US president-elect Donald Trump said he expected to have most members of his cabinet announced by next week, interviewing more candidates at Trump Tower for top jobs in his administration as he prepares to take office on January 20th.
Mr Trump is still weighing who to choose as secretary of state. The Republican president-elect said on Thursday he had chosen retired Marine Corps general James Mattis as defence secretary and would make a formal announcement on that on Monday.
“We have tremendous people joining the cabinet and beyond the cabinet. You’ll be seeing almost all of them next week,” he said in an interview that aired on Friday on Fox News.
Mr Trump plans to move quickly after taking office on his goals to overhaul taxation, healthcare and immigration laws, vice-president-elect Mike Pence said in an interview published by the Wall Street Journal on Friday.
Top priorities include curbing illegal immigration, abolishing and replacing President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare programme, and filling a vacancy on the supreme court, Pence told the newspaper.
Asked what he would do on his first day in office, Mr Trump told Fox News he might address his campaign pledge to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico, though he did not go into specifics.
Mexico wall
“We could do the wall. We’re going to do some repealing: we’re going to do some executive orders that we think are inappropriate,” he said, referring to the possibility of reversing executive orders issued by Mr Obama during his eight-year term.
Trump famously pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington during his campaign for the White House, a populist message of change that caught fire with his supporters. But he has staffed his transition team mostly with government veterans and former lobbyists. He turned to Wall Street for his nominees for the treasury and commerce departments.
“We’re getting credit for having one of the great cabinets ever picked,” Mr Trump said on Fox. “These are people of great distinction, great success, which is what you need.”
On Friday, he named an advisory panel led by the chief executive of Blackstone, the world’s biggest alternative asset manager, stacked with executives from some of America’s largest companies, such as Wal Mart Stores Inc, Boeing Co and International Business Machines Corp .
The president-elect is weighing who to put in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces immigration law and plays a key role in preventing terror attacks. He is also choosing a director of national intelligence, and filling several cabinet posts dealing with energy and the environment.
On Friday, Jay Cohen, former under secretary of Homeland Security for science and technology and a retired Navy rear admiral, told reporters in Trump Tower that he had been interviewed for an undisclosed position.
“Cyber security was discussed, and I believe that president-elect Trump understands fully the magnitude of that challenge,” Mr Cohen said.
Romney rapprochement
Mr Trump has narrowed the field for secretary of state to four candidates, including the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who had attacked him throughout the 2016 campaign but spoke glowingly of the president-elect after having dinner with him earlier this week.
“There was actually good chemistry,” Mr Trump said on Fox.
He has also been taking calls from dozens of foreign leaders, and on Friday spoke by phone with Rodrigo Duterte, the maverick leader of the Philippines, a key US ally in Asia.
Mr Duterte, known for his deadly war on drugs, had sparred with President Obama, who cancelled a planned meeting with him in September. Mr Duterte invited Mr Trump to visit his country next year.
As the president-elect forms his administration, the Green Party is seeking a recount of the vote in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Such recounts would be extremely unlikely to overturn Mr Trump’s victory over his Democratic rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton.
But Trump supporters moved on Friday to maintain his narrow victories in three states, pursuing legal challenges aimed at halting the Green Party’s requests for long-shot recounts of the presidential votes there.
Lawsuits were pending in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three “Rust Belt” states which bucked their history of supporting Democrats and gave Mr Trump thin wins in the November 8th election.
Recount tussle
The Green Party has said its requests for recounts in those states are focused on ensuring the integrity of the US voting system and not on changing the result of the election.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who garnered only about 1 per cent of the vote, has said the recount campaign is not targeted at either candidate.
Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette, a Republican, said on Friday he had filed a lawsuit to halt the requested recount in his state. Recounting all of the state’s votes “threatens to silence all Michigan votes for president” because of an impending federal deadline to finalise the state’s results, he said in a statement.
The presidential race is decided by the Electoral College, or a tally of wins from the state-by-state contests, rather than by the popular national vote. Federal law requires states to resolve disputes over the appointment of electors by December 13th.
Mr Trump far surpassed the 270 electoral votes needed to win, with 306 electoral votes, and the recount would have to flip the result to Ms Clinton in all three states to change the overall result. In the popular vote, she won more than 2.5 million more votes than Mr Trump, according to the Cook Political Report.
Mr Schuette also criticised Ms Stein for the potential expense of a recount, although she said last week that she had raised $3.5 million to cover some costs. A Schuette spokeswoman said on Friday that Ms Stein had contributed $787,500 but that it would cost some $5 million.
Michigan’s recount is expected to begin early next week, barring court action, after the state’s board of canvassers deadlocked 2-2 on Friday on a motion objecting to the recount, the Michigan secretary of state’s office said on Twitter.
The Trump campaign’s own attorneys have moved to block recount efforts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to court papers in those states. A Pennsylvania court has scheduled a hearing for Monday morning in Harrisburg, the state capital.
In Wisconsin, where the recount is already under way, the Trump-supporting political action committee Great America PAC sued in federal court on Thursday seeking to block a recount there. The lawsuit cited as legal precedent the US Supreme Court’s Bush v Gore decision that ended the 2000 election and Florida recount.
The Wisconsin Republican Party has also filed a complaint over the recount effort in that state, it said.
Ms Stein’s campaign manager, David Cobb, criticised the Trump effort in Pennsylvania in particular, saying in a statement: “We will continue to help Pennsylvania voters make sure that the election in Pennsylvania had integrity and that their votes counted.”
Her website said on Friday the Green Party had raised $6.8 million so far for the recount and had a goal of $9.5 million.
Lawyers for Ms Clinton have said they would take part in the Wisconsin recount effort to ensure her campaign is legally represented, and that they would do the same if necessary in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
– Reuters