US President-elect Joe Biden will name his first cabinet picks on Tuesday; his chief of staff said, even as Donald Trump continues to evoke unsubstantiated fraud despite growing dissent from within his own party.
Biden has continued his preparations to assume the presidency on January 20; regardless of Trump’s moves — increasingly dismissed by Republicans — to try to undo the results of the November 3 vote.
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, “You are going to see the first of the president-elect’s cabinet picks on Tuesday”.
He declined to say which posts the president-elect would announce; though Biden said last week he has already decided on a person for the key position of Treasury.
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A large number of Republicans have either recognised Biden’s victory or at least urged the General Services Administration; — the usually low-profile agency that manages the federal bureaucracy — to release federal funds for the Biden transition.
With Trump refusing to acknowledge the election outcome, Biden and his top aides have been denied briefings on sensitive domestic and foreign policy issues — most urgently the coronavirus pandemic battering the country.
‘Without merit’
On Sunday Trump again tweeted about “massive and unprecedented fraud;” an assertion dismissed by a long list of judges in several states.
Trump’s latest legal setback came on Saturday; when a Pennsylvania judge threw out the president’s fraud claims there in a scathing judgment.
Pennsylvania was a must-win state this year, and went solidly into Biden’s column after backing Trump in 2016.
Trump’s campaign told a judge it was appealing the ruling by US District Judge Matthew Brann to the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals; a day before the state’s 67 counties are set to certify their results and send them to state officials.
Brann wrote that Trump’s team had presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” in their complaints about mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.
His ruling paved the way for Pennsylvania to certify Biden’s victory there, which is scheduled to take place Monday.
Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College votes that ultimately decide who takes the White House by 306 to 232.
