President Obama called Hillary Clinton to persuade her to concede the White House on election night, according to a forthcoming book on Clinton’s defeat, The Hill reports.
“Obama’s call left a sour taste in the mouths of some Clinton allies who believe she should have waited longer, and there’s now a fight playing out between the Obama and Clinton camps over whether to support an effort to force the Rust Belt states to recount their votes.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) “is already reaching out to top Hillary Clinton donors about the 2020 presidential race,” the New York Post reports.
“If she were to run, it could set up an interesting clash of New Yorkers for the Democratic nomination. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already made it clear he wants to make a run for the White House.”
David Weigel on Jill Stein’s efforts to wage a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania:
“Someone was going to tap into mounting liberal anger that — for the second time this century — a Democrat has lost the presidency while winning the popular vote. But Democrats can’t believe that the someone was Stein. In all three of the contested states, Stein campaigned for votes; in Michigan and Wisconsin, her total was greater than the gap between Clinton and Trump.”
“For Democrats, Stein’s role in the campaign resurrects some of the worst aspects of the campaign. It directs liberal anger toward a hopeless goal.”
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“Laura Ingraham doesn’t want to be just another flack. The popular conservative radio talk show host is willing to accept the position of White House press secretary in Donald Trump’s administration, but she wants a bigger title, a role in policymaking and a seat at the decision-making table with the president,” Politico reports.
“It’s not yet clear how Ingraham, a regular on Fox News who boosted Trump’s anti-establishment candidacy throughout the campaign, would mesh with the rival power centers that currently define Trump’s inner circle.”
“President-elect Donald Trump on Friday chose Washington insider Donald McGahn to be his White House counsel, giving him the job of untangling potential conflicts of interest that the New York businessman’s presidency may present,” Reuters reports.
“McGahn, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, had been the chief counsel of the Trump campaign and was one of the few members of the Republican establishment to embrace the candidate.”
“The Secret Service is in negotiations with the Trump Organization to take over two vacant floors in the gilded 68-story Fifth Avenue tower,” law enforcement sources told the New York Post.
“The federal agency and the NYPD plan to run a 24/7 command post out of the space that would be housed at least 40 floors below Trump’s $90 million penthouse triplex, where wife Melania and their 10-year-old son Barron will continue to reside at least through the spring, sources said.”
“The lease deal alone could cost more than $3 million a year, based on prevailing rates in the building.”
“On the back of a debunked fear of election tampering in key swing states, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has raised nearly $5 million to fund a recount effort,” Politico reports.
“As of early Friday morning, Stein had raised just over $4.7 million dollars to a newly updated goal of $7.0 million, according to a tracker on her campaign website.”
“Tech and civil liberties advocates are imploring the Obama administration to rein in the government’s massive surveillance apparatus before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, fearful he will carry out his campaign promises to register Muslims, spy on mosques and punish companies that offer Americans unbreakable encryption,” Politico reports.
“But many national security experts and former administration officials say the effort is almost certainly doomed to fail… And some civil libertarians blame Democrats for being too content to allow President Barack Obama to wield the sweeping, post-Sept. 11 surveillance powers he inherited from George W. Bush, rather than rolling them back so that no future president could use them.”
Wall Street Journal: “Donald Trump’s victory this month allowed Republicans to largely skip the intraparty reckoning that descended upon Democrats instead. But Mr. Trump’s White House win raised a different, unexpected question for a handful of Republicans: did breaking with the GOP presidential nominee carry a political price for some this month, and could it bring political peril in the next midterms for others?”
“The initial evidence seemed to suggest that splitting with Mr. Trump was a dangerous move. Three GOP Senate candidates who broke with Mr. Trump at various times in the campaign lost on election night, including Rep. Joe Heck in Nevada and two incumbents, Sen. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and Sen. Mark Kirk in Illinois.”
“In the scarcely two weeks since Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin have spoken at least twice by phone,” McClatchy reports.
“Their aides have had additional contacts.”
