good morning. it is november 14th, i'm ali develop shi. just a small group of republican lawmakers recognizing the reality determined by the majority of american voters, admitting that former vice president joe biden should receive all necessary information he needs for his transition to the presidency. ohio governor mike dewine stating it plainly that joe biden will be the 46th president of the united states. maryland governor larry hogan tweeting we need to come together as a nation now more than ever. a few republican senators, including iowa's chuck grassley saying that biden should get all the classified intel briefings necessary to carry out the duties of the highest office of

the land, but stopping short of admitting he's actually the president-elect. all this amid days of theatrics and stone walling and cartoonish denial of reality from the current administration led by the soon to be former president himself, donald j. trump, who refuses to admit that he lost. it's all so leudicrous and unprecedented. it's hard to determine whether this is an actual threat to the rule of law or a trumpian fakeout. the new yorker's reporter asked is this a coup in the making or just another trump con? and "a little coup and a lot of con and total and rebless disregard for the health of our

democracy or country." and another said "trump couldn't organize a one-car funeral, he certainly couldn't organize a coup." it's getting harder and harder for him to keep it up. the vote tallies stick up higher and higher against them. nearly 78 million voters cast their ballots for joe biden, the highest number ever for a u.s. presidential candidate. as of pride, nbc news now has joe biden as the projected winner of arizona and thewinner putting joe biden's electoral vote tally at 306, which happens to be the exact number that trump received in 2016. you may also recall trump lost the popular vote that year to hillary clinton by 2.8 million votes whereas biden leads trump in the popular count by more than 5 million votes and yet

trump and his sick oycophants continue to perpetrate this fraud against the american people. >> moving forward here at the white house under the assumption there will be a second trump term. i think it's really important before people's heads explode here to understand what we seek here is verifiable ballots, certifiable ballots and an investigation into what are growing numbers of allegations of fraud. >> there is no trump second term. there are no growing allegations of fraud. election officials across the country, republican as well as democrat, have said the election was free and fair. and to his credit, president-elect biden simply laughs off the trump temper it

a and -- tantrum and moves forward with the business of the country. >> it does not change the dynamic at all in what we're able to do. >> what do you say to americans who are anxious over the fact that president donald trump has yet to -- >> i think it's an embarrassment and will not help the president's legacy. >> 67 days until joe biden's inauguration at noon on january 20th. he nailed key members to deal with the country's biggest challenge, the scourge now killing americans. joining me more with more on the

transition, geoff bennett, nbc news white house correspondent. he's on the road with the biden team in delaware. what is the latest from the boardwalk where you are? >> reporter: hey, ali. great to see you. even as joe biden projects calm and confidence, this unprecedented effort by the trump administration to block a smooth changeover, the trump white house locking the biden transition team out of critical covid data, contacts and intelligence creates a real problem, as you might emergency and the longer it goes, the worse it gets. let's just unpack for a second what this means for the roll out of a covid vaccine. you heard the head of the trump administration operation warp speed effort say once a vaccine comes online, the plan is to vaccinate 25 to 30 million people a month. in order for that to happen, you have to have 25 to 30 million glass vials a month to put that

vaccine in, 25 to 30 million syringes each month. the pfizer vaccine has to be shipped at 100 degrees below zero and stored that way and beyond all that you have to have enough supplies and staffing to actually vaccinate millions of americans. so right now because president donald trump refuses to recognize reality and refuses to recognize the results of the race, the gsa, the general services administration, which functions at sort of the h.r. did the for the federal government has not granted the biden team access to officials doing that planning. it means come late december, come early january, whenever the gsa sort of allows the biden team to do that work, the biden team only then will be able to look at the plan and to spot potential plaflaws in that pland then course correct. you can imagine all the

intricacies in making sure the plan is to scale. you can understand why the transition team wants access to that today. >> meanwhile, there's another coronavirus outbreak in the executive branch. according to "the washington post," more than 130 secret service agents assigned to the white house are under quarantine, after either being infected or being exposed to someone who tested positive. quote, the spread of the coronavirus, which has sidelined roughly 10% of the agency's core security team is believed to be partly linked to campaign rallies that president donald trump held in the weeks before the november 3rd election. according to the people who, look others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation. joining me now is carol

