Lawyers from one Atlanta law firm, Taylor English Duma, are facing potential conflict-of-interest issues as they represent both outgoing president Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” voter disenfranchisement efforts and the Georgia Secretary of State in election integrity lawsuits, the Atlanta Constitution Journal reports.

It’s not unheard-of for lawyers from major firms to have clients who may have conflicting interests–for example, one client being an oil company and another being an environmental group–but the 170-lawyer Taylor English firm would likely have significant crossover of resources in two major cases.

Taylor English lawyers represented the Trump campaign in its quest to invalidate ballots in Chatham County, claiming county election officials mishandled ballots that should make them void.  A judge threw out the case due to lack of evidence.

The firm is also defending the Georgia Secretary of State in a lawsuit related to the security of the state voting system.

Daily Beast: “President Donald Trump continues to refuse to cede the election. His national security adviser Robert O’Brien is enabling the mayhem, four senior officials told The Daily Beast. O’Brien—once viewed as a potential check on Trump’s erratic national security demands—endorsed the installation of a pair of Trumpists at the Pentagon’s highest levels, while a defense secretary O’Brien has long opposed was fired by tweet.”

“Officials familiar with the matter noted that O’Brien has also pushed national security officials to publicly embrace the absurd Trump message that the election has not been certified and that there are still legal battles playing out across the country that could turn in the president’s favor. ‘If you even mention Biden’s name … that’s a no go. You’d be fired,’ one national security official said. ‘Everyone is scared of even talking about the chance of working with the [Biden] transition.’ Asked if officials in the White House feel comfortable saying Biden’s name in the West Wing, one senior White House official said, half-jokingly, ‘Sure, you can say his name. If you’re talking about who lost the election to the president.’ Behind closed doors, one official claimed, O’Brien has been much more forthcoming about Trump’s loss and the need to prepare for a transition. The problem, the other officials said, is that O’Brien hasn’t made that known to the commander in chief.”

For the ninth consecutive day, the United States recorded more than 100,000 new confirmed cases of coronavirus while setting a new record for new daily cases with 144,000 infections, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Additionally, the US saw more than 1,400 fatalities from coronavirus, and the nation set a new record for the number of hospitalized COVID patients, with nearly 65,400 patients.  The increase of 3,400 hospitalizations is the largest one-day increase since April 13th.

Texas became the first state to surpass 1 million total cases.  The state recorded the most daily cases in the US, with 12,000.  Illinois and Texas led the nation with the most fatalities for the day.

With 50.8% of the vote, President-elect Joe Biden has captured a second largest percentage of the vote than any challenger who has successfully ousted an incumbent president since 1840.

In the 1840 election, Whig challenger William Henry Harrison captured 52.9% of the vote versus incumbent Democrat Martin van Buren’s 46.8%.

The 1932 election saw Democrat Franklin Roosevelt swamp incumbent Herbert Hoover, 57% to 38%.  (Thanks to @BlackCat for pointing out the omission in the original story.)

Even in the so-called “landslide” election of 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan only won 50.7% of the vote.  Incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter took just 41% of the vote, with independent John Anderson winning 6.6%.

(UPDATE 8:22 p.m. ET)  The Biden Transition Team named Ron Klain to be the Chief of Staff-designate 25 minutes after this story was originally posted.

President-elect Joe Biden continues to build the team that he’ll lead into the White House on January 20th, and he may name his Chief of Staff as early as Thursday, CNN reports.

The leading candidate for the Chief of Staff position is Ron Klain, a long-time advisor who served as Biden’s Chief of Staff during Biden’s first three years as Vice President during the Obama Administration.  Klain served in the same position for Vice President Al Gore from 1995 to 1999.

Klain also served as the Obama Administration’s Ebola response coordinator from 2014 into 2015.

NBC News: “Conservative voters are shocked by how Election Day turned out in Georgia, but now Republicans are trying to convert the anger at Democratic successes into GOP wins in January. More than a week after the election, some Republicans continue to cling to hope that a recount will reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s lead here and hand President Donald Trump a victory in a state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for the White House in nearly three decades. While the state remains ‘too close to call,’ Biden is currently ahead by about 14,000 votes.”

“GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler is battling Democrat Raphael Warnock in a runoff. Sen. David Perdue’s race against Democrat Jon Ossoff is rated ‘too close to call’ by NBC News but the Republican has begun to mount a runoff campaign, bending to the possibility that he may fall short of the 50 percent threshold to win outright. Both parties seem eager to make the Senate races a referendum on whether Biden’s party should control Congress. If Democrats were to grab both seats held by Loeffler and Perdue, it would deliver control the Senate chamber to their party.”

The people donating to a Trump campaign-fronted “Stop the Steal” campaign in a futile attempt to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from taking office are likely actually donating to a general fund for the GOP or to Trump’s personal PAC, Reuters reports.

The “Stop the Steal” fund is only keeping amounts over $8,000, which are the vast minority of donations.  Donations over that amount have the first $8,000 going to the GOP and the PAC.

According to the fine print, the first $5,000 goes to the PAC and up to $3,600 would to the GOP.  Donations to the so-called “recount account” is legally limited to $2,800 per person.

Read more here.

CNBC: “There is a growing expectation among President Donald Trump’s advisers that he will never concede that he lost re-election, even after votes are certified in battleground states over the coming weeks, according to multiple people familiar with the president’s thinking. ‘Do not expect him to concede,’ one top aide said. More likely, the aide said, “he’ll say something like, ‘We can’t trust the results, but I’m not contesting them.’’”

“Another adviser said that after the legal battles and recounts, the closest the president is likely to get to a concession is, ‘he’ll acknowledge the results and that we’ll never know how accurate they are… ‘But we’re not there yet,’ the adviser said.”

https://twitter.com/jeffreytoobin/status/1326644658991140866

Two more people who attended outgoing president Donald Trump’s East Room Election Night wait-fest have tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing to at least five the number of people at the event who are now infected, CNBC reports.

Brian Jack, the White House political director, and Haley Baumgardner, a former White House staffer who now works for a private equity firm, both tested positive.

They join Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and Trump campaign lawyer David Bossie, who all attended the East Room gathering, tested positive since the event.

“President Donald Trump is ‘very, highly unlikely’ to win enough of the still-uncounted ballots in Arizona to defeat President-elect Joe Biden, that state’s Republican attorney general said Wednesday. And there is no evidence so far that Arizona’s votes were tainted by fraud or other irregularities that would affect the election, said Attorney General Mark Brnovich. ‘It does appear Joe Biden will win Arizona,’ Brnovich said in an interview on Fox Business.”

“NBC News has not yet projected a winner in Arizona’s presidential election. The Democratic former vice president Biden currently holds a lead of just under 13,000 votes, a margin of less than .4 percentage points over Trump, in the state. But even without Arizona, Biden currently is projected to win 279 Electoral College votes, nine more than he needs to deny the Republican incumbent a second White House term. If he wins Arizona, Biden would get 11 additional Electoral College votes. That would give him even more of a cushion against ongoing legal efforts by the Trump campaign to invalidate a number of ballots in six battleground states, including Arizona” – CNBC.

CBS Minnesota: “A Twin Cities man who identified himself to authorities as a supporter of President Donald Trump is accused of attacking an elderly couple with a golf club over the weekend after he saw them standing at a street corner with a homemade Joe Biden sign. Fifty-year-old Mark Anthony Ulsaker, of Lino Lakes, is charged with second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, threats of violence and assaulting a peace officer in connection to the Sunday incident, court documents filed in Ramsey County show. If convicted of all counts, he could face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.”

