In fresh blow to Trump, U.S. court rejects Pennsylvania election case
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an attempt by U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to block President-elect Joe Biden from being declared the winner of Pennsylvania, dealing another significant setback to Trump’s bid to overturn the Nov. 3 election.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” wrote Stephanos Bibas on behalf of a three-judge panel.
“Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” wrote Bibas, who was nominated by Trump.
The Trump campaign and its supporters have tried and failed to convince judges of election irregularities in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, all critical to Biden’s victory.
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” said the appeals court opinion.
“On to SCOTUS!” wrote Jenna Ellis, a Trump campaign attorney, on Twitter after the ruling, referring to a planned appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud.”
Pennsylvania certified Biden, who won the state by 80,000 votes, as its winner this week. Under Pennsylvania law, the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of the state’s 20 electoral votes.
Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede to his Democratic rival and continues to claim, without evidence, widespread voter fraud.
But as his legal challenges to the results fail, Trump said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden when it meets on Dec. 14, the closest he has come to conceding the election.
On Monday, Trump’s administration cleared the way Biden to transition to the White House, giving him access to briefings and funding even as Trump vowed to continue fighting the election results.
Biden won the election 306-232 in electoral votes, including Pennsylvania’s 20. Even if Trump overturned the outcome in Pennsylvania, he would still need to reverse the result in at least two other states to remain as president.
TIME RUNNING OUT
While Trump and his supporters continue to wage legal battles, time is running out as states as states have until Dec. 8 to resolve election disputes.
Legal experts have said the cases have no chance of success and may be aimed at undermining confidence in the election. Polls have showed a majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election and many believe the election was tainted, despite a lack of evidence.
Soon after Friday’s ruling, Trump posted a video from Newsmax on Twitter about alleged voter fraud in Nevada.
The Trump campaign filed the Pennsylvania case earlier this month, saying that county election officials had treated mail-in ballots inconsistently and asking U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann to halt certification of the results.
Some counties had allowed voters to fix minor deficiencies with their ballots, such as a missing “secrecy envelope,” while others did not.
Brann dismissed the case on Nov. 21, saying the case was based on “strained legal arguments” and “speculative accusations.”
The Trump campaign said it appealed on the “narrow” question of whether Brann improperly refused to let it amend the lawsuit a second time.
The campaign wants to add back allegations it dropped from the case, including a claim that its due process rights were violated.
The appeals court said many of the claims by Trump campaign are matters of Pennsylvania law but noted the campaign already lost on those issues in state court.
“It never alleges that anyone treated the Trump campaign or Trump votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or Biden votes,” said the opinion. “The campaign’s claims have no merit.”
The other judges on the panel, Brooks Smith and Michael Chagares, were nominated by George W. Bush, a Republican.
CNBC: “President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani ... argued to a federal judge in Pennsylvania that there had been ‘widespread national voter fraud’ in the presidential election that led to Joe Biden’s projected victory.”
Donald Trump warned us all that he would try to invalidate our ballots in the courts, so we shouldn’t be surprised that’s now exactly what he and his team are doing.
The good news is that we have the chance to stop Trump’s legal campaign in its tracks. POLITICO reports that “small-dollar contributors could play a critical role in funding legal efforts” to push back against Trump, especially in light of how much impact grassroots donors have already had this election cycle.
We don’t have the kind of funds we need to land a courtroom knockout punch against the president and his anti-democratic efforts. Not after the race we just ran.
That’s why we’re reaching out to you -- we know you don’t want to see Donald Trump use the legal system to steal the election.
We don’t either. But the only way to stop a power-hungry chief executive is to respond with a grassroots push that shows the full power of the American people.
Thank you for not letting the one-term president in the Oval Office slither his way out of defeat.
Progressive Majority
Progressive Majority PAC is leading the fight against Trump's dangerous and divisive agenda by helping elect progressive Democrats to Congress and protecting the gains we made in the midterms. This movement is powered by progressives like you.
Progressive Majority PAC 410 1st St, SE Suite 310 Washington, DC 20003
Due to a total lack of donations for November the organization’s funding situation has become critical. We are going to have to stop the train and focus solely on bringing in the relatively few donations we need to function.
Chavez was the president of Venezuela between 1999 and his death in 2013.
Two years prior in 2005, Maradona had protested against George W. Bush during the president's tour of Latin America shortly after being elected for a second term in the White House.
Maradona wore a "Stop Bush" t-shirt that had the "s" in "Bush" replaced by a swastika during a march in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, where he also announced, according to The Guardian: "I'm proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this human trash, George Bush."