lengthilengtonnig, the co-author of the article. you are and i spoke yesterday about this. what do we know about these 130 or so secret service agents who make up about 10% of the staff of the secret service, the protective staff of the secret service who are pretty muff sidelinsid -- much sidelined at this point. >> that's right, ali. in the last several weeks, the secret service has been discussing the damage done to their security bubble for the white house, for the president, for the vice president's residence because 10% of the people called secret service uniform division officers have either tested positive for covid in recent weeks or had to stay at home for two weeks to quarantine because they're expected to have been exposed for a long period of time to other people that are infected, usually co-workers. it's not rocket science to

figure out how they got covid. a lot of them were on the road and anxious about doing so, to help support and create security, ali, around president donald trump's campaign events. to be fair, they were also out on the road to protect vice president biden who was campaigning. it's just that so many more of them were at trump events because there were more trump rallies. as you remember, there were five different cities that trump stopped in in the last two days of his campaign. so that's ten cities, that's five different teams of secret service officers who all have to be in those locations and who have to be out on the road with two big risk factors -- one, white house staff that doesn't wear masks and a campaign that doesn't wear masks and many of them that came down with covid. and the second is they're leaving their home base going out into cities where covid is

spiking. >> and neither of those two risks are actually what secret service officers sign up for. we don't know much about that, we don't talk to them, they don't talk to the press. we know about them from movies and books because these people do their jobs with anonymity essentially. they all agree implicitly with the idea they will take a bullet for the president of the united states, they will die in someone tries to kill the president of the united states. this isn't part of the deal, getting a potentially deadly illness from something that's completely preventable. >> you have hit the nail on the head. probably the only reason i have this story in the first place. these are folks who do their work, as exhausting and defeating as it can be at times, as dull as it can be at times, staying up all night in a hotel stairway to make sure nobody gets up to the presidential

suite, these are people who do their work without complaint, they work on their days off. but this is a ris ak, ali, that they can't mitigate, they can't calculate a plan for this. they are security professionals who know what to do about a bullet, about a line of sight that's dangerous, about a truck bomb this could get close to the president. they know what to do about that. but in this case they cannot protect themselves from it and several of them are asking why exactly am i going out on the road for a rally? is it really that necessary? what about my mother, who i will be compromising when i come home to lives with us, what about my daughter who has this health problem? these are things that the secret service did not sign up for. >> carol, thank you for your remarkable reporting on this. this is a tough story. carol is a pulitzer prize

winning reporter and tauthor. > joining us is the ranking member of the homeland committee. senator peters, thank you for joining us. i enjoyed talking to you in michigan. things have changed. you and i were talking about a security threat made against the governor of michigan. now we've got something that fees a little bit like a security threat. my viewers are trying to determine if this is a trump temper tantrum or something real. the president is replacing people in the department of defense and people in the national security establishment. what does somebody like that who is so close to these matters think of this? >> i think it's ridiculous. to see this happening when you

have an administration that's winding down, will be gone in a couple of months and we have to step up the biden administration. this has always been, as you know, a core strength of the united states is that we have a peaceful transfer of power, it's seamless. the outgoing administration will work with an ingoing administration. this is an incredibly complex endeavor. takely when you're talking about home laubd security, national security. this is incredibly complex. poe need to have a handover that is as comprehensive and seamless as possible and while you're doing that, the current administration to continue to keep us safe. there isn't anything more fundamental when it comes to the federal government than keeping us safe from foreign adversaries and folks in the united states, domestic terrorism and others that may want to do harm. you need to have that kind of stability occurring at the same time you're doing the transition. so then to go in and fire people and to reshuffle and to create

chaos creates a real danger for security in this country. and is completely unacceptable in my mind. >> and unlike the rest of us who can speculate about the whole thing, you're the ranking member on the homeland security committee. what do you have to think about? i imagine these moves make people like you and people in the military and the intelligence community have to think about was this a chess move or is this nothing? >> we don't know. tease what keeps us speck and i heard it in the opening of your segment here, is that this is just reckless. there's no question about it. when it gets us worried that you have these kind of changes a the a time when we have to be vigilant. our adversaries are watching. they look for areas of vulnerability. they don't sleep. they're constantly thinking

