By LIBBY CATHEY, ADIA ROBINSON LAURAN KING, CATHERINE THORBECKE, LAUREN LANTRY and KIARA BRANTLEY, ABC News
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is slated to hand over control of the White House to President-elect Joe Biden in 54 days.
Here is how the transition is unfolding. All times Eastern:
Nov 27, 1:23 pm
New lawsuit by conspiracy minded Trump ally Sidney Powell seeks to nix Georgia election results
Sidney Powell, the attorney recently removed from the president’s legal team, filed a lawsuit in Georgia this week alleging, without evidence, a vast conspiracy against Trump built on unproven claims of numerous instances of voter fraud in the state.
The 104-page suit, filed in the U.S District Court in Atlanta on behalf of Trump electors and Republican officials, among others, is demanding numerous longshot remedies, including decertifying the state’s election results, preventing the results from being transmitted to the electoral college and disqualifying Biden’s electors in favor of Trump’s electors.
“While the bedrock of American elections has been transparency, almost every crucial aspect of Georgia’s November 3, 2020, General Election was shrouded in secrecy, rife with ‘errors,’ and permeated with anomalies so egregious as to render the results incapable of certification,” the suit states. “Accordingly, the results for President and Congress in the November 3, 2020 election must be set aside. The results are infected with Constitutional violations.”
Biden won the state of Georgia by more than 12,000 votes, a victory confirmed by a hand tally last week. State elections officials also began a machine recount at the request of Trump’s team, permitted because he lost by less than 0.5 percentage points.
Like many suits before it, Powell’s case relies on affidavits from various poll watchers, audit watchers and self-described experts who claim, without documentation or supporting evidence, that they witnessed a wide range of fraudulent activity, including switching votes from Biden to Trump, counting illegal votes and shutting observers out of the process.
The suit rests heavily on a debunked conspiracy theory that has been trafficked widely on the internet which blames the Dominion Voting Systems for secretly flipping thousands of votes from Trump to Biden. Veteran elections officials from both parties have refuted the claim, as did the Trump administration’s own cybersecurity expert.
Dominion released a lengthy statement Friday rebutting the claims in the lawsuit — calling it “a bizarre election fraud conspiracy that — were it possible –would necessarily require the collaboration of thousands of participants… This quite simply did not occur.”
“Sidney Powell’s wild and reckless allegations are not only demonstrably false, but they have also led to stalking, harassment, and death threats to Dominion employees,” the Dominion statement says. “We intend to hold Ms. Powell, and those aiding and abetting her fraudulent actions, accountable for any harm that may occur as a result.”
Other conspiracy theories cited in the lawsuit as “evidence” include an affidavit from a man who claims he went undercover in Antifa and overheard a top Dominion official talking about rigging the election. The lawsuit also claims, with no evidence, that a water pipe burst on election night, which briefly delayed the counting of ballots, was part of a conspiracy to prevent Trump poll watchers from seeing them process ballots.
-ABC News’ Olivia Rubin
Nov 27, 1:15 pm
Trump campaign loses appeal in federal case
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the Trump campaign’s appeal of a scathing U.S. District Court ruling out of Pennsylvania in which the campaign’s request to set aside potentially thousands of legally cast ballots was refused.
The opinion was just as blistering as the one that preceded it.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” said the opinion from a three-judge panel authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee.
Nov 27, 12:24 pm
Without evidence, Trump disputes Biden’s popular vote lead
Despite telling reporters Thursday that he would leave the White House if Biden is inaugurated, while still not conceding, Trump continued on Friday to baselessly cast doubt on the president-elect’s record-breaking popular vote lead.
In a tweet Friday morning, Trump wrote, “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous “80,000,000 votes” were not fraudulently or illegally obtained” and went on to allege — without citing any proof — that Biden “got a big unsolvable problem!”
As reported previously by ABC News, the Trump campaign and its allies have lost at least 30 cases brought in the effort to overturn the results of the election, according to an ABC News count.
Biden won the Electoral College by the same margin as Trump did in 2016 and leads in the popular vote by over 80 million votes.
-ABC News’ Alisa Wiersema
Nov 27, 11:49 am
Progressives worry about lobbying, corporate ties in Biden administration
Several leading candidates for the roles in president-elect Joe Biden’s administration have (come under scrutiny)[] for their work in corporate America or lobbying history.
Michele Flournoy, a leading candidate for the head of the Department of Defense after serving in senior posts at the Pentagon during the Clinton and Obama administrations, has faced criticism from progressive and left-leaning activists for her ties to defense contractors and a strategic advisory firm that has faced questions about its clients.
Several other Cabinet selections and initial White House hires for the Biden administration, along with members of his transition efforts, are under the microscope as well, showing an early struggle between the activist and established wings of the Democratic Party, which collaborated to elect Biden and deny President Donald Trump a second term.
-ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel and Soo Rin Kim
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
