Trump looks to fill more vacancies
NEW YORK — With his return to New York, President-elect Donald Trump faces a pressing need to set more of the foundation blocks of his presidency in place by filling vacancies for secretary of state and other top posts.
Distraction looms, however, much of it created by the president-elect himself, whose extraordinary claims of widespread voter fraud during a 12-hour Twitter offensive on Sunday cast a shadow over the legitimacy of an election that he actually won.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted in the afternoon before alleging in an evening tweet “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to questions seeking evidence of the claims.
The charges come amid a recount of presidential votes in up to three battleground states, an effort joined by Hillary Clinton despite decidedly tamped-down expectations that the election’s outcome will not change. Wisconsin election officials are expected to meet today to discuss a possible timeline for a recount of that state’s presidential votes; recounts are possible in Pennsylvania and Michigan as well.
There’s been no evidence of widespread tampering or hacking that would change the results; indeed, Clinton’s team said it had been looking for abnormalities and found nothing that would alter the results.
Trump narrowly won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and, as of Wednesday, held a lead of almost 11,000 votes in Michigan, with the results awaiting state certification today. All three would need to flip to Clinton to upend the Republican’s victory, and Clinton’s team says Trump has a larger edge in all three states than has ever been overcome in a presidential recount.
Still, Trump and his lieutenants assailed the effort led by the Green Party’s Jill Stein, calling it fraudulent, the work of “crybabies” and, in Trump’s view, tweeted from Florida, “sad.” Clinton leads the national popular vote by close to 2 million votes, but Trump won 290 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232, not counting Michigan.
Trump scheduled a series of meetings in New York today with prospective administration hires, after spending Thanksgiving weekend at his Palm Beach, Fla., estate. But in an unusual public airing of internal machinations, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway warned Sunday that the president-elect’s supporters would feel “betrayed” if he tapped former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as secretary of state. Romney, until recently a fierce Trump critic, was “nothing but awful” to him for a year, she said.
The spectacle of close aides who speak frequently with Trump in private being so explicit about their views in public raised the possibility, at least, that Conway was acting at Trump’s behest by suggesting the president-elect was being generous by considering his former political rival. Romney denounced Trump in scathing terms during the campaign, prompting Trump to call him a “choker” who “walks like a penguin.”
People involved in the transition process said Trump’s decision on his secretary of state did not appear to be imminent. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker and John Bolton, a former ambassador to the U.N., also have been under consideration.
