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Biden Moves to Counter Trump Message on Vaccine

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“President-elect Joe Biden’s team is feverishly working to get a messaging plan in place to sell a skeptical public on the first FDA-backed coronavirus vaccine, believing the Trump administration has set the effort back significantly,” Politico reports.

“Biden implied on Friday that he’s not going to wait until he takes office to start counteracting Trump’s mixed messaging on the vaccine, which includes downplaying the public health threat of the coronavirus while hailing the unprecedented speed at which a shot was developed.”

How the GOP Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy

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“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 also was 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 New York Times reports.

“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 G.O.P. 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 on Election Day.”

Trump Absent as Congress Works Around the Clock

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Playbook: “This presidency has been filled with hard-to-believe split screens, but we’re seeing perhaps the starkest display of dissonance yet. Congress has been working around the clock to cut a series of end-of-year deals, and President Trump is on an unending tear of falsehoods, suggesting that he is the rightful winner of the election, which, of course, he’s not. He’s losing support — Republicans are sick of the gripes, the Supreme Court is summarily dismissing his arguments, and the nation’s governing apparatus is preparing for Joe Biden’s presidency.”

“Congress, meanwhile, has spent this week and will spend next week trying to put in place a series of policies to help America bounce back from the coronavirus. It avoided a government shutdown, with the intent of giving itself more time to cut a bipartisan deal. Yet Trump has been absent — a bit player in a government he’s meant to be steering and a country he’s meant to be leading.”


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Trump Rips Supreme Court

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President Trump blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to reject his bid to overturn the election results in Texas, calling it a “disgraceful miscarriage of justice.”

Said Trump: “The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!”

In his Saturday morning tweet storm, Trump also retweeted a post that called for Attorney General Bill Barr to be fired, adding his own comment: “A big disappointment!”

Washington Post: Trump’s spin on his Supreme Court failure is as bad as his legal case.

Durham Sought Records from Christopher Steele

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“The prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the intelligence community’s handling of the Russia probe has been searching for evidence that FBI agents mishandled classified information,” Politico reports.

“John Durham, whose investigation began in early 2019, has specifically zeroed in on records belonging to Christopher Steele, the British former MI6 officer and longtime FBI source. Four years ago, Steele alerted the bureau to information he had collected about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the course of opposition research paid for by Democrats. Steele’s dealings with the FBI have been a source of great consternation and speculation among Republicans, all the way up to President Trump.”

Texas GOP Floats Secession After Justices Ruled

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Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West put out a statement tonight:

“The Supreme Court, in tossing the Texas lawsuit that was joined by seventeen states and 106 US congressman, has decreed that a state can take unconstitutional actions and violate its own election law. Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.”

Trump Skipped Party After Supreme Court Ruling

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New York Times: “The president, who at a White House Hanukkah party earlier in the week eagerly mentioned the pending court case in his remarks, was scheduled to attend another holiday party around the time the ruling came down. But around 8:30 p.m., guests were informed that Mr. Trump would not be coming down from the residence to speak.”

Trump Seeks Special Counsel to Probe Hunter Biden

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“President Trump has expressed interest in pursuing the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of fraud in the November elections and issues related to Hunter Biden,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“In recent days, the president has directed advisers to look for people who could serve in such a position, one of the people said, as lawsuits and other efforts by Mr. Trump and his campaign to reverse the election results founder. White House officials and allies of the president on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have also pushed for the appointment of a special counsel.”

FDA Clears Pfizer Vaccine

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“The Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use on Friday,” the New York Times reports.

“With the decision, the United States becomes the sixth country — in addition to Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico — to clear the vaccine. Other authorizations, including by the European Union, are expected within weeks.”

Biden Considering Cuomo for Attorney General

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is one of several contenders under consideration by President-elect Joe Biden for the role of attorney general, the AP reports.

“The other three contenders at the moment include former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, said the person, who cautioned that no decision had been reached and no announcement was expected imminently.”

Email to Hunter Biden Raised Questions About Taxes

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“Hunter Biden’s former business partner sent him an email in 2017 saying he did not disclose on his tax returns $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian natural gas company where he sat on the board,” according to a copy of the email obtained by NBC News.

“The message from Eric Schwerin, then president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, says Hunter Biden would need to ‘amend’ his 2014 returns to reflect the ‘unreported’ income, according to the copy of the email.”

Justices Won’t Hear Texas Challenge to Election

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The Supreme Court has denied Texas’ last-ditch effort to overturn the election results in four battleground states that voted for Joe Biden.

The court’s unsigned order was short: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”

New York Times: “The move, coupled with a one-sentence order on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that the court refused to be drawn into President Trump’s losing campaign to overturn the results of the election last month.”

Top House Republican Joins Suit to Overturn Election

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“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was among 20 new names added Friday to an amicus brief filed by a majority of House Republicans in support of a Texas-led effort with the Supreme Court to effectively reverse the results of the presidential election,” the Washington Post reports.

“With the names added Friday, 126 of the 196 House GOP members have now signed onto the brief.”

For members: Why the GOP Has Given Up on Democracy

Key People Are Leaving Facebook

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BuzzFeed News: “Since May, a number of Facebook employees have quit, saying they were ashamed of the impact the company was having on the world or worried that the company’s inaction in moderating hate and misinformation had led to political interference, division, and bloodshed. Others have been fired for documenting instances of preferential treatment of influential conservative pages that repeatedly spread false information.”

“But in just the past few weeks, at least four people involved in critical integrity work related to reducing violence and incitement, crafting policy to reduce hate speech, and tracking content that breaks Facebook’s rules have left the company. In farewell posts obtained by BuzzFeed News, each person expressed concerns about the company’s approach to handling US political content and hate speech, and called out Facebook leadership for its unwillingness to be more proactive about reducing hate, incitement, and false content.”

About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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