Biden begins transition plans as Trump refuses to concede

President-elect Joe Biden has announced new members of the White House staff Tuesday, filling nine new senior-level positions in his administration mainly with loyal advisors and staffers who served on his presidential campaign. 

Campaign chief strategist Mike Donilon will be a senior advisor, along with former Black Caucus Chair Cedric Richmond, who will also serve as Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.  

CNN previously reported that Richmond, who acted as a national co-chair of Biden's campaign, would leave Congress to join the White House in a senior advisor role. 

Longtime Biden aide Steve Ricchetti, who served as Chairman of Biden's campaign and once acted as Biden's Chief of Staff while he was vice president, will serve as Counselor to the President. 

Dana Remus, who served as General Counsel of the Biden-Harris campaign, will be Counsel to the President, and Annie Tomasini, who was seen on the road with Biden as his traveling Chief of Staff, will become Director of Oval Office Operations.

Julie Rodriguez will be the Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Rodriguez served as National Political Director and traveling Chief of Staff for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign before joining Biden's campaign as a deputy campaign manager.

Some key members of Jill Biden's staff were also announced Tuesday: Anthony Bernal, who acted as deputy campaign manager and Jill Biden's chief of staff during the campaign, will serve as senior advisor to the future first lady, and Julissa Reynoso Pantaleon will be her chief of staff. 

The transition team also tweeted the announcement:

Jen O'Malley Dillon will join President-elect Joe Biden's incoming administration as a deputy chief of staff, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN.

The expected move, first reported by NBC News, is the latest in a long line of expected senior White House hires as Biden moves to fill out his administration.

O'Malley Dillon will be joining Ron Klain, who was announced as Biden's incoming chief of staff last week, and Rep. Cedric Richmond, who sources tell CNN is expected to leave Congress and join the Biden White House in a senior role.

Here are some things to know about O'Malley Dillon:

O'Malley Dillon has long told friends that she had no interest in working in the West Wing after the campaign, but after working in top jobs on numerous political campaigns — including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's failed 2020 primary campaign and both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns — the Democratic operative has never served in the White House.

That historical pull, said a person familiar with her decision, proved too much to turn down. O'Malley Dillon is expected to have the operations portfolio in the White House — a role Jim Messina played in Obama's first term.

Read up here on who else could serve in top roles of the Biden administration.

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal lawyer, formally told the court that he will represent the Trump campaign in its long shot case to block Pennsylvania from certifying votes. 

The case and whether it should be dismissed will be argued in federal court on Tuesday. 

The hearing will take place before Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Brann is an Obama appointee, but is a longtime Republican.

Some context: Trump has refused to concede the election and continues to make false claims of widespread voter fraud with no evidence.

On top of the fraud claims, his campaign and GOP allies have filed numerous and flimsy legal challenges in the days following the Nov. 3 election, with some attempting to deprive Biden of the Electoral College votes he's set to receive to become president.

On Friday, nine cases meant to attack Biden's win in key states were denied or dropped. 

General Services Administrator Emily Murphy had a call with David Barram, the GSA administrator during the 2000 election, before this year’s election, according to a source with direct knowledge of the call. 

As administrator, Murphy is the person tasked with officially affirming President-elect Joe Biden has won the election on behalf of the Trump administration — something Trump hasn't done himself.

She needs to sign a letter to release funds to the Biden transition team through a process called ascertainment. This would mark the first formal acknowledgment from the Trump administration that Biden has in fact won the election, but it would also unlock access to national security tools to streamline background checks and additional funds to pay for training and incoming staff.

Barram, a Bill Clinton political appointee, ascertained Bush as then winner of the 2000 election following the historic Bush v Gore recounted that ended up in the Supreme Court.

The call between Barram and Murphy was set up by mutual associates as a way for him to discuss his experience with her, the source said. 

Recently, post-election, Barram said that this year’s election is “dramatically different,” than what happened in 2000. “It was all about Florida. One state, and something like 537 votes. Everyone knew that once Florida was settled, the winner would become clear,” Barram has said. 

Murphy has still not issued an ascertainment letter that would officially trigger the transition period for the federal government.  

AP first reported on the call between Barram and Murphy. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN's Jim Sciutto that he has not yet had contact with President-elect Joe Biden and called the smooth transition of power "important" to fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

"Transitions are important and if you don't have a smooth transition, you would not optimize whatever efforts you're doing right now," Fauci said.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases noted that he has served six administrations which amounted to five transitions of power.

Fauci said the level of communication needed to pass the baton would include communicating to the incoming administration what the level of supply is, getting interaction at "a formal level" with the governors and understanding "every detail" of the vaccine program.

"Not only the two vaccines that have fortunately been shown to be very effective but where we are in Operation Warp Speed with regard to the other candidates which are coming into their own in the sense of clinical trial, accumulating data. All of those things can be done in partnership," the nation's top infectious disease expert said.

Biden warned yesterday that President Trump's unwillingness to accept the outcome of the 2020 election could hamper the incoming Biden administration's ability to rapidly distribute a coronavirus vaccine.