Maradona's anti-Bush sentiment was replicated widely across Argentina at the time, with many of the country's citizens angry at his push for free trade across the Americas.
"We are marching against the creation of a free trade region in the Americas, against the repayment of the foreign debt and against the militarization of Latin America," said Argentinian economist Julio Gambina at the same protest.
Chavez, also at the protest, added: "Every one of us has brought an a shovel, an undertaker's shovel, because here in Mar del Plata is the tomb of [the deal]."
Argentina has entered three days of mourning following the death of Maradona.
The former Napoli and FC Barcelona star's coffin is currently being displayed at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, with over one million people expected to visit.
Stacey Abrams has some reassuring words for us as we wait to see who will win the Senate races in Georgia and control the Senate: “We have seen what is possible when we work hard and when we work together. We know we can win Georgia. Now let’s get it done, again.”
We know we’re in good hands. After massive voter suppression in Georgia during the 2018 elections, Stacey Abrams stepped to the political forefront to protect every vote across the state with her project Fair Fight. And when Trump tried to “crown himself the winner,” Stacey Abrams and her team continued to fight to ensure every vote would be counted.
After turning Georgia blue in the presidential race, Abrams is preparing for the next fight -- winning control of the Senate. We’re proudly supporting the work Fair Fight and Stacey Abrams are doing to protect our democracy. But today, we need to know where you stand.
FOCUS: Juan Cole | In Bid to Kill a Biden Return to Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel Assassinates Leading Nuclear Scientist Juan Cole, Informed Comment Cole writes: "The Iranian newspaper Ettela'at reports that on Friday, what it called 'armed terrorist elements' mounted an assault on the automobile carrying Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was badly wounded in the midst of the clash between his security team and the assailants and was transported to hospital, where he died of his injuries."
Fakhrizadeh, an eminent nuclear scientist, was the head of the Research and Innovation Organization within the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.
Iran’s chief justice, Ayatollah Sayyed Ibrahim Ra’isi, characterized the attack as by “foreigners and international Zionism,” with, he said, “the sinister objective of forestalling the scientific progress of the country.”
The Iranian government believes that Israel’s Mossad carried out the assassination.
The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, also blamed Israel, but included among the culprits “global arrogance,” the regime’s term for American imperialism in the Middle East.
Likely, the operation, whether by Israel or Saudi Arabia or both, was intended to spike tensions in US-Iranian relations so as to make it more difficult for Joe Biden to start back up the 2015 nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Israel does not acknowledge its covert operations, but it seems the most likely culprit.
Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May, 2018, and has strangled Iran with an unprecedented trade and financial embargo. Iran had given up 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program in 2015 in return for a lifting of international and US economic sanctions. Because Trump’s secretary of the treasury, Steven Mnuchin, has threatened third-party sanctions on firms and countries that deal with Iran the country has never received any sanctions relief from any quarter, despite its having completely abided by its obligations 2015-2018. In fact, the US moved from sanctions to blockade, preventing Iran from so much as selling its petroleum. Since 2018, in order to demonstrate its displeasure in having been taken for a ride, Iran has acted out by contravening some nuclear deal stipulations in a relatively minor ways.
In other words, the nuclear deal had an excellent prospect of forestalling Iran from ever moving to militarize its civilian nuclear enrichment program, but Trump’s destruction of it has had no success in stopping Iran from enriching uranium, in stockpiling it, and in establishing spheres of influence in Syria and Lebanon.
Trump and his cronies are afraid that Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, both of whom were deeply involved in the negotiations toward the nuclear deal, will revive it. Reviving the JCPOA could bring Iran into the world economy and lead it to be open to pressures from Europe and the US to change its behavior.
Israel and Saudi Arabia do not believe that Iran has no military nuclear ambitions, and they see it as a geopolitical enemy whom they would like the US to crush for them and keep weak, as the Bush administration broke the legs of Iraq, once one of the more formidable countries in the Middle East. That is, the likely alternative to a return to the 2015 nuclear deal is not the unstable status quo but eventually a US-Iran war that would be cheered on by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, and has not had one since about 2003. Back then, Fakhrizadeh was the head of it. After it mothballed its rudimentary military experiments once the existence of its nuclear enrichment program was revealed by spies of the People’s Jihadi (Mojahedin-e Khalq) Organization (the MKO or MEK), Iran kept to civilian enrichment. Uranium in nature is mostly inert U-238, but it is sprinkled with volatile U-235. If you enrich uranium 238 with more U-235 than is found in nature, you increase its volatility. If you enrich to 3.5% you make it into fuel that can run nuclear reactors. It gets hot and you can boil water with it that turns turbines. That’s all it is, an exotic way of boiling water. Iran has a reactor, and is building more, down at Bushehr.
