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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend even if it was scaled down and weird compared to most years. Today is Cyber Monday as companies like FedEx and UPS, as well as the US postal service gear up for what some people are calling shipaggedon with more people buying online than ever before for the holidays because they want to avoid going into stores, obviously, could mean you have to do your shopping early. We will talk later about keeping Amazon workers safe from injury amidst all the pressure to produce. It's an investigative report from Reveal that we will dig into.

By the way, just 10 more shopping days until Hanukkah, did you know that? Hanukkah is early this year. It starts on December 10th. Joe Biden's weekend ended with breaking his foot in two places, playing with his dog. He'll be in one of those walking boots for about six weeks they say, nevertheless, he is hitting the ground running with more nominations that we'll talk about, including his new all-female communications team, but also, some controversies already brewing about some of his other nominees, and even one of the new ones. As for President Trump, maybe you heard Senator Roy Blunt become the latest Republican, Blunt from Missouri, to say he believes Joe Biden won the election for real.

Senator Roy Blunt: I think there was some element of voter fraud as there is in every election, but I don't have any reason to believe that the numbers are there that would have made that difference.

Brian: Senator Blunt on CNN's State of the Union. Maybe you heard that the president's bid to throw out millions of Pennsylvania votes got struck down in another strongly-worded opinion on Saturday by a federal appeals court panel of three judges, all appointed by Republican presidents with the opinion written by a judge named Stephanos Bibas, who was appointed by Trump himself. Judge Bibas wrote that Trump suit, "Never claims fraud or that any votes were cast by illegal voters." He wrote, "Tossing out millions of mail-in ballots would be drastic and unprecedented disenfranchising," that from the Trump-appointed federal judge, which of course led the president to ask on Fox.

President Donald Trump: What kind of a court system is this?

Brian: Now, his own judicial appointees are in on the fraud, apparently, along with his own FBI and justice department. We won't even play that clip. Oh, and Georgia's Republican governor and usual Trump ally, Brian Kemp.

President Donald Trump: The governor's done nothing. He's done absolutely nothing. I'm ashamed that I endorsed him.

Brian: If everyone including your friends thinks you're lying about something, it could mean you're lying about something, but according to Trump, it just means the whole world is in on the conspiracy against you, even Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Just for the record regarding Georgia, the guy who Trump just fired, who was head of the federal government's own election security team, that guy Christopher Krebs, was on 60 Minutes last night and explained why the conspiracy theory about voting machines in Georgia being programmed to flip votes to Biden can't be true. The simple reason is paper ballots.

Christopher Krebs: Georgia has machines that tabulate the vote. They then held a hand recount, and the outcome was consistent with the machine vote

Scott Pelley: And that tells you what?

Christopher Krebs: That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count side. That pretty thoroughly, in my opinion, debunks some of these sensational claims out there that I've called nonsense and a hoax, that there's some hacking of these election vendors in their software and their systems across the country. It's nonsense.

Brian: Former federal election security chief, Christopher Krebs, with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes. Don't exhale yet, Blue America. The president says he is appealing the Pennsylvania ruling to the US Supreme Court, the court he is most depending on to uphold his various claims will get a shot in at least one of them. With us now, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief, Susan Page. Hi, Susan, hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, and welcome back to WNYC.

Susan Page: Hey, Brian, I did. Thanks, it's great to be back.

Brian: Trump judges, Trump election security officials, Republican governors, state legislatures, Republican hands, and Republican secretaries of state, Chris Christie, Roy Blunt, all saying there is no evidence of fraud at anything near a scale that would flip the results, and yet, poll after poll shows 70% to 80% of Republicans in the United States believe the election was, in fact, stolen, how do you explain it?

Susan: Well, those are voters who have a lot of faith in President Trump, who have stuck with him from four years ago through now, through a myriad of controversies. I think, sometimes, poll questions become proxies for just, "Who you're for? Who you're against?" I mean, we find this now when we ask people about the economy, that if your party upholds the White House, you're much more likely to rate the economy highly than if your party doesn't, and it doesn't really relate to what you, in fact, at your core, think about the economy.

There's some thought that this is a question that taps into Trump's support and not necessarily views of the actual outcome of the election. Now, maybe that's a naive view, but that is possible what we're measuring here. That said, the fact that so many voters continue to say that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected is a huge hurdle for him as he prepares to take over the White House.

Brian: The Trump attack on Governor Brian Kemp was a new wrinkle, played that clip. Trump wants Kemp in Georgia to call a special session of the legislature to order a recount, not of the votes but of the signatures on the absentee ballot envelopes, a reinspection of every one of those to see if they match. You're based in Washington, but do you happen to know why Kemp isn't going along with Trump on that?