"More people may die if we don't coordinate," Biden told reporters Monday in Delaware.

Biden's comment comes as Trump refuses to acknowledge the reality that he lost the presidential election.

Americans deserve a smooth transition between administrations and not coordinating now could lead to problems in the vaccine rollout process, according to Rick Bright, a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus taskforce, on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday. 

Biden told reporters on Monday that “more people may die if we don’t coordinate,” during a news conference in Delaware. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Bright what isn’t getting done now that needs to happen between the Trump administration and the Biden transition team. 

Bright told Stephanopoulos that there was a lot of coordination that goes into putting the vaccines into vials, shipping them across the country, getting them to doctors and nurses who can administer them and tracking to make sure that people get all the doses that they need at the right time. 

 “There’s a lot of activity that must happen, and we need to coordinate that,” Bright said. “You know that after January 20, a new administration will come in and a new team will take over that responsibility, so it’s important that that new team has all of the information that the current team has so there’s a smooth transition.” 

“Lives are at stake here, if we miss this opportunity to coordinate now, we could experience hiccups or delays that really we don’t need to see,” he continued. “Americans deserve a smooth transition so we can make sure to save their lives from this pandemic.” 

In a last-ditch lawsuit from the Trump campaign to block the certification of election results in Michigan, a federal judge on Tuesday morning pointed out that the Trump campaign’s lawyers had not taken steps to move their case along quickly.

Judge Janet Neff wrote in a court order that the Trump campaign didn’t serve the lawsuit to the defendants, Michigan’s Secretary of State and Wayne County election officials, nor had it asked for the court to consider its case an emergency.

The lawsuit is part of a long shot court effort in Michigan and Pennsylvania from the Trump campaign as it so far fruitlessly trues to block election results in an unlikely play to grab electoral votes from President-elect Joe Biden.

The hiccup Neff points out comes after the Trump campaign has faced ridicule from the legal community for bringing meritless lawsuits to challenge the election, and after the campaign’s case in Pennsylvania faces its own series of setbacks including swapping the legal team there twice and being cut off from making some constitutional arguments.

The Trump campaign lawyers had outlined that they would need intervention to stop the election results in Michigan in the next few weeks because of an initial Electoral College deadline to finalize popular vote results on Dec. 8.  

“Despite setting forth these looming deadlines and despite having characterized their pleading as one requiring ‘emergency’ relief, Plaintiffs have, to date, neither Plaintiffs have, to date, neither served their Complaint on Defendants nor filed any motions for immediate injunctive relief,” Neff wrote.

 If the lawsuit is to continue at all, the Trump campaign has to serve the suit to the Michigan officials by 5 p.m. local time today, she added.

President Trump has “no public events” on Tuesday — the tenth day since the election that those words have appeared on his daily schedule.

Even by Trump’s standards, the empty schedule is a remarkable stretch. Trump’s public appearances since Nov. 3 have amounted to a lie-filled appearance in the briefing room, a wreath-laying at Arlington and remarks about the coronavirus vaccine, all of which ended without any questions.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, some of Trump’s advisers pushed for more official events that would demonstrate the President going about the job he is now desperately trying to retain.

But the White House did not have any announcements or official engagements in the pipeline ahead of Nov. 3 because Trump and his team were so focused on re-election.

Trump has demonstrated little interest in adding more to his schedule, people familiar with the matter said, and few aides have raised the idea with him because of his dark mood and preoccupation with his loss.

Even as President-elect Joe Biden carries out daily public appearances focused on governing, Trump hasn't felt obliged to keep pace — though he has watched Biden's activities from the White House.  

Instead, he is spending mornings in the residence watching television, arriving to the Oval Office later in the afternoon and remaining into the evening. He goes back-and-forth between the office and his adjoining dining room, which is equipped with the large television and where newspapers and magazines are strewn across the table.  

The West Wing had also been without an in-person leader in the weeks since the election as chief of staff Mark Meadows recovered from coronavirus. Meadows returned to the White House on Monday. He had been working while in isolation and spent a lot of time on conference calls with colleagues and Trump, people familiar with what happened told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

President-elect Joe Biden’s national security briefing today will feature a team of diplomatic, intelligence, and defense experts, a transition official said.

“They’ll discuss readiness at the relevant agencies as the president-elect prepares to lead on day one,” the official said.

The briefing comes as Biden has yet to receive classified intelligence briefings as President Trump has refused to concede the race and blocked his administration from taking any of the administrative steps typically taken in a transfer of power, including allowing the General Services Administration to declare that there is a president-elect — a move that triggers the transition process. 

Speaking Monday to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden pointed to the fact that Vice president-elect Kamala Harris continues to receive intelligence briefings in her role on the Senate Intelligence committee.

“The good news here is my colleague is still on the intelligence committee, so she gets the intelligence briefings. I don't anymore,” Biden said. “So that is, but there is a number of Republicans calling for that. I am hopeful that the president will be mildly more enlightened before we get to January 20.”

Biden's briefing Tuesday will not be an official US government national security briefing.