You’d have to enrich the uranium to about 95% U-235 to make a bomb. Iran has never enriched beyond 19.5%, which is the level that is needed to run its small medical reactor, and is the cut-off for Low Enriched Uranium. There is no reason to think that Iran knows how to enrich to 95% for a bomb or has the various additional technologies that would be necessary to construct a bomb. Sometimes you see US journalists allege that Iran has “enough” enriched uranium to make “two bombs.” That is frankly ridiculous. You don’t make bombs by the amount of uranium you possess that is enriched to 3.5% or 4.5%. Without the necessary level of enrichment, you’d just have some rocks that could be used to heat water.
Iran accepted extensive and intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency of its civilian nuclear enrichment program under the JCPOA from 2015 on. It was earlier under inspects as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The IAEA has consistently certified that no Iranian nuclear material has ever been diverted (i.e. to possible military uses). No country actively under UN inspection has ever developed a nuclear weapon.
Fakhrizadeh was hardly the only high-powered Iranian nuclear scientist, and murdering him by terrorism likely has no implications for Iran’s ongoing enrichment.
My guess is that the regime will decline to take the bait by reacting in a dramatic way. As for reviving the nuclear deal, the Iranian foreign minister has said that if the US went back to observing the JCPOA and lifted the financial and trade blockade on Iran, Iran would go back to observing its obligations strictly.
That is what Trump, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman are deathly afraid of.
More than 205,000 new cases were reported Friday -- which likely consists of both Thursday and Friday reports in some cases, as at least 20 states did not report Covid-19 numbers on Thanksgiving.
The US has now reported more than 100,000 infections every day for 25 consecutive days and hospitalizations remain at record high levels -- with more than 89,800 patients reported nationwide Friday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. A record was set just a day earlier, with a staggering 90,481 hospitalizations, according to the project. And the nation recorded a daily death toll of less than 1,000 only twice this week -- while the two days prior to Thanksgiving each saw more than 2,000 American deaths reported.
And while there is more good news on the vaccine front, for now Americans need to "hunker down" and prepare for a difficult winter ahead, according to Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and a visiting professor at George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.
"We cannot let our guard down," she told CNN Friday night. "The vaccines will make a big difference in the spring and the summer; they're not going to make a difference right now."
Based on the current Covid-19 numbers in the US, the country is far from rounding the corner, she said.
"If anything, we are rounding the corner into a calamity," Wen said. "We're soon going to exceed well more than 2,000 deaths, maybe 3,000, 4,000 deaths every single day here in the US."
That projection has been echoed by other experts including Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, who predicts the country's daily death toll will likely double in just the next 10 days.
Iraq Fears Trump's Final Weeks Could See a US-Iran Confrontation Louisa Loveluck and Mustafa Salim, The Washington Post Excerpt: "The Iraqi government is on edge as the Trump presidency enters its final weeks, fearing that a last-minute confrontation between the United States and Iran could erupt on Iraqi soil." READ MORE
Honestie Hodges. (photo: Hodges Family/NYT)
Honestie Hodges, Handcuffed by the Police at 11, Is Dead at 14 Glenn Rifkin, The New York Times Rifkin writes: "Honestie Hodges, who was handcuffed by the police outside her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when she was 11, a frightening incident that drew outrage and national headlines in 2017, died Sunday. She was 14." READ MORE
A Black Lives Matter rally. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/WP)
This photo released by the semiofficial Fars News Agency shows the scene where Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was reportedly killed in Absard, a small city just east of Tehran, Iran, on Friday. (photo: Fars News Agency/AP
Wendsler Nosie, Sr. speaks with Apache activists in a rally to save Oak Flat, in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (photo: Molly Riley/AP)
Trump Is About to Hand Over Sacred Apache Land to a Mining Company Ian Kumamoto, VICE Kumamoto writes: "President Donald Trump's administration has sped up a process that will hand over the rights to a sacred Apache Indigenous area outside of Phoenix, Arizona, to a mining company by next month - a full year ahead of schedule."
Trump officials are rushing to hand over Oak Flat in Arizona to Resolution Copper by next month, a full year ahead of schedule—while they still can.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to release its official environmental impactstatementthat will give the go-ahead to transfer Oak Flat in the Tonto National Forest to the mining company Resolution Copper, a joint venture by mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP, a year before its planned December 2021 date.
