Pelosi elected to 4th term as House speaker

The Biden transition team announced that it surpassed its goal of naming 100 staff members by the end of the year with Wednesday’s announcement that included 28 new members of the White House staff. 

The staffers all will work in several key offices including the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of the Vice President, Office of the Staff Secretary and Oval Office Operations. 

The transition team noted that the Obama-Biden 2008 transition team only had 50 staffers at this same point. Many of the new hires have ties to the Obama White House. 

The transition team also said that 61% of staffers are women and 54% are people of color. Moreover, 11% of all White House staff are members of the LGBTQ+ community and almost 20% are first-generation Americans. 

-ABC News’ Beatrice Peterson

In a news conference Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., signaled that she’s got the votes to retain the speaker’s gavel, predicting enough Democrats will turn out for her when the new Congress convenes Sunday. 

With just 222 Democrats eligible to be seated, she can only afford to lose five detractors, given a couple of vacancies and another race in New York where a winner has not yet been certified. That’s a heavy lift for Pelosi given there are still eight members in her caucus who opposed her in 2019, and two more who voted present in 2017.

Pelosi also dismissed news that Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., will object to the certification of the Electoral College votes next week.

“I have no doubt that on next Wednesday, a week from today, that Joe Biden will be confirmed by the acceptance of the vote of the Electoral College as the 46th president of the United States,” she said.

On the stimulus fight, Pelosi pressured Senate Republicans to act on behalf of struggling families.

"The Democrats and Republicans in the House have passed that legislation. Who is holding up that distribution to the American people? Mitch McConnell, and the Senate Republicans," Pelosi said. "In blocking it, they are in denial of the hardship that the American people are experiencing now -- health wise, financially, in every way, their lives and livelihood in many cases are on the brink."

"This $2,000 will go a long way, not only to sustain the financial security of America's working families but will help small business to thrive as well," she added.

-ABC News’ John Parkinson

President Trump, who has spent a lot of time over the past week at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, took to Twitter to attack Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s brother -- except that Raffensperger doesn’t have a brother. 

In a tweet Tuesday evening just before midnight, the president called Raffensperger and Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp a “complete disaster” as he peddled his baseless claims of election fraud. 

“Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China, and they definitely don’t want ‘Trump’” he wrote in a tweet. “So disgusting! #MAGA” 

Trump’s tweet bolsters a popular theory in far-right conspiracy circles in recent days -- that the Georgia's secretary of state is related to a Huawei Enterprise Storage Solutions executive with the same name. Huawei has been blacklisted by the Trump administration for its ties China. 

Raffensperger, however, does not have a brother. He has two sisters and neither work for Huawei. 

The White House has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the tweet, and has not responded to whether the president plans to take it down, issue a correction or has apologized to the Georgia secretary of state. 

-ABC News’ Ben Gittleson and Adam Kelsey

Vic Reynolds, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, participated in a press conference Wednesday morning at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta where he reaffirmed that the signature match audit conducted in Cobb County using GBI investigators found there were only two ballots out of approximately 15,000 that shouldn't have been accepted as they were. 

"The results of that audit confirmed the accuracy of the initial determination of the Cobb County election department in all but two cases. In other words, out of the 15,118 absentee ballot oath envelopes that were randomly audited, all of those were appropriately counted with the exception of two. Two were allowed that should not have been," Reynolds said.

But even though election officials should have initiated the "cure" process for those absentee ballots, they were still not fraudulent. 

While the absentee ballots were randomly selected, Reynolds said that every ballot that was rejected due to a signature mismatch or a missing signature were automatically included in the audit. 

"I would also note for the record as well that during the course of the audit, there were no fraudulent absentee ballots identified in the process," Reynolds added. 

Reiterating what the secretary of state's previously said, Reynolds said the audit found Cobb County had a 99.99% accuracy rate with envelopes GBI audited. 

-ABC News’ Quinn Scanlan