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Despite recently suffering the most consequential in a string of defeats in his quest to subvert the results of November’s election, President Trump continued to insist that his plans to challenge his loss were “not over.”
“It’s not over. We keep going,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday and was taped on Saturday at the Army-Navy football game. “And we’re going to continue to go forward.”
The president’s vow to press on came the day after the Supreme Court rejected a Texas lawsuit against four battleground states, effectively ending his attempt to overturn the results. Mr. Trump’s allies have also lost dozens of times in lower courts. The Electoral College meets on Monday to cement President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win.
Many top Republicans in Congress continued to stand by Mr. Trump in refusing to recognize Mr. Biden as the president-elect. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, did so again on Sunday, arguing on “Fox News Sunday” that the legal process was not over despite the Supreme Court ruling.
“There will be a president sworn in on Jan. 20, but let this process play out,” he said.
Some party elders, though, have begun to say more than a month after Election Day that it is time to move on.
“The courts have resolved the disputes. It looks very much like the electors will vote for Joe Biden,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, in a prerecorded interview aired Sunday by NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And when they do, I hope that he puts the country first — I mean, the president — that he takes pride in his considerable accomplishments, that he congratulates the president-elect and he helps him get off to a good start, especially in the middle of this pandemic.”
Mr. Alexander, who will retire at the end of the year, said Mr. Trump had lost the election because of “the president’s conduct, his behavior” and his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Trump has made baseless claim after baseless claim of election fraud in his attempt to deny Mr. Biden’s victory. Some states “got rigged and robbed from us,” he falsely claimed in the interview. “But we won every one of them.”
When the interviewer, Brian Kilmeade, tried to ask if Mr. Trump would attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Trump interrupted. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. “I want to talk about this. We’ve done a great job.”
He also tore into Attorney General William P. Barr again for not violating Justice Department guidelines against publicly discussing open cases and trying to keep information from leaking out about an investigation into the finances of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, during the presidential campaign.
Mr. Trump, who spent months denouncing the work of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, used Mr. Mueller as a positive example when compared with Mr. Barr.
The president noted that Mr. Mueller had said that an article by BuzzFeed News claiming that Mr. Trump had directed his lawyer to lie to Congress was flawed. He argued that Mr. Barr should have contradicted Mr. Biden’s statements in one of the presidential debates minimizing questions about his son.
“Bill Barr, I believe — not believe, I know — had an obligation to set the record straight, just like Robert Mueller set the record straight,” Mr. Trump said, saying that Mr. Mueller “stood up” against a false report.
A federal judge in Milwaukee on Saturday tossed out President Trump’s latest effort to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, dismissing the case and ruling that it had failed “as a matter of law and fact.”
In a strongly worded decision, Judge Brett H. Ludwig, a Trump appointee who took his post only three months ago, shot down one of the president’s last remaining attempts to alter the results of a statewide race. The decision came just one day after the Supreme Court denied an audacious move by the State of Texas to contest the election outcomes in Wisconsin and three other battleground states.
Judge Ludwig’s ruling was especially significant because after the Supreme Court’s terse decision Friday night, Mr. Trump complained that courts around the country have thrown out dozens of his lawsuits based on technicalities, and have not given him a chance to fully present his legal arguments.
Judge Ludwig, however, held a daylong hearing on Thursday and still found that Mr. Trump’s claims were lacking. He dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning Mr. Trump cannot refile it in the same court.
“This court has allowed the plaintiff the chance to make his case,” Judge Ludwig wrote, “and he has lost on the merits.”
The suit in Milwaukee in many ways echoed the petition filed by Texas, which was backed by 17 Republican attorneys general and more than 100 Republican members of the House of Representatives.
Congress will reconvene on Monday for a make-or-break week in the effort to deliver badly needed relief to Americans and an economy hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic before the Christmas holidays.
After months of impasse, lawmakers are now staring down a Friday deadline to complete a must-pass government funding bill to which they hope to attach new money for small businesses, unemployed Americans, the airline and restaurant industries, and possibly schools. Many of the relief programs created this year are set to expire next week, putting millions of Americans at risk of losing government support as the health crisis continues in their communities.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers who have been working for a month on a $908 billion proposal met through the weekend and plan to introduce their final product on Monday. It is expected to include the liability shield from coronavirus-related lawsuits that Republicans insist is needed for businesses and schools, as well as more than $100 billion in funds to prop up services typically paid for by state and local governments, which Democrats have argued is essential.
“The plan is alive and well and there is no way, no way we are going to leave Washington without taking care of the emergency needs of our people,” Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia and a leader of the group, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Republican Senate leaders, though, have already said they view the compromise as a nonstarter and are pushing for a narrower package that excludes both liability protections and state and local funding. Democrats shot down that idea when Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, first floated it last week, but there were signs on Sunday that they may be reconsidering.
Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the House majority leader, signaled that Democrats, who have already shaved more than $2 trillion off their own demands, may be willing to set the state and local funding issue aside until after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.
