FINALLY!!!! THE GSA IS ACTING LIKE THEY BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY

 

                         …Even Chris Christie believes that Biden won the election

 

More and more Republicans in DC are acknowledging the President Elect

 

Well, Emily Murphy, the head of the GSA has finally sent the letter to the Biden team saying that they will be receiving the money (over $6 million) and the go ahead for the transition team.  Of course, as expected, (how many times have I made that statement?) President Trump took the credit for the decision, saying that he instructed Ms. Murphy to do this, while she says she decided on her own to send the letter.  Whatever the case, neither Ms. Murphy nor the president referred to Joe Biden as the "President Elect".

The reality is that several prominent Republicans said over the weekend that President Trump’s legal arguments had run their course and they called on him to allow the presidential transition process to begin.

Chris Christie, a Trump confidant who helped prepare the president for the debates that almost didn’t happen, he called the conduct of Trump’s legal team a “national embarrassment.”  Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.) said Trump had “exhausted all plausible legal options” and urged him to concede, which I doubt that we will ever actually hear from Trump’s mouth.  And even the Red state Senator. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said it’s time to begin the transition.

These comments mark the latest signs of dissent with the president, directly from within the president’s party, with increasingly more Republicans urging Trump to accept the results of the election, and to move on.

In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Christie said the president should give up his legal strategy. “Elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” he said.

“The conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie added, noting that Trump’s lawyers have made a number of fraud allegations but they have offered no evidence to back them up in court.

Christie criticized Trump’s lawyers for offering false conspiracy theories at news conferences and other media appearances.

“They don’t do it in the courtroom,” the 2016 Republican presidential candidate said, suggesting that the attorneys were fearful of making their nonsense arguments under oath before federal judges.

“It must mean the evidence doesn’t exist,” Christie said.

Christie said the Republican Party should focus on trying to win Georgia’s two runoff elections on Jan. 5 to secure the Senate majority rather than continuing with its unsuccessful legal challenges of the presidential election results.  Christie is correct, as the runoff elections on January 5^th are not looking very good for the Republicans and they should be focusing their efforts on that election.  If the Democrats are successful, the Senate will then be under the control of the Democrats.  It’s that important.

“The rearview mirror should be ripped off,” Christie said.

The president’s legal team was thrown into race Sunday when two Trump attorneys, both Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, released a statement abruptly distancing the campaign from the third attorney, Sidney Powell.  She was also the head of the group that Trump is so upset with.

Giuliani, Ellis and Powell had appeared at a news conference last Thursday where they made a number of totally baseless accusations about the integrity of the election.  Powell in particular has been so vocal in lobbing some of the most bazaar claims, alleging a conspiracy that involved “communist money,” from the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez...?  As usual, they offered no evidence or proof..

At the beginning of the news conference, Giuliani said that he, Ellis, Powell and the other attorneys present were “representing President Trump and we’re representing the Trump campaign.” Ellis introduced the group as “an elite strike force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign to make sure that our Constitution is protected.”

But on Sunday, Guiliani and Ellis, then distanced themselves from Powell.  

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” Giuliani and Ellis said in their statement. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

But on MSNBC, they showed an earlier Trump tweet where Trump had personally listed Sidney Powell as a great Trump legal team member.

Two advisers to Trump, who of course, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, they said that the president disliked the coverage Powell was receiving from Tucker Carlson and others, and that several allies had reached out to say she had gone too far. The advisers also said that she fought with Giuliani and others in recent days.

The president believed Powell was causing more harm than help. “She was too crazy even for the president,” a campaign official said.

Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Late Saturday night, after a federal judge threw out Trump’s legal attempt to invalidate millions of votes, Toomey congratulated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory and encouraged the president to accept that result.

“President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Toomey said in a statement, noting that the deciding judge, Matthew Brann, is a “longtime conservative Republican.”

This result, Toomey noted, followed Georgia’s certification Friday of Biden’s victory there and Michigan’s GOP legislative leaders rejecting efforts to block the certification of Biden’s clear victory in that state.

“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country,” Toomey said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who congratulated Biden in a statement after his Nov. 7 victory address, also urged Trump to “begin the full and formal transition process” and criticized the president’s efforts to pressure state and local officials.

“President Trump has had the opportunity to litigate his claims, and the courts have thus far found them without merit,” Murkowski said in a tweet Sunday night. “A pressure campaign on state legislators to influence the electoral outcome is not only unprecedented but inconsistent with our democratic process.”

Senate Republicans have by and large avoided commenting on Trump’s actions, with more than 40 not responding to requests for comment Thursday and Friday about the president’s effort to have Michigan legislators reject the Biden victory there of more than 150,000 votes.

Republicans are aware that any perceived lack of loyalty to the president could prompt him to attack the defectors, just as Trump did Saturday night when he called Brann a “product of Senator Pat ‘No Tarriffs’ Toomey.”

Of course, as expected, Trump tweeted: “No friend of mine.”

Even some Trump backers who support pushing ahead with legal challenges said that Biden probably will take office and that the General Services Administration should allow the Democratic transition team access to the federal agencies and key briefings, along with office space and millions of dollars in funding, so they can hit the ground running on Jan. 20.

“I just think that you have to begin that process, give the incoming administration all the time they need,” Cramer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Cramer said that the transition process should have begun at least a week ago. But he added that the transition could begin even as Trump’s legal team continued to press its cases in the states.

This is, Cramer said, “just a simple legal process.”

Copyright G. Ater 2020