“According to a criminal complaint, multiple witnesses called 911 around 3 p.m. after seeing a man, described as stocky and bald, attacking an elderly couple with a golf club in White Bear Lake, at the intersection of Highway 96 and Centerville Road. After the golf club broke during the attack, the man reportedly punched the elderly man in the head. The attacker then retreated to his pickup truck, which was parked at a nearby Walgreens, witnesses told investigators. The elderly woman gave chase. When she approached the truck, the pickup drove toward her, hopping over a curb before speeding off on Centerville Road. The victims, who were in their late 70s/early 80s, told responding officers that they were just minding their business on the street corner with their homemade Joe Biden sign when the attack unfolded, the complaint states. First, the man pulled up in his red truck and shouted ‘f— You!’ at them, which they ignored. A moment later, the man was stomping toward them with a golf club.”

This isn’t even an “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” thing. We’re well past that point. This QAnon wolf in an HGTV reality show host’s clothes is not the certified winner of the CO-3 race yet. She is just as much of an “-elect” as Joe Biden is.

A Republican member of the Mississippi legislature tweeted that he wanted the state to “succeed” from the Union following the election which elevated Democrat Joe Biden to become the next President of the United States, the Washington Post reports.

Representative Price Wallace, who represents Mississippi’s 77th District southeast of Jackson, later deleted the tweet (which is captured in a screen shot below), but he clearly urged the state to *secede* from the United States.

No idea what Dominion is. It has something to do with the election and the ballots, and it’s somehow connected to Hillary Clinton and Soros. Supposedly there’s a whistleblower and the conspiracy goes all the way to the top and blah blah blah. I didn’t read the articles on TheDonald.win or Gateway Pundit that are hyping it.

They’ll start hyping DOMINION like you already know what they’re talking about. And then Hillary and Obama and Biden and Harris and all the rest of them are TOAST. It will be all over the Hill Disqus comments probably later today. What they won’t explain is why, if Trump is such a tough and powerful leader, that he would allow his reelection to be thwarted by such a shadowy organization run by the globalist liberals who he always wins against.

Utah Highway Patrol officers stopped a car speeding through a snow flurry on wet roads, reaching speeds of 130 mph, driven by a man who later admitted that he was driving to Missouri to kill former US Senator and MSNBC commentator Claire McCaskill, the Deseret News reports.

After having to use spike strips to stop the vehicle, police arrested George William Stahl, 36, of Cottonwood Heights, Utah, who was found with a partially-consumed 12-pack of Budweiser, LSD and Adderall in his car.

Police report Stahl was belligerent when arrested and said several times that he was going to Missouri to kill McCaskill.  Stahl was charged with investigation of making a threat of terrorism, failing to stop at the command of police, reckless driving, speeding, DUI and drug possession.

Although Stahl was belligerent and uncooperative during his arrest, he was not tased or shot by police.  Instead, police took Stahl, a white male, to a local fire station for medical treatment before booking him at the Summit County Jail.

Washington Post: “President Trump needs Republicans to help him validate his big lie that the votes of millions of Americans are illegitimate and that the election is being stolen from him. Meanwhile, Republicans need Trump to keep his voters energized for two big Senate runoffs in Georgia. This has created a Faustian bargain of sorts: Republicans keep feeding the illusion that the outcome of the presidential race remains in doubt by refusing to say Trump should concede. And Trump keeps screaming that the outcome is fraudulent, which he may or may not actually believe, but either way, it has utility to Republicans because it keeps his voters in a fury.”

“But at the core of this bargain is a fatal flaw, one rooted in iron facts about the law and the calendar: Republicans cannot sustain this illusion for much longer. Which hints at longer-term truths about the current situation and how it might ultimately wind down. The Georgia runoffs are in early January. What will happen to the Faustian bargain in the interim? There will be still more talk of pulling off a miracle when Congress meets to count the electoral college votes, also in early January. But it will be noise.”

An Economist/YouGov poll finds 86% of Trump voters and 42% overall responded that “Biden did NOT legitimately win the election”. Read more here.

Texas surpassed one million coronavirus cases Wednesday, becoming the first state in the US to surpass that milestone, CNN reports.

While the virus hit the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut the hardest during its first wave, the last five months have seen an explosion of cases in states that did not implement public health guidelines like mandatory mask wearing and social distancing.

Of the top 25 states with the most infections per capita, all but two (Illinois and Minnesota) voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.