Speaking on CNN, Mr. Hoyer called the process a “give and take” and said he had been negotiating with House and Senate leaders through the weekend.
“We need to get the essential done and we’ll have time to get stuff done that we didn’t include because we couldn’t get political agreement,” he said. “We’ll have time to do that. We have a new president. We have a new Congress. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”
Top lawmakers are also hoping to add a bipartisan deal on surprise medical billing into the year-end spending package, after two years of struggling to reach agreement on how to end a practice that leads to patients unexpectedly being treated by a doctor who does not take their insurance.
While Democrats have publicly said they hope to see the measure included in the package, top Republicans including Mr. McConnell have yet to sign off, senior Republican aides said.
WASHINGTON — The head of the N.A.A.C.P. had a blunt warning for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. when Mr. Biden met with civil rights leaders in Wilmington last week.
Nominating Tom Vilsack, an agriculture secretary in the Obama administration, to run the department again would enrage Black farmers and threaten Democratic hopes of winning two Senate runoffs in Georgia, the N.A.A.C.P. chief, Derrick Johnson, told Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden promptly ignored the warning. Within hours, his decision to nominate Mr. Vilsack to lead the Agriculture Department had leaked, angering the very activists he had met with.
The episode was only one piece of a concerted campaign by activists to demand the president-elect make good on his promise that his administration will “look like America.”
The pressure on the Democratic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Trump. And it is coming from all sides.
When Mr. Biden nominated the first Black man to run the Pentagon last week, women cried foul. L.G.B.T.Q. advocates are disappointed that Mr. Biden has not yet named a prominent member of their community to his cabinet. Latino and Asian groups are angling for some of the same jobs.
Allies of the president-elect note that he has already made history. In addition to nominating retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III to be the first Black secretary of defense, he has chosen a Cuban immigrant to run the Department of Homeland Security, the first female Treasury secretary, a Black woman at the Housing and Urban Development Department and the son of Mexican immigrants to serve as the secretary of health and human services.
And, perhaps most notably, he picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate, making her the first Black person and the first woman to be vice president.
But the rollout of Mr. Biden’s cabinet and White House picks has created angst among many elements of the party. While some say he appears hamstrung by interest groups, others point out that his earliest choices included four white men who are close confidants, leaving the impression that for the administration’s most critical jobs Mr. Biden planned to rely on the same cadre of aides he has had for years.
It is the Electoral College, not the direct vote of the American people, that will decide the next president on Monday, when its 538 electors, chosen mostly during state party gatherings earlier this year, sign their ballots and send them to Washington.
For generations, the body was viewed as a rubber stump to the will of the voters — but as with many things, scrutiny came only when things seemed to go wrong. The 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush showed that a mere 537 popular ballots could tip Florida’s Electoral College votes, and with it, the presidency. The 2016 election proved that a president could lose by millions of popular votes, yet be handed the White House anyway.
Yet it’s hard to think of a time before this year that dragged the Electoral College, and American democracy with it, into such dangerous territory.
The election, where it was clear by evening on Election Day that Mr. Biden had won the popular vote, turned into a nail-biter that stretched on for days — largely because of the high volume of mail ballots in a few states rich in Electoral College votes. President Trump used the delay to make false claims from the White House that fraud was underway and that he had actually won.
Mr. Trump then turned to the courts to swing the Electoral College his way, backing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
As judges dismissed his suits, the president urged Republican state lawmakers to send delegations to the Electoral College who would vote for him anyway.
That has left electors like Ronda Vuillemont-Smith, a conservative Oklahoma activist who will cast her vote for Mr. Trump on Monday, believing the president will stay in office.
“I’m going to be quite honest with you, I think Donald Trump will be president for a second term,” she said, citing continued attempts to overturn the results.
Yet for other electors, the frantic moves by a sitting president — indeed, most of the election itself — has led to soul-searching, not just on who should be president, but also on how the president should be chosen.
WASHINGTON — Since President Trump took office, the Justice Department has been under sustained attack as he questioned whether the lawyers and investigators who serve the country were loyalists who supported his personal agenda or traitors who should be rooted out and fired.
But under President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., the department’s former and current employees hope that his pick for attorney general will shield the agency from partisan battles and political concerns.
More than 40 current and former department employees shared with The New York Times who they thought should run the Justice Department. They all wanted someone who would stand up for the employees and protect them from undue political influence, something that they say Mr. Trump’s attorneys general have largely been unable or unwilling to do.
They said that restoring the department’s independence from the White House, repairing morale and engaging both racial justice advocates and law enforcement officials on matters of race and criminal justice were the biggest issues facing the incoming leader.
While Democratic administrations often prioritize the work of the civil rights division, the protests prompted by the death of George Floyd this spring have made such work an urgent priority, regardless of which party is in office, most interviewees said. To that end, they hoped for an attorney general who had the strong support of civil rights groups. But many acknowledged that for that to be consequential, on issues including complicated ones like policing, that person should be able to work with groups like the Fraternal Order of Police.
