Michigan state legislature closes offices due to 'credible threats of violence'
Law enforcement recommended the Michigan legislature close its offices.
President Donald Trump is slated to hand over control of the White House to President-elect Joe Biden in 39 days.
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Harris arrives on Capitol Hill to vote
Vice President-elect and California Sen. Kamala Harris arrived on Capitol Hill Friday morning ahead of the Senate’s midnight deadline to pass a one-week continuing resolution on a government funding bill to prevent a shutdown.
“I’m here to vote,” Harris told reporters as she entered the building.
Harris is expected to vote to break the filibuster on the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual military budget bill, which Trump has twice threatened to veto.
Harris was last on the Hill on Nov. 17 to vote against a Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
-ABC News’ Allison Pecorin
Trump plants time bombs for GOP with refusal to admit realities: Analysis
The Trump presidency is now destined to end with falsehoods -- a blizzard of baseless accusations about the election that he lost, as distilled into a final plea to the Supreme Court.
Trump's ask is for the nation's highest court to overturn the results of the election. As unlikely as he is to succeed, that breathtaking statement doesn't even encapsulate the principles at stake that will matter long after Biden is inaugurated.
Some 106 House Republicans -- more than half the GOP conference -- are backing the president's effort to get the Supreme Court to step in. More than that number continue to resist labeling Biden "president-elect," just three days before the Electoral College will cement Biden's victory based on certified results from every state.
So much of the Trump era is ephemeral and transactional. Some Trump loyalists will essentially pretend as if Trump never existed, or that his smashing of conservative principles in service to Trumpism wasn't what it was.
But some of those principles -- of federalism, the rule of law and even basic democracy and common sense -- are still at stake at this moment.
Trump once famously promised to his supporters that they would be "sick and tired of winning" one day. Now, though, what Trump is losing could outlast the limited days of his presidency.
-ABC News' Political Director Rick Klein
Overview: Trump pressures SCOTUS to overturn election, Biden to introduce more staffing picks
While Trump waits to hear whether the Supreme Court will take up Texas' case seeking to overturn and invalidate the votes of millions of Americans in four battleground states, he's continuing his pressure campaign on the high court Friday morning, calling on justices to “do what everybody knows has to do be done.”
Experts say justices are unlikely to take up the case, but the Texas lawsuit has quickly become a loyalty test for Republicans with 106 representatives -- about one-fourth of the House or half of the Republican caucus -- asking the high court to disregard millions of votes in a democratic election.
Trump also voiced his resistance Friday morning to turning over distribution of coronavirus vaccines to the incoming Biden administration, tweeting "they want to come in and take over one of the ‘greatest and fastest medical miracles in modern day history'" and slamming the Federal Drug Administration as a "big, old, slow, turtle" moments after Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told ABC's "Good Morning America" that emergency authorization use of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine is imminent and vaccinations could start as early as Monday. Trump's tweet follows months of him pressuring the agency to speed up its process for approving vaccinations.
Meanwhile, as the Biden White House takes shape, the president-elect is turning to familiar faces in former Obama administration officials to fill top posts and will be introducing some of those picks from Wilmington, Delaware, Friday afternoon.
His latest additions include tapping Dennis McDonough, former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, as his nominee for secretary of veterans affairs, and naming Susan Rice, Obama’s former national security adviser, as the director of his White House Domestic Policy Council. These picks have some Democrats worried that with the resurgence of so many Obama-era officials there's little room for rising stars in the party.
In another historic first for the Biden team, the president-elect and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris were named as Time’s 2020 "Person of the Year" -- the first time a vice president has been given the title.
States blast Texas bid to overturn election as 'seditious abuse of judicial process'
Four states sued by Texas in a bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to swiftly reject the case and avoid legitimizing "a cacophony of bogus claims" that would upend the will of millions of American voters.
In court filings Thursday afternoon, the attorneys general of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia were scathing in their rebuttal to Texas' suit.
"The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process," said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told the justices in a court filing for his state.
-ABC News' Devin Dwyer
Georgia secretary of state to recertify Biden's win Monday
Up against Tuesday's "safe harbor" deadline, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that he will recertify that Biden won Georgia's election sometime Monday following the state's third recount of the presidential vote there which has Biden ahead by nearly 12,000 votes.
"It's been a long 34 days since the election on Nov. 3. We have now counted legally cast ballots, three times, and the results remain unchanged," Raffensperger told reporters.
As he did in his WSJ op-ed this morning, the secretary equated how former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams acted after her 2018 loss and Trump's behavior in 2020.
"Whether it's the president of the United States or a failed gubernatorial candidate ... disinformation regarding election administration should be condemned and rejected," he said. "All this talk of a stolen election, whether it's Stacey Abrams, or the president of the United States is hurting our state."
Raffensperger also said that "the focus on Nov. 3 is drawing energy away from" the state's goals of job growth, efficient COVID-19 vaccine distribution and "getting back to normal."
"I know there are people that are convinced the election was fraught with problems, but the evidence -- the actual evidence, the facts -- tell us a different story," he said.
Gabriel Sterling, the voting system implementation manager in Raffensperger's office, came to the podium afterward to fact check some of the misinformation that the president has helped spread. In one example, he directly called out the president's legal team for how they've tried to "mislead" people about a video from counting occurring in State Farm Arena in Fulton County that Trump played at his rally in Valdosta on Saturday night.
"What's really frustrating is the president's attorneys had this same videotape. They saw the exact same things the rest of us could see, and they chose to mislead state senators and the public about what was on that video," he said, debunking the notion that there were "magic ballots" that showed up in the state's largest county.
"They knew it was untrue and they continue to do things like this," Sterling said. "We continue to see people who are put in positions of responsibility, sending out this disinformation and undermining the electoral system," he added later.Minutes after Raffensperger told reporters he would receritfy the vote Monday, Trump continued his attacks on election officials in the state on Twitter, targeting GOP Gov. Brian Kemp for signature verification saying he'd have an "easy win" were it conducted -- but signature verification was already done twice for absentee ballots in the state, and the vote was recounted three times affirming Biden's win.
-ABC News' Quinn Scanlan