about how they may be able to do harm to this country. our folks have to be on guard constantly. when you have an administration that's creating chaos, not assisting a new incoming administration to be able to pick up the reins of that security immediately and do it effectively, this is reckless, it is unacceptable and to me to think we still have a president who doesn't want to come to terms with the fact that he lost and he continues to play and feeling that our election wasn't carried out properly, it's it's corrosive to our democracy. we're engaged in reckless short-term pavier that puts us at risk and can weaken our democratic republic. we've got to get this biden administration in place as quickly as possible so we as americans can sleep better at night. there's no question in my mind.

>> it worth noting that if there hadn't been such a long transition, there might not have been any attack. >> i want to show you a hand recount happening in fulton county, georgia. it's the county in which atlanta sits. i lived there for a while and loved it. it's also called an audit because the results were so close in georgia. nbc news does project joe biden is the the winner of the state. almost 5 million ballots being counted by hand. the united states is back to setting new records with

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lead, follow or get out of the way. the quote is sometimes attributed to 16th century philosopher and revolutionary

thomas payne and also general george s. paton. both men had strong ideas and were willing to lead to them. its meaning and sentiment is clear, the status quo are unacceptable and if you're not going to help change it, stand aside. the united states is breaking coronavirus records we do not want broken. infection positivity rates continue to increase around the country as states like texas and california reach more than a million confirmed cases each. we're firmly returned to a thousand plus deaths per day. these days we are losing a grandparent or a parent or child, a cousin, an uncle, an aunt, friend or neighbor, one every minute of the day. since before march 13th when the pandemic was officially declared, many in this country have asked for -- begged for really, a plan.

americans knew it wasn't like the flu and we knew national coordination would be our best defense again this rae real problem. and yet despite everything we absolutely knew to be true and all that has come to pass to prove those projections correct, there is still no national plan eight months later. but how it was handled by the current administration was because that's how the trump administration decided to handle it. the only choice we had was to wear a mask, wash your hand and keep your distance. well, that's all changed. with 67 days to go to inauguration, joe biden wants to go to war with the coronavirus, coordinate a response, marshal our best resources to do it, but until he is sworn in, there are limits to how much biden can do,

as he continues to hit petty, bureaucratic walls and these particular walls come with heavy costs -- increased american deaths. but while trump can disrupt the transfer of power by clocking the courts with baseless lawsuits, almost all of which have been summarily dismissed, he cannot stop the incoming administration from talking to governors around the country who are looking for and open to a coordinated national effort to fight this pandemic. mask mandates are gaining momentum. all ogs and science truing. we have a clear signal a vaccine will likely require shipping and temperature restrictions we cannot hand. we have thousands standing at the ready willing to serve their

americans for a cause for which they can be proud. the current administration is not planning for this and has spent eight months wishing this deadly virus away. joe biden has won the election. today even donald trump knows and private live accepts that. but biden needs the power of the presidency and normal transition to do that. so donald trump, lead, follow, or more likely, just get out of the way. kely, just get out of the way. irresistibly smooth chocolate. ♪ to put the world on pause. lindor. made to melt you. by the lindt master chocolatier. tonight, try pure zzzs all night. unlike other sleep aids, our extended release melatonin helps you sleep longer. and longer.

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agencies, virus is out of control across the country with 49 states simultaneous live classified as hot spots. joe biden has already assembled a team of experts but the current administration won't allow biden to execute his plan. ron klain had to to say about my colleague on thursday night. >> so far the inhibition has been relatively minor. the unreasonable position of the administrator of the general services administration to refuse to asser tak eascertain biden is the apparent winner will have an impact. the covid is a really good example. we're in a covid crisis. right now, right now there are officials in side the department of health and human services who are planning a vaccination campaign in february and march when joe biden will be president. so the sooner we can get our

transition experts into meetings with the folks planning the vaccination come paampaign, the seamless a transition from a trump presidency to a biden presidency can be. >> and trump is causing even more damage. cases in wisconsin are surging. hospital and medical capacity is almost complete there. she's in the city of o'claire, wiflt. what's the situation there, c cori? >> reporter: the state has hit all-time highs in cases and in deaths the week. they to issue an entirely new category because of county had surpassed the very high threshold. the numbers here surpassing 300,000 cases in this state.

