he said. “If we have to wait until 20 January to start that planning, it puts us behind.”
• As coronavirus cases surge across the US, governors and local officials are announcing new restrictions. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced that 94% of Californians would come back under the most severe coronavirus restrictions after the state surpassed 1m cases last week.
• The US biotech firm Moderna announced the results of its vaccine trial, which found that its vaccine was 95% effective. The news comes after a Pfizer vaccine showed 90% effectiveness, per the company – boosting optimism for widespread vaccination next year.
  
  

Follow the Guardian’s live Covid-19 coverage here:

Dillon is expected to join the Biden administration as deputy chief of staff, per multiple reports.

The news was first reported by NBC. Dillon would work with Ron Klain, who Biden has named chief of staff.

Dillon previously had worked on Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign. She’s been credited with helping Biden pull through the primaries to become the Democratic nominee.

Jessica Glenza

Nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, a picture of the other side is emerging. There has been positive news from leading vaccine manufacturers and they are beginning to analyze phase III clinical data, an important milestone that could tell researchers about whether they are safe and effective.

But to distribute those vaccines, the US must undertake the most logistically difficult vaccination campaign in history, with a hesitant and weary public, and at least one vaccine with unprecedented storage requirements.

The cause for optimism is real – but so are the logistical challenges that lie ahead:

According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, if Donald Trump wants a statewide recount, he will have to pay $7.9m.

The president lost the state by more than 20,000 votes – which means a recount is very unlikely to change the fact that he lost. Even if a recount, miraculously, left Trump ahead in the state, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes are not enough to change the election outcome.

Still, Trump has indicated that he’ll be calling for a recount – though his campaign has yet to request one. Under Wisconsin law, candidates may request a recount if less than 1 percentage point separates them from their opponents. However, if the margin is greater than 0.25 percentage points, the candidate who makes such a request must foot the bill.

The Trump campaign has been fundraising to raise money for recounts and litigation challenging results, though the campaign has taken broad leeway to spend the funds raised from supporters on other expenses.

“Our county clerks have carefully estimated their costs for recounting 3.2 million ballots, which is approximately $7.9 million,” said Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s chief election official.

“These estimates are significantly higher than the actual costs of the 2016 recount, but they take into account factors not present four years ago, including the need for larger spaces to permit public observation and social distancing, security for those spaces, the higher number of absentee ballots, a compressed timeframe over a holiday, and renting high-speed ballot scanning equipment,” she noted in a statement.

Trump must request a recount and pay for it by Wednesday if he wants Wisconsin to consider it.

Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told the Washington Post that senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina was among several members of his party who pressured him to toss out legally cast ballots so that Trump could win the state.

From the Post:

In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.

The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” Raffensperger said of the threats, “particularly when it comes from people on my side of the aisle. Everyone that is working on this needs to elevate their speech. We need to be thoughtful and careful about what we say.” He said he reported the threats to state authorities.

The pressure on Raffensperger, who has bucked his party in defending the state’s voting process, comes as Georgia is in the midst of a laborious hand recount of roughly 5 million ballots. President-elect Joe Biden has a 14,000-vote lead in the initial count.

The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for US Rep Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s effort to prove fraud in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”

Read the rest of the remarkable interview by the Post’s Amy Gardner here.

Charges against Attica Scott, a Kentucky state representative who was arrested while protesting police brutality, have been dropped.

Scott, the only Black woman in Kentucky’s legislature, has been advocating for justice for Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old woman who was shot and killed by police who raided her home.

Along with activist Shameka Parrish-Wright and her daughter Ashanti Scott, Attica Scott was arrested before local curfew while walking into a church that provided refuge for protestors. The Scotts and Parrish-Wright were among 200 protestors who were arrested after Louisville mayor Greg Fischer amped up law enforcement and enacted a 9pm curfew amid protests in September.

A grand juror in the Breonna Taylor case told the Associated Press that prosecutors wanted to give police “a slap on the wrist and close it up.”

From the AP:

The woman is the third grand juror to speak anonymously about the September proceedings, joining two others who said the 12-member panel was not given the option to consider charges against the officers who fatally shot Taylor in March.

The woman, in her first published interview, told The Associated Press that when the proceedings concluded with three wanton endangerment charges for one officer, she felt herself saying “no, that’s not the end of it.”

“I felt like there should’ve been more charges,” she said in a phone interview. She echoed two other grand jurors’ complaints that the panel wasn’t allowed to consider additional charges because prosecutors told them the use of force was justified.

“All of them went in blindly, you really couldn’t see into that lady’s apartment as they explained to us, there was just a TV on,” she said of Taylor’s Louisville apartment. The police “went in there like the O.K. Corral, wanted dead or alive.”

The grand jury charged former officer Brett Hankison with three counts of wanton endangerment for firing into the apartment of Taylor’s neighbor. The two officers who shot 26-year-old Taylor were not charged.

In October, another grand juror said the jury was not offered the option of considering homicide charges against the officers who killed Taylor.

Read more background:

That’s it for me. I’m passing the blogging baton to political reporter Maanvi Singh. Here’s what happened so far:

• Donald Trump is angry at Ohio governor Mike DeWine. He’s also in a back and forth with Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
  
  
• Members of Congress keep getting infected with COVID-19.
• The Guardian’s Sam Levine weighs in on the odds of the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania lawsuit.
  
  
• Virginia governor Ralph Northam is moving to legalize marijuana.
  
  
• The bureaucrat holding up resources to president-elect Biden’s team put some feelers out about new job opportunities.
  
  

Last week Oklahoma senator Jim Lankford, a Republican, argued that Joe Biden should be receiving classified intelligence briefings despite the standstill with the GSA. Lankford said he would step in if the standoff continued.

But that was last week. This week Lankford sounded less worried:

After saying he would step in if President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris still weren’t receiving detailed intelligence briefings Friday, Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.) said over the weekend his comments had been blown out of proportion.

“I’m not in a hurry, necessarily, to get Joe Biden these briefings, it’s been interesting how the media, the national media, not this network, but others have twisted this term ‘step in.’ I happen to chair the committee that oversees GSA, that is the entity that has to be able to make this call,” Mr. Lankford said an interview with the pro-Trump Newsmax TV Saturday.

On Wednesday, in an interview with KRMG radio in Tulsa, Okla., Mr. Lankford said: “If that’s not occurring by Friday, I will step in as well and be able to push and say, this needs to occur,”

Mr. Lankford said he was using the term “step in” to ask the General Services Administration about their process and act as a sounding board for the agency.

Illinois congresswoman Cheri Bustos has tested positive for coronavirus as well:

U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, of Illinois, revealed Monday she was experiencing mild symptoms of COVID-19 after testing positive for the virus, the lawmaker posted on social media.

Bustos, D-Moline, represents Illinois’ 17th Congressional District, which covers the northwest portion of the state.

In a tweet, the congresswoman said she still felt well despite experiencing symptoms. Consistent with medical advice, Bustos plans to work from her Illinois home until she’s cleared by her physician.

Health officials have predicted a significant spike of coronavirus cases. Lawmakers are not immune to the virus. Michigan congressman Tim Walberg also has tested positive for the virus.