The announcement came just days after the Trump administrationissuedan executive order that declared the U.S. dependence on China for “critical minerals” a national emergency and vowed to “cut down on unnecessary delays in permitting actions.”
Some see the expedited process to mine the Oak Flat as part of a final push to weaken environmental regulations and fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to bring back mining jobs from abroad.
“They are afraid of what a (Joe) Biden administration would do and so they want to get this done now,” Randy Serraglio, who works at the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, said.
Once the Environmental Impact Statement is released, Tonto National Forest will have at most 60 days to finish the land exchange, but critics think it will try and execute as fast as possible to avoid litigation and public opposition.
Democratic Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva and Senator Bernie Sanders have introduced abillcalling for the land transfer to be repealed. “If the land exchange happens, it will be difficult to roll back,” Grijalvatold the Guardian.
“The Trump administration is cutting corners and doing a rushed job just to take care of Rio Tinto,” he said. “And the fact they are doing it during COVID makes it even more disgusting. Trump and Rio Tinto know the tribes’ reaction would be very strong and public under normal circumstances but the tribes are trying to save their people right now.”
The desertous and otherworldly Oak Flat is located in the outskirts of the San Carlos Apache reservation, and has been a highly contested area for more than two decades. In 1995, enormous copper deposits were found 7,000 feet, or five Eiffel Towers, beneath the ground. Resolution Copperhopesto extract 1.4 billion tons of ore and 40 billion pounds of copper cliff by using a technique calledpanel caving, which could likely cause the collapse of surrounding land and leave a giant crater once the company is finished mining.
Local Indigenous communities are worried about the destruction of the land, particularly Apache Leap, the site of amass suicidein which warriors jumped off to escape an onslaught of U.S. soldiers in the 1870s. On top of that, the area is also considered to have the best-preserved artifacts of Apache culture and is the location of Sunrise coming-of-age ceremonies.
“I tell people that it’s no different than when people talk about the Holy Land,” Wendsler Nosie Sr., an Apache activist, told VICE News. “This place is a place where you can be born and die of old age because it has everything… It’s a provider for all.”
In an email, Dan Blondeau, a spokesperson for Resolution Copper, ensured that Resolution Copper was going to protect Apache Leap and that it was “partnering with consulting Western Apache tribes… (to) protect and conserve culturally significant Emory Oak groves.”
But Native opposition against the mine is strong and Nosie Sr., who lives in Oak Flat, said that the company feels “no responsibility to talk to the tribes.” He also says it hasn’t spoken to him or others he knows about some of Apache’s spiritual concerns.
In 2012, a Senatehearingaddressed the issue of the Apache peoples’ fight against Resolution Copper.
“Senator (Jon) Kyl and I (are constantly) urging that the San Carlos Apache Tribe just sit down, just listen to the Resolution Copper,” Senator John McCainsaid. “They refuse to do it.”
Two years later, McCain pushed for the land transfer to Rio Tinto, through one of his infamous “midnight rider” maneuvers. Although the Obama administration protected the Oak Flats through a “Historic Places” designation in 2015, this does not override the 1872General Mining Law, which includes a provision that favors industry over environmental concerns when it comes to mining.
Despite Resolution Copper’s promise that it will bring great economicbenefitsto the Apache community and that it is working with locals to ensure it respects sacred land, theGuardianreportedthat Rio Tinto destroyed an ancient Aboriginal site in Western Australia earlier this year even after it claimed it had been working with Native people for decades.
“We deeply regret the events at Juukan Gorge and have unreservedly apologised to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people,” the company wrote in a publicstatement.
In its final year in power, Trump has green-lit similar projects that were deemed detrimental to the environment by past administrations. InAlaska, the Trump administration is hastening the auctioning off of drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In Minnesota, officialsrenewedmineral leases to a copper mining company inside the Superior National Forest.
Aside from its cultural and spiritual significance, Oak Flat is known as a place of awesome natural splendor and is home to endangered ocelots, the charismatic hedgehog cactus, and its namesake tree, the Emory oak.
Some locals believe that the only hope to save the natural area now would be a major legal intervention by the next administration.
“Joe Biden can thank Native people, 90 percent of whom voted for him, for winning Arizona,” Serraglio said. “I hope he can recognize that and do the right thing.”
Jacques will leave once his successor is chosen or at the end of next March, whichever date comes first, according to the company.
Two other executives are also departing: Chris Salisbury, head of the iron ore business, and Simone Niven, group executive for corporate relations. Salisbury is stepping down from his position immediately and will leave the company at the end of the year. Niven will also exit at the end of December.