“That’s more contact than Trump is known to have had with any other world leader since he defeated Clinton in the Nov. 8 election. But it is a concrete display of what many predicted would be a reversal in the standoffish relations between the two nuclear powers should Trump win election.”
Think Progress: “Members of the Electoral College should not make Donald Trump the next president unless his sells his companies and puts the proceeds in a blind trust, according to the top ethics lawyers for the last two presidents.”
“Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.”
“Rival factions of Republicans are locked in an increasingly caustic and public battle to influence President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, leaving a prominent hole in an otherwise quickly formed national security team that is unlikely to be filled until next week at the earliest,” the New York Times reports.
“The debate inside Mr. Trump’s wide circle of formal and informal advisers — pitting supporters of one leading contender, Mitt Romney, against those of another, Rudolph W. Giuliani — has led to the kind of dramatic airing of differences that characterized Mr. Trump’s unconventional and often squabbling campaign team.”
“And it traces the outlines of the enduring split in the Republican Party between establishment figures who scoffed at Mr. Trump’s chances of victory and the grass-roots insurgents who backed him as a disrupter of the Washington power structure.”
“The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation,” the Washington Post reports.
“Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human ‘trolls,’ and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.”
“It has been a tough couple of days for Mitt Romney. After the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP nominee met with President-elect Donald Trump, it was rumored — and then stated explicitly by Vice President-elect Mike Pence — that Romney was being considered for Secretary of State,” Politico reports.
“And it’s been all downhill from there, as Trump supporters and surrogates have piled on, slamming Romney for his attacks on Trump during the GOP primary and his refusal to endorse Trump. Now Kellyanne Conway, a senior transition adviser and Trump’s campaign manager, has joined the fray.”
President-elect Donald Trump “has received two classified intelligence briefings since his surprise election victory earlier this month, a frequency that is notably lower — at least so far — than that of his predecessors,” the Washington Post reports.
“A team of intelligence analysts has been prepared to deliver daily briefings on global developments and security threats to Trump in the two weeks since he won. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, by contrast, has set aside time for intelligence briefings almost every day since the election.”
“Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald J. Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin — a combined gap that is narrowing. Her impassioned supporters are now urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Mr. Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College,” the New York Times reports.
“In recent days, they have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Mr. Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to assure the election was not hacked.”
Meanwhile, NBC News reports Green Party nominee Jill Stein appeared to have met her initial fundraising goal for recounts of the vote in the three key swing states.
“Wilbur Ross, the billionaire investor considered the ‘king of bankruptcy’ for buying beaten-down companies with the potential to deliver profits, is expected to be President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for commerce secretary,” the Washington Post reports.
“Ross helped shape the Trump campaign’s economic agenda, particularly its hard-line stance on the need to renegotiate — or withdraw from — free trade agreements. Trump’s advisers have been split on that issue, which some economists warn could spark a damaging trade war, but Ross’s nationalist views are considered in line with the president-elect’s own.”
Meanwhile, Politico reports Trump is likely to tap Todd Ricketts, the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and a member of the powerful conservative Ricketts family, to be deputy secretary of commerce.
The New Yorker profiles President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn:
Flynn broke rules he thought were stupid. He once told me about a period he spent assigned to a C.I.A. station in Iraq, when he would sometimes sneak out of the compound without the “insane” required approval from C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. He had technicians secretly install an Internet connection in his Pentagon office, even though it was forbidden. There was also the time he gave classified information to NATO allies without approval, an incident which prompted an investigation, and a warning from superiors. During his stint as Mullen’s intelligence chief, Flynn would often write “This is bullshit!” in the margins of classified papers he was obliged to pass on to his boss, someone who saw these papers told me.
The greatest accomplishment of Flynn’s military career was revolutionizing the way that the clandestine arm of the military, the Joint Special Operations Command, undertook the killing and capture of suspected terrorists and insurgents in war zones. Stanley McChrystal, Flynn’s mentor, had tapped him for the job. They were both part of the self-described “Irish mafia” of officers at the Fort Bragg Army base, in North Carolina.
Taegan 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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