WASHINGTON — Incensed by a Supreme Court ruling that further dashed President Trump’s hopes of invalidating his November electoral defeat, thousands of his supporters marched in Washington and several state capitals on Saturday to protest what they contended, against all evidence, was a stolen election.
In some places, angry confrontations between protesters and counterprotesters escalated into violence. There were a number of scuffles in the national capital, where four people were stabbed, and the police declared a riot in Olympia, Wash., where one person was shot.
Chris Loftis, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol, said that two people were in custody in connection with the episode in Olympia but that specific details about the shooting were not yet clear, including the condition of the person who was shot.
State and federal courts have rejected dozens of lawsuits by Mr. Trump’s allies seeking to challenge the election results, but the pointed refusal by the Supreme Court on Friday to hear a case filed by the attorney general of Texas loomed the largest yet. By foreclosing one of the last legal avenues Mr. Trump had to potentially block Mr. Biden from succeeding him on Inauguration Day, it left many of his partisans casting angrily about for answers.
Trump flags dotted the air above Freedom Plaza in Washington, where demonstrators — including many members of the far-right Proud Boys group — chanted “four more years!” and vowed not to recognize Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect.
At Georgia’s Statehouse in Atlanta, speakers used megaphones to cast doubt on the election as American flags and Make America Great Again hats bobbed in the crowd. Across the street, a few dozen anti-Trump activists — many dressed all in black — heckled the president’s supporters.
Pro-Trump rallies were mounted in a number of other communities around the country. More than 100 people gathered at a rally in St. Paul, Minn., to display Trump flags and call on the state’s Democratic governor to loosen coronavirus restrictions in the state. In Spanish Fort, Ala., a suburb of Mobile, about 100 people demonstrated, according to footage posted by WKRG-TV. “We want to be part of the ‘Stop the Steal’ national movement,” one speaker there said. “That’s why we’re here.”
The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It was also a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.
The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the Republican leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November.
Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The Republican Party sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument.
Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 Republican House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss.
“The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.”
A day after President Trump’s stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, Republicans around the country seemed to be having trouble finding the right words.
The bellicose statements from some quarters that had characterized the postelection period — claims of switched and missing votes, a “rigged” election and even threats of secession from Texas Republicans after the ruling on Friday — had given way to something resembling muted resignation and an acceptance of the inevitable.
Many were completely silent, even in the face of a tweet from Mr. Trump himself in which he vowed, “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!”
Of 17 Republican attorneys general who had endorsed the case, filed by Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, none agreed to be interviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Paxton, who had issued a statement calling the decision “unfortunate,” did not respond to a request for comment.
Other attorneys general who issued statements mostly seemed to acknowledge that all legal avenues had been exhausted in efforts to overturn the election results.
On Capitol Hill, the response was particularly muted among the 126 House Republicans who signed onto an extraordinary amicus brief backing the suit. Aides to Representatives Kevin McCarthy of California and Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the party’s top leaders in the House, had no comment. And questions and requests for comments sent to the office of more than two dozen top congressional Republicans on Saturday were either declined or ignored.
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who assembled the House’s friend of the court brief, merely posted a quote on Twitter from John Quincy Adams, implying he had done what he could: “Duty is ours, results are God’s.”
Just one lawmaker who signed on, Representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, appeared newly ready to accept the president’s road had run out.
In a statement, he called the Texas suit “the best and likely last opportunity” to get the Supreme Court to rule on the election, and said the court’s decision “closed the books on the challenges to the 2020 election results.”
President Trump on Saturday excoriated Attorney General William P. Barr, castigating him on Twitter for not violating Justice Department policy to publicly reveal an investigation into President-Elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son.
The critical tweets about Mr. Barr, who has largely been a close confidant to the president since he was appointed two years ago, came a day after the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking to subvert the results of the election. With the Electoral College set to meet on Monday and Congress to formally tally the results in January, the prospects for Mr. Trump to change the outcome are all but gone.
The president’s statements undermining faith in the electoral process — and his assaults on institutions — have escalated since the election on Nov. 3. Privately, he has railed against Mr. Barr for not bolstering his false claims of widespread fraud in the election and instead affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.
His messages on Saturday echoed his attacks on his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whom he blamed for recusing himself from overseeing the investigation into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 election. For months, Mr. Trump publicly berated Mr. Sessions before firing him in November 2018, a day after the midterm races.
In his tweets, Mr. Trump called the attorney general a “big disappointment” and denounced him for not disclosing the existence of an investigation into Hunter Biden for possible tax evasion, which he said would have given Republicans an edge in the election. Doing so would have violated department guidelines about publicly discussing ongoing cases. Mr. Trump benefited from that policy himself in 2016, when officials kept quiet the inquiry into possible conspiracy between his campaign and Russian officials.
“Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth to the public, before the Election, about Hunter Biden,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Joe was lying on the debate stage that nothing was wrong, or going on – Press confirmed. Big disadvantage for Republicans at the polls!”
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