when you compare to a state like texas that has a million cases, it doesn't sound like that much but look at the infection rate. wisconsin has an infection rate of 37%. that is a staggering number when you compare it to new york, the hot spot in the spring that had an infection rate at its worst of 25% in some spots. this number just blowing that out of the water. hospitals here, as you ever mentioned, come beiing to capac. this is the mayo clinic right behind us. they report a 90% capacity for their beds right now and that includes the intensive care unit. the governor worries that not only will there be a shortage of actual health care workers to respond to the crisis in the state but a shortage of aptly needed ppe as well. he's also embassy press frustration over gop roadblocks.

it's unclear how quickly these localities will be able to get a handle on surging cases without this executive order and these stay-at-home orders that the governor is trying to issue at this point. ali? >> good to see you, my friend. thank you very much. i want to bring in dr. michelle mcmurray heath, associate science director at the fda under president obama. good to see you again. thank you for being with us these are real life consequences. there's a lot of stuff -- i got to tell you, i don't care if the commerce department delays its transition to the biden administration or the labor department delays its transition to the biden administration, this really, really matters. what you heard ron klain say is material. they're planning the distribution of the vaccine when they won't be in government and the people who will be in government aren't re table. >> it matter and the response

has been working around the clock to bring new therapeutic and vaccines to combat the scourge in a week where we saw they want to impose european price controls to try to undercut our response. it just unbelievable. >> let me ask you about the particular challenges here with respect to the drugs that we're talking about. we just talked to the head of the nih earlier who said we are talking about levels of dosage and distribution that require a herculean effort. we may need the army corps of

engineers, we may need the national guard, we may need the distribution methodology that fema has to get the drugs everywhere. so we need the federal government involved in this. >> oh, yes. the federal government has been working rahal close, dafd, of disease control has been working to have a plan to distribute these drugs and advance eens has they become available, but we need no gap in that plan. we need it to seamlessly be executed across the winter and the spring so what we can bring this crisis to an end. >> what do you think the best case scenario is for americans to have enough either of therapeutic drugs or vaccines so that we can start to leave this chapter behind us, the chapter of closures, the chapter of work from home, assuming people don't like working from home.

when do you think we're looking at? >> we're looking at a lot of promising news this week. not only did we hear from pfizer that they're showing amazing efficacy rates with their covid vaccine, lilly has received emergency use authorization for their antibody cocktail to treat people once they received covid and mod moderna. all have been preparing not just to make the science work but also to produce it at mass scale so we can hopefully vaccinate a large percentage of population in the spring and summer. you look to this winter for the first line of health care personnel, the people at greatest risk to start getting vaccinated and then you look into the spring and early summer where you'll see it at your local pharmacy and local doctor's office so everyone can be protected and it's really promising everyone has worked together so closely to make it

this close to the finish line. >> dr. mcmurray heath, thank you for joining us, former science director for the fda under president obama. >> a top cyber security official could be next on the chopping block in the trump administration what did he do wro wrong? he debunked information about the epidemic. n about the epidemic that's how you do it right. usaa insurance is made just the way martin's family needs it with hassle-free claims, he got paid before his neighbor even got started. because doing right by our members, that's what's right. usaa. what you're made of, we're made for. ♪ usaa who've got their eczema under control. with less eczema, you can show more skin. so roll up those sleeves. and help heal your skin from within with dupixent.

