Biden brushes off Trump’s effort to undermine election

Bloomberg

President-elect Joe Biden shrugged off Donald Trump’s effort to challenge the election results, forging ahead with transition planning even as the president pursues a multi-state legal fight backed by Republican allies and the Justice Department.
Trump’s campaign said it would file a federal lawsuit in Michigan that seeks to stop the state’s top election official from certifying Biden’s win. The campaign filed a similar suit in Pennsylvania a day earlier, which Secretary of State Kathryn Boockvar moved to dismiss, arguing Trump’s lawyers failed to present a case.
Biden leads Trump in Michigan by more than 148,000 votes and in Pennsylvania by more than 46,000 votes.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, meanwhile brushed aside calls from the state’s two US senators, both fellow Republicans, for him to resign over unspecified election irregularities. Biden leads in the state by more than 12,000 votes.
Trump’s campaign has so far produced no evidence of widespread irregularities or fraud, and it isn’t clear his effort to delegitimise the election is finding much traction among the public. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 79% of Americans believe Biden won the election, including nearly 6 in 10 Republicans. Just 3% say Trump
won, according to the poll, while 13% say the election hasn’t been decided.
Two separate groups of international observers have said the election was fair and free of major irregularities. One of them, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, criticised Trump for “baseless” attacks on the integrity of the vote. The other, the Organization of American States — which was invited by the State Department to observe the election — pointed out that Trump has repeatedly sought to cast “aspersions” on the election process.
Biden called Trump’s approach an embarrassment, and his lawyers said the legal challenges would fail and the Democrat will inevitably be sworn in as president on January 20.
“How can I say this tactfully? I think it will not help the president’s legacy,” Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Delaware. His campaign announced dozens of members of “agency review teams” that will begin preparing the government for Biden’s administration once the administrator of the General Services Administration, a Trump appointee, allows the transition to begin with a finding that the Democrat is the incoming president.
Biden allies have complained that the GSA administrator, Emily Murphy, is obstructing the transition by so far refusing to issue the finding.
Republicans have largely backed Trump’s effort, though a handful — including Ohio Senator Rob Portman, in a statement — have called on the president to produce whatever evidence he has of widespread fraud.

‘Russia isn’t planning any contacts with Biden yet’
Bloomberg

A senior Russian diplomat said that his country hasn’t made contact yet with President-elect Joe Biden’s team and doesn’t plan to, reinforcing the Kremlin’s unenthusiastic approach to the new American leader.
Deputy Foreign Ministry Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow was put off by the experience in 2016, when the Russian ambassador to the US came under a storm of criticism for his outreach to the incoming Donald Trump administration.
“We have refrained from making such contacts this time and don’t plan to” make them, he said in comments to the state-run Tass news service that he later confirmed by text message.
Ryabkov said there’s been no progress so far on extending the New START treaty, the last major nuclear accord between Russia and the US.