WASHINGTON • President Donald Trump's refusal to allow President-elect Joe Biden and his transition staff access to government offices, secure communications and classified briefings has prompted growing warnings, including from Republicans, that keeping Mr Biden in the dark potentially endangers the country.
Mr Biden yesterday pulled further ahead from Mr Trump in the election by winning the state of Arizona, as called by US networks. Arizona gives Mr Biden a 290 to 217 lead over Mr Trump in the Electoral College, with 270 needed to win the White House.
On Capitol Hill, several Senate Republicans insisted that Mr Biden should at least be given access to the President's daily brief, the compendium of the nation's most closely guarded intelligence secrets and assessments of threats like terrorist plots and cyber attack vulnerabilities.
Their call amounted to an acknowledgement that Mr Biden would be declared the victor in the election.
"I don't think they need to know everything," Senator Roy Blunt, a member of the Senate Republican leadership, said of Mr Biden's advisers. "I think they do need to know some things, and national security would be one of them."
"President-elect Biden should be receiving intelligence briefings right now; that is really important," said Senator Susan Collins, a member of the Intelligence Committee and one of the few Senate Republicans to publicly acknowledge Mr Biden's victory. "It's probably the most important part of the transition."
Giving Mr Biden and his top aides access to the daily briefing, as Mr Trump got right after his election four years ago, would address only a fraction of the problem. Mr Biden will confront an array of complex dilemmas: bruised relationships with foreign allies, a weak economy and sluggish recovery, perhaps the most high-risk period yet of the coronavirus, and a need to distribute a vaccine to 330 million Americans.
The President-elect's team is concerned that it is being shut out of planning for the vaccine distribution, a huge undertaking that the incoming administration expects to inherit the moment Mr Biden is sworn in. His advisers said they have not had access to the details of Warp Speed, the project that has vaccine distribution planning well under way, and understand little about its workings.
It is focusing on logistical challenges and policy questions, one senior Biden adviser said, like how to prioritise who gets a vaccine and how to make distribution equitable along racial and socioeconomic lines - a priority of Mr Biden's, but one rarely discussed by Mr Trump.
His stonewalling is already creating modest risks in the President-elect's dealings with foreign leaders: Mr Biden made his first contacts on unsecured telephone lines, without State Department translators or briefings about what those leaders might seek from him.
Aides to Mr Biden said that so far, the risks were manageable.
Mr Biden's team of more than 500 former officials and outside experts has so far embraced workarounds, talking over encrypted apps like Signal to shield their conversations from the Chinese and meeting in outdoor coffee shops with government officials they once worked alongside.
The conversations are circumspect because of rules on both sides limiting their exchanges of information, participants said.
Meanwhile, the first small cracks have begun to appear in the Republican wall of support for President Trump and his unfounded claims of voter fraud. A growing number of elected officials and party leaders signalled on Thursday that they would indulge Mr Trump's conspiracy theories for only so long. A few were willing to openly contradict him.
Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio said it was time to call Mr Joseph R. Biden Jr the "President-elect".
The Republican Attorney-General of Arizona said Mr Trump would not end up winning his state, despite the President's protestations.
Influential party financiers and strategists have begun to weigh in, as well.
"The President does a disservice to his more rabid supporters by insisting that he would have won the Nov 3 election absent voter fraud," said an editorial in The Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper owned by the family of the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. "That's simply false."
Mr Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed essay under the headline, "This election result won't be overturned".
NYTIMES