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his name is christopher krebs. you may not have heard his name. by design you shouldn't have heard his name. he could become the latest casualty in donald trump's efforts to defy the 2020 election results. he's the head of cyber security at the department of homeland security and sources flagged reuters on thursday that he told associates he expects to be fired from his post. at the center of all this, the

reason is his battle against disinformation. his main job was to protect from cyber attacks. but he drew trump's ire because he had a web site which he oversaw as part of department of homeland security called rumor control. it's been debunking disinformation about election fraud, including some of the same nonsense that has been coming from donald trump himself. it happened this week actually. his group put out a thing saying this is one of the most secure elections and donald trump tweeted nonsense about untmilli of votes changed from biden to trump. twitter revealed on thursday it had labeled around 300,000 tweets about the election as disputed info. that figure includes dozens of tweets by the president of the united states himself. you can never get used to this stuff. the dangerous qanon fiction has

made its way through this week. she is a qanon member and a qanon person will be on committees in the united states congress. welcome into the republican fold. joining me now, nina jankowicz. my concern is that 20% of this country doesn't actually believe, one in five voters doesn't believe joe biden won the election. not that they're angry that they

won the election. lots of people were angry that donald trump won the election last time but they believed the result. donald trump's disinformation has actually worked if one fifth of the nation does not believe that joe biden will be the next president of the united states. >> yeah, that's extremely concerning to me as well, ali. we've also seen polling that indicates 70% of republicans don't believe the result of this election was free or fair, which is a very scary thing for me as someone who studies democracy and disinformation's effect on it. we've seen widespread voter fraud in places like ukraine where that fraud has actually happened and the effect on democracy, you know, years down the road can't be understated. even after they've held, you know, free and fair elections. folks still don't trust that their ballots are being counted correctly. no matter what happens in the coming weeks and months, there's going to be an uphill battle for the biden administration to regain the trust of the american people.

and this is our calling card, right? this is the thing that other nations look to us to emulate these free and fair elections. the fact that we have the president of the united states launching this disinformation campaign for personal gain to the detriment of our democracy is something that's going to take us a long time to outgrow. >> i'm a little concerned about this whole marjorie taylor greene thing. this is qanon. i ran into people who told me qanon garbage. it's the stuff they heard that is now main streamed and the leaders of the republicans in the house will not distance himself from that stuff. qanon has made it to the congress of the united states of america. >> not just the congress but frankly president donald trump

also refuses to disavow qanon. he's said things like i know they think i'm very good, stuff like that. i was just doing a hearing in the house intel committee a couple of weeks ago with a few other experts on conspiracy theories and disinformation and not a single republican member showed up to that hearing to conduct their oversight as they are required by the constitution to understand these issues for the american people and legislate about them. not a single republican member was there. i think we really need to call this stuff out. we should not be normalizing the use of conspiracy theories and disinformation in our politics. we need to disincentivize it. if there's one thing i'm optimistic about, president-elect biden has a long history of reaching across the aisle, he has bipartisan bo bona fides. i think he will push back and make sure we return to an understanding that disinformation is not a partisan issue. the ultimate victim of

disinformation is our democracy. >> but when you talked to people and talked to voters, either they didn't believe me or they said he was joking. and that's why it bothered me so much when the secretary of state, pompeo, said we're preparing to are a second trump administration. says he was joking. i'm sure he was actually joking, but this kind of stuff is where we have to be careful because the population is ripe for nonsense. >> absolutely. and, you know, that affects america's standing abroad also. so it's something that's extremely worrisome but we need to make sure that our politicians, our elected officials, our appointed officials are speaking facts and being real champs of the truth because we've walked a long, long way away from that and that opens people in push, and russia

ander and erdogan and the normalization of lies in our political system is something that affects americans' ability to get involved in democracy. it's a very scary thing. >> good to see you as always. thank you for joining us. she is the author of "how to lose the information war." what the world and u.s. foreign policy could look like under joe biden. cy could look like under e biden. reply all look own your look... ...with fewer lines. there's only one botox® cosmetic. it's the only one... ...fda approved... ...to temporarily make frown lines... ...crow's feet... ...and forehead lines... ...look better. the effects of botox® cosmetic, may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. do not receive botox® cosmetic if you have a skin infection. side effects may include allergic reactions,

