United States president Donald Trump and a key government agency have granted president-elect Joseph Biden permission to start accessing state resources in order to transition to the presidency, after garnering a projected 306 electoral votes in the just-ended presidential election.
Trump, who has been challenging the results of the election in which he got a projected 232 electoral votes, said her made the recommendation to the General Services Administration (GSA) for Biden to use state resources, ahead of the presidential inauguration in January next year.
He said, “I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused – and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”
GSA also wrote a letter to the Biden transition team giving them a heads up to access millions of dollars and state institutions.
VOA reports that despite his legal setbacks, Trump had refused to authorize his administration to cooperate with Biden on his transition to power.
Biden’s aide, Ron Klain, on Monday rebuked Murphy, the Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration, for refusing to ascertain that Biden is the apparent election winner so that federal funding can be made available for the transfer in control of the government and Biden aides can talk with officials at numerous agencies.
Trump’s legal fight has been fruitless so far, with his campaign losing or withdrawing 34 lawsuits claiming vote and vote-counting fraud in key battleground states Biden was projected to win to claim a four-year term in the White House.
Trump has not upended the vote count in any state, leaving intact Biden’s unofficial 306-232 majority vote in the Electoral College. It determines U.S. presidential elections, not the national popular vote, although Biden leads there, too, by more than 6 million votes.
Trump’s legal team filed an appeal Sunday after its latest courtroom defeat contesting the election came late Saturday in Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral votes Biden won by an 81,000-vote margin.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann declared that the Trump campaign had presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” in its effort to throw out millions of votes in Pennsylvania and hand the state’s electoral votes to Trump.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” Brann wrote.
