Crooked Media - What A Day: Leave of Grassley

Sources close to Joe Biden and Democratic leaders have begun signaling a desire to move beyond the Trump administration’s corruption and abuses of power, while Donald Trump and his allies are still in the middle of trying to light election results on fire. 
 

• A staffer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has corroborated Raffensperger’s allegation that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pressured him to throw out a bunch of legally cast absentee ballots to swing the Georgia election towards Trump. Graham denied it, and to prove his very legal intentions, announced that he also spoke with election officials in Arizona and Nevada. Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State said she never spoke with Graham, though, so Graham was specifically calling up Republicans in states where Trump lost to chat about trashing ballots. It is partly cloudy in Washington today with a high of 51, beautiful resigning weather! 
   
• In spite of Republicans’ attempted election crimes, Georgia’s recount will wrap up on Wednesday and affirm Biden’s historic victory: Election officials from 29 counties have finished their audits without finding discrepancies in the results. (Officials in Floyd County and Fayette County did find a few thousand previously uncounted ballots, which should net Trump around 1250 votes—nowhere near enough to swing the 14000 vote margin.) Georgia’s audit of its voting machines likewise found no evidence of fraud or tampering, unless you count the one with eye holes that Lindsey Graham has been crouched in dressed as the Hamburglar for the last week. 
   
• Democratic leaders have reportedly decided to rely on public pressure and fed-up Republicans to force Trump into allowing the transition to move forward, rather than take legal action, at least for now. It could be a long wait. Two weeks after Election Day, a growing number of Republicans now acknowledge that Biden sure does seem to be the president-elect, but stop miles short of suggesting that their disgraced leader stop putting national security and vaccine distribution at risk by blocking the transition. Maybe tomorrow?

Democrats also sent a signal that they may not be spoiling for a fight about Trump in the post-Trump era. 
 

• Biden has reportedly told advisors that he doesn’t want his presidency consumed by divisive investigations into Trump, but that he’d leave those probes up to his independent Justice Department. While we can certainly expect the Justice Department to operate much more independently from Biden’s White House than it did under Trump, reports like this could send a signal to the eventual department leadership (and the still-criming Trump administration) about Biden’s preferences. 
   
• In the same vein, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have notified the Supreme Court that they might drop their fight for grand jury materials from Robert Mueller’s investigation, saying that the newly-elected Congress will have to decide whether to continue seeking them. If it doesn’t, and if Biden’s Justice Department chooses not to release those documents, we may never know the full extent of Trump’s abuses.

Uniting the country, or at least backing away from constant social unrest, is a very cool goal we can all get behind. Another cool goal is a full accounting of the Trump administration’s unprecedented corruption and criminality, especially while Trump is still in a position to wreak havoc, and when Trump 2.0 could be just around the corner.

Facebook is still profiting from ads placed by a Ukranian neo-Nazi group that the company banned a year ago. The far-right Azov movement has created at least a dozen new Facebook pages since July, and used them to place dozens of ads. Azov-affiliated groups have a history of using violence, and using social media to both organize those actions and share the results. The movement’s Intermarium project, which aims to connect white-nationalist movements in western Europe and the U.S. (the LinkedIn of nightmares), has also ducked around a Facebook ban to continue facilitating violence on social media. The State Department has designated the Azov movement a “nationalist hate group,” and Facebook knows it’s been using the platform to expand beyond Ukraine, but seems content to continue taking its money.

• Joe Biden has announced several hires for White House senior staff, including several veterans of his presidential campaign and none of his daughter’s husbands, weirdly. 
   
• Trump tweet-fired Chris Krebs, the head of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs had been using an agency website and his personal Twitter to debunk Trump's post-election conspiracy theories. 
   
• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), age 87, has tested positive for coronavirus. Thank god this virus will instantly disappear after two weeks ago.
   
• Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH) “a complete ass” after Brown asked Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) to wear a mask when he’s exhaling on staffers. We may never know how Grassley was exposed, what with all of his GOP colleagues taking public-health measures so seriously.
   
• Rudy Giuliani stepped in to represent the Trump campaign in its “big” Pennsylvania case aimed at stopping the state from certifying its results, promptly making claims of voter fraud and irregular ballot processing that other judges (and some of Trump’s own lawyers) have repeatedly rejected as unfounded. Rudy then went on to learn exciting new things about the law, and the word “opacity.” For this Giuliani has requested $20,000 a day. 
   
• Senate Republicans failed to advance Judy “bring back the gold standard” Shelton’s nomination for a Fed board seat, after three Republicans came out against her and two others were banished to coronavirus quarantine. Also, Lindsey Graham fist-bumped Kamala Harris? If anyone understands this man’s deal, our DMs are open.
   
• The Justice Department has moved to drop all drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges against former Mexican Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, for some kind of normal, non-corrupt-deal reason.
   
• Internal Facebook data shows that slapping a warning label on Trump’s false claims does nothing to stop them from going viral. Labels on the posts decrease reshares by around eight percent, a drop in the bucket given how widely Trump’s disinformation spreads. 
   
• Dolly Parton was a major funder of the 94.5 percent effective Moderna vaccine, the indisputable Jolene of coronavirus vaccine candidates. (You’ll find someone else, Pfizer.)
   
• The "fleets" are upon us. These are tweets that disappear automatically, instead of being manually deleted by a user who expected more engagement, as the lord intended. 

Russia didn’t mount any major hacking or disinformation operations to interfere in the election—possibly because Americans did such a good job of it on our own. U.S. officials said that a series of cyber operations, better overall preparation, and the exposure of Russian malware may have helped to keep hackers at bay, but the Kremlin may have simply decided it wasn’t worth the risk of extra sanctions: Four years of Trump successfully banged up American democracy, Americans were satisfactorily anxious about the very prospect of foreign election interference, and Trump himself churned out so much election disinformation that Russia didn’t need to lift a finger. Bringing jobs back to the U.S., baby!

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New data suggests that coronavirus immunity could last for years, and possibly even for decades. That research hasn’t been peer reviewed, but it’s the most comprehensive study on the topic to date, and provisionally extremely good news. 

New York will allow nonbinary gender designations on state drivers licenses. 

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has handed the Trump campaign its 25th post-election legal defeat.

The Biden transition team is reportedly vetting Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM) for the Secretary of Interior post. If nominated, she would be the first-ever Native American Cabinet secretary.