The president and the president-elect

Josh Barro and Ken White are back! A few interesting things have happened in the past two weeks — first of all, Joe Biden is the president-elect with narrow but clear leads in states that put him over 300 electoral votes. President Trump is displeased about this. He says he really won the election and he is engaging in a legal and PR strategy to contest those results. Most of the individual lawsuits, though, are not very plausible, and as Democrats keep pointing out, they don’t contest a number of votes that would actually change the election outcome. So what is President Trump’s objective here? Can his lawyers help him achieve those objectives? Is Attorney General Bill Barr and the DOJ assisting in a meaningful way?

Plus: is Joe Biden entitled to cooperation with the transition, and should he sue the Government Services Administration to force them to treat him like the president-elect? And a really big question: can President Trump pardon his associates and even himself before he leaves office?