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joe biden remains the president-elect. it's ♪ when it comes to foreign policy, the election of joe biden could start a new chapter for america. over the past four years, the trump administration has ceded much of the united states' power in favor of chaos and hostility. we've seen our government reject our allies, pull out of deals, and set aside our long-held values in favor of pursuing relations with strongmen leaders. well, things are about to

change. president-elect joe biden has already signaled a shift in policy with a desire for diplomacy. the truth is, foreign policy could ultimately be where biden can set himself apart from previous presidents. as presidential scholar douglas brinkley told veteran foreign policy expert and reporter robin wright of "the new yorker," "given the political constraints at home, especially if republicans retain control of the senate, biden may also end up having more impact on the rest of the world than he does on the united states." brinkley added, "biden will be hamstrung to move the meter domestically, but he has the opportunity to become one of the greatest foreign policy leaders as everyone in the world is extending their elbows because he stands for global democracy." joining me now to discuss biden's foreign policy and what it could be for hot-button places like iran, russia, china, and north korea, is nbc's tehran bureau chief and my good friend, ali arouzi, joining us from

tehran. ali, let's start with iran. iran has even made certain fairly restrained noises about the fact that they expect things to be better between them and the rest of the world because of the election of joe biden. >> reporter: that's right, ali, and the iranians here have been waiting for this day since donald trump got elected four years ago. look, he's piled enormous pressure on iran, the so-called maximum pressure campaign. and it's been very difficult for the iranians. it's been painful. revenues have almost come down to zero. the country is isolated. the population has grown increasingly angry with their own leaders because of all the pressure that's on them, which poses a threat to the establishment here. now, what the iranian leadership wants is a de-escalation, a return to the 2015 nuclear deal and relief from sanctions in order to sell their most valuable commodity, oil. but as you and i know, ali, things between iran and america

are rarely simple. if joe biden was going to go back to the terms of the 2015 deal and nothing beyond that, then that's fine by iran. but if he wants to wait to take sanctions off for iran to agree to further talks, beyond the jcpoa, that would cover iran's missile program or regional influence, that could prove problematic between the two countries. but what is for sure, that iran needs a de-escalation, and they need sanctions to be lifted, so they will probably be more willing to talk to joe biden now than they've ever been before. >> ali, richard engel was telling me the other day that after the election that most of the democratic world breathed a sigh of relief that joe biden is there and the u.s. gets ready to be welcomed back into the democratic fold. but there are countries, like russia, like china, like north korea, not quite sure how to handle this. what do you make of this as somebody looking at it from the

outside? >> reporter: well, there's a lot of moving parts here. look, the relationship between china and the usa is of immense significance. they are, after all, the two world's largest economies. and for the past four years, it's been turbulence, you know, military build-ups between the two sides, trade wars, president trump blaming the coronavirus on china and saying that they'll pay a big price. all of this makes you think that china would prefer to deal with a new administration, but given their late and cautious congratulations to president biden, they're probably not expecting a sea change in policy, which isn't surprising. look, there are some serious challenges, vis-a-vis china. their human rights records, currency manipulation, and not least of all, intellectual properties theft. now, joe biden has made that clear during the debates that he'll take a hard line on china to make sure that they play by the rules. and china's aware of that. they know that there's broad

political support across the american political spectrum for pressure on them. but if biden readopts a traditional, multilateral coalitions, that may increase the pressure on china to shift some of their policies. you know as well as i do, ali, that american rejection of multilateral alliances almost always plays into the hands of america's adversaries and competitors. when america is tight with its european allies, they can put a lot of pressure on people that they want to. now, russia is a different ball game. they don't have many trade links with the united states. and given that putin was one of the first leaders to congratulate donald trump almost four years ago, and now that biden's been elected, there's been radio silence from the kremlin, i think it would be safe to assume that nobody's breaking out the bunting in moscow, which isn't really a shocker. president trump was rarely critical of russia, but biden

has been a vocal critic. he's identified russia as posing one of the biggest threats to the united states. and over the last years, russia has managed to garner enormous influence here in the middle east. and they're not going to give that up without a fight. so, there are enormous challenges for joe biden, but i think if he's tight with all of his allies, these will be much easier obstacles to overcome. >> good to see you, my friend. thank you for joining us, ali arouzi, nbc's tehran bureau chief, on what a biden administration and its foreign policy could look like. and that does it for me. thank you for watching. join me tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. eastern and then tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. eastern we'll have a special "velshi: surviving the next wave." if you're worried about your personal finances or your small business or you work for a small business and you're worried about what these new closures and restrictions could mean, i'll have experts here to answer your questions. you can email them to me at mystory@velshi.com. coming up next, congressman

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