TRUMP’S PARTIAL CONCESSION
HE TELLS HIS TEAM TO COOPERATE ON HANDOVER AS OFFICIAL AGENCY CALLS BIDEN WINNER... BUT SAYS HE’LL ‘KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT’ DESPITE LEGAL SETBACKS
DONALD TRUMP has inched towards conceding the presidency after Joe Biden was recognised as the ‘apparent winner’ of the November 3 election.
After weeks of testing the boundaries of US democracy, the president yesterday accepted the formal handover of power must begin.
He relented after suffering more legal defeats in his effort to overturn the result with baseless claims of fraud.
However, he vowed to continue to fight in court after Mr Biden (pictured) was given the go-ahead by the General Services Administration to coordinate with federal agencies for his January inauguration.
However, Mr Trump did tweet that he was directing his team to cooperate on the transition.
‘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 [Murphy] and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same,’ he wrote.
Ms Murphy, the GSA’s administrator, acted after Michigan certified Mr Biden’s victory in the state on Monday. Yesterday Pennsylvania also called him as winner, days after a federal judge threw out a Trump lawsuit seeking to block certification there.
It came as an increasing number of Republicans acknowledged Mr Biden’s victory publicly. In recent days, senior Trump aides including chief of staff Mark Meadows told the president he could no longer justify withholding support to the transition.
Yohannes Abraham, director of the Biden transition, said: ‘The decision is a needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our nation, including getting the pandemic under control and our economy back on track.’
Ms Murphy, a Trump appointee, had faced criticism for failing to begin the process sooner, preventing Mr Biden from working on his administration.
The delay denied the Democratic president-elect access to highly classified national security briefings and hindered his response to the pandemic.
Ms Murphy insisted she came to her decision ‘independently’ and ‘based on the law’. She told Mr Biden in a letter: ‘I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any official including those who work at the White House or GSA.’