Susan: Well, I think that Governor Kemp thinks that the election was properly done and the outcome is clear. While we haven't seen a lot of profiles to encourage in Washington, among Republicans, to stand up against the baseless allegations the president's been making. It's been remarkable the Republican governors, and particularly, the Republican secretaries of states in various states across the country who have stood up for the process. We find so many things to be unhappy about.

Here's an election that went pretty smoothly despite every possible obstacle between the pandemic, foreign interference, threats of violence, the statements of the President of the United States. It's an election that seems to be taking a little while to finish up but looks like it'll be all set for quite an ordinary Electoral College Election on December 14. We see States continuing to certify their vote on schedule, Arizona, today, Wisconsin, either today or tomorrow. Other key states have moved ahead, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia. Maybe something to feel optimistic about it.

Brian: Yet, Kemp, to not completely break with the president says an audit of the election results, which might include that signature verification or re-verification, takes place after certification, and the state legislators, not so much the governors or the secretaries of state, are the ones who could if they decide to, step in and try-- They may be stopped in court, but try to flip the results from the electors. From where you sit in Washington, how confident are you that that's not going to happen at the level of state legislators? Trump would need three state legislatures to do that, and he's looking at Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona as the potential-- Some combination of three.

Susan: You never want to be too confident about predicting the future and the track record on that, possibly flawed. I would say it's extremely difficult to see how President Trump manages to pull that off.

Brian: The Supreme Court, the two lower courts in Pennsylvania rejected the president's lawsuit to throw out millions of votes in very strong language, but SCOTUS still has to decide whether or not to take this case for a close look of its own or not. Any indication, at least, when they'll decide whether to hear it?

Susan: Well, I don't have any inside information on when the court will decide. I will say the court tends to try to move promptly in cases like this because, obviously, there's a time imperative. Let's hope they do because it would be good to have this issue settled.

Brian: Susan Page, Washington Bureau Chief for USA Today, our first guest today. John Podesta coming up next in a few minutes, just a few minutes, as we talk to a major democratic insider about this transition and put questions that are already arising about the transition to him. To that point, Susan, meanwhile, the Democrats are licking wounds of their own, rather than gaining seats in the House of Representatives, as many predicted, the latest count is they lost 11 seats, leaving them only a slim majority and very vulnerable to losing the House in 2022, altogether, since a new president's party usually loses House seats in the first midterm elections. What's your take on what happened in the house?

Susan: This was a surprise to everyone, just about everyone. It was a surprise to Nancy Pelosi, who I talked to about the election a week beforehand, and she was quite confident that they were going to gain seats in the House. It was a surprise to Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, who did not expect his party to show gains. It showed that there was a great willingness and historic willingness to eject President Trump from the White House.

More than 80 million Americans, a record, voting for Joe Biden, but that did not translate down the ballot. It didn't translate on the ballot in these House seats. It was not the easy move to take over the Senate that many Democrats had hoped and no state legislature was flipped. That is another disappointment for Democrats. You ask a liberal or a moderate Democrat what happened, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says there was stale and outdated campaigns waged by moderate Democrats. Moderate Democrats, like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, will say that the problem was that the provocative rhetoric of the most progressive Democrats put moderates like her in a pinch.

This is a matter of some dispute in the party, and it's complicating and affecting moves toward who gets appointed to the Biden administration. How much sway do progressive have in the new Democratic White House? A lot of repercussions. Control in the House, the party in control can have, because of the rules, pretty good control even with a small majority, but this will be the smallest majority that any speakers had in more than two decades. It will really be a challenge, I think, for Nancy Pelosi, both for the next two years and for Democrats in the next midterm.

Brian: We'll put questions about that to John Podesta in just a minute. Before you go, Susan, how will you, as a Washington Bureau chief, set up your team to question and scrutinize the Biden administration? Because President Trump presented unique challenges to the press, I don't have to tell you, by putting such monumental issues into play, not just his hostility to the press but real issues facing the country regarding truth itself, authoritarian style behaviors, winking at white supremacists, and this baseless claim that he really won the election by a lot, unprecedented challenges to our basic norms of democracy and institutions of democracy, not just policy debates that the White House press corps has had to cover, and yet, you're not part of the Democratic Party, as some in the conservative media would like to argue that the mainstream press corps is. How will you scrutinize the Biden administration?

Susan: Well, we will scrutinize a Biden administration. I think that the change that we're likely to see is configuring more toward policy and less toward politics because with the Trump administration, there was very little consistent policymaking, and there was so much provocative rhetoric and politics that it took up more of our energy than usual. We're hoping to be able to get back to actually cover, in a more serious way, some of the government agencies. That gives us a chance to see both what the new president, Biden administration is doing, and also maybe to look at some of the policies instituted by the Trump administration that have not gotten the scrutiny that they ordinarily would have because we were so focused on the president himself.

Brian: Susan Page, Washington Bureau Chief for USA Today. Thanks for starting us off, Susan.

Susan: Hey, Brian. Thank you.

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