A united front?

Senate Republicans formally rejected a wild assertion by President Trump that he might reject a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the presidential election. Republicans uniformly committed yesterday to a peaceful transition to Democratic nominee Joe Biden's administration, should the former vice president win in November. "The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th. There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted early yesterday. "No question that all the people sworn to support the Constitution would assure that there would be a peaceful transition of power," Sen. Mitt Romney told reporters. —The Washington Post

• — No "coordinated national voter fraud effort." FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers yesterday that his agency has seen no evidence of mass voter fraud in the U.S., directly undercutting the president's efforts to stoke fears about mail-in ballots. The White House still disagrees. In typical fashion, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows clapped back this morning, "With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI let alone figuring out whether there is any kind of voter fraud." —The New York Times
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• — "Highly unusual" situation in Pennsylvania. The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it is investigating "potential issues" with nine military ballots in Allegheny Co. that had been "improperly opened" by elections staff and "discarded." All of the votes were cast for Trump. David Thornburgh, who heads the nonpartisan election watchdog Committee of Seventy, said the DOJ's announcement left him nonplussed. "You have to be on the lookout for breakdowns in the system, but we have to be careful not to extrapolate from single-digit incidents to more systemic problems," he said. —NPR
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• — A dustup in North Carolina. The two Republican members of the North Carolina State Board of Elections abruptly resigned Wednesday, saying they felt misled by the state attorney general's office and board staff when they agreed to a settlement that would allow voters to fix absentee ballots with missing information. The board chair claims the two were fully briefed prior the settlement, to which the five-member board had unanimously agreed. The settlement must still be approved by a court; a hearing is set for Oct. 2. —CNN

Boot: We need a landslide election

"Trump's talk has a purpose. He is claiming that mail-in ballots will be fraudulent not because any evidence of fraud exists. He is doing so because Democrats in recent years have had a big advantage in ballots that are counted after Election Day. ... By calling the mail-in ballots a 'hoax,' Trump is laying the foundation for throwing them out and demanding that he be declared the winner based on ballots counted on election night." —The Washington Post

Ed. Note: Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

MORE: Watergate-style anti-corruption reforms unveiled —Politico

Facebook disables more Russian disinfo

Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking down three disinformation networks linked to Russia's military and intelligence agencies, and to the Internet Research Agency, which was central to Moscow's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

• — None of the networks were large, and they operated almost entirely abroad. But the concern is that Russia could use the infrastructure around the Nov. 3 presidential election in an effort to influence the vote or to dispute its outcome by calling into question the fairness of the balloting.
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• — "We want to be proactive." Though Facebook hasn't seen them directly target the 2020 election yet, the networks are linked to actors associated with "DCLeaks," the website set up by Russian military intelligence to make public emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
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• — The action came two days after the FBI and a division of the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint warning that the vulnerability of American voting systems may be greatest in the days after the election, if mail-in ballots are slow to be counted, and President Trump begins making accusations of a "rigged" election. —The New York Times

MORE: Florida Democrat asks FBI to investigate anti-Semitic, racist disinformation —The Hill

The staff stays in line

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, told senators at his confirmation hearing this week that white supremacists are "certainly the most persistent and lethal threat when we talk about domestic violent extremists," but he strongly denied suppressing a report that would have rendered that judgment more officially. "It's a fabrication, completely," Wolf said of charges by the department's former intelligence chief, Brian Murphy, that he buried a DHS threat assessment that singled out racist extremists.

• — Always a yes man? Widely considered one of President Trump's most loyal Cabinet officials, Wolf also rejected a separate allegation that he held back a July intelligence report on Russian disinformation targeting former Vice President Joe Biden because it would have reflected poorly on the president. —The New York Times
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• — A moo, I mean new, IG. Trump has announced he will nominate National Security Council official Allen Souza, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, to serve as inspector general of the intelligence community. Trump fired the IC's previous inspector general, Michael Atkinson, for turning over to Congress a whistleblower complaint about the president's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, ultimately leading to Trump's impeachment. —Axios
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• — Trouble with the boss. Officials at the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development, have sent a 13-page memo to USAID's inspector general targeting Pete Marocco, who now leads the bureau. The memo accuses Marocco of creating internal chaos by interfering in the work of employees in countries such as Ukraine, Malaysia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Burkina Faso. —Politico

MORE: At Pentagon, fears grow that Trump will pull military into election unrest —The New York Times

Butler: A weak charge in Taylor case

"The [Breonna] Taylor case is one that should resonate with Republicans. Second Amendment advocates might champion [Kenneth] Walker, Taylor's boyfriend, who used a legally possessed weapon in self-defense. Libertarians should be worried about the overreach of government agents breaking into a home in the middle of the night to look for drugs. Faith-based conservatives might see criminal prosecution as promoting the sanctity of life." —The Washington Post

Ed. Note: Paul Butler is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University. A former federal prosecutor, he is the author of "Chokehold: Policing Black Men."

MORE: 'A long, tough week': 24 arrested as Breonna Taylor protests again take over Louisville streets; curfew extended through weekend —USA Today

Global roundup

Here’s something you don't hear everyday. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un apologized today for the shooting death of a South Korean man. The apology came in a letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in a day after the North's soldiers killed the man and set his body on fire in an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The rare conciliatory message appears to be an attempt to boost Moon, who has faced intense political fallout over the incident, coinciding with a renewed push by him for engagement with North Korea. —Reuters

• — Belarus. The U.S. no longer recognizes Aleksandr Lukashenko as the legitimate president of Belarus, the State Department announced on Wednesday. Lukashenko has clung to power with the support of Russia amid seven weeks of protests that have followed a blatantly rigged election. Fresh protests broke out in Minsk this week after it emerged that Lukashenko had held a secret inauguration ceremony. —Axios
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  — Russia. Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny, who has been recuperating in Germany after being poisoned last month, plans to return to his home country to resume his activism as soon as he is fit to do so. Earlier this week, an aide to Navalny warned the West against sanctioning Russia over the poisoning, saying it would be, paradoxically, an "enormous opportunity" for Moscow. —Deutsche Welle
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• — United Kingdom. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appealed for resolve and a "spirit of togetherness" through the winter as he unveiled new restrictions on everyday life to suppress a dramatic spike in coronavirus cases in Great Britain. Warning that the measures could last for six months, Johnson voiced hope that "things will be far better by the spring" when a vaccine and mass testing could be in place. —Associated Press

West & Cohen: Remembering RBG

"Back when a woman could easily be fired for being pregnant; when a wife needed her husband's permission to get bank credit; and when a married man could not be charged with raping his spouse, a young lawyer had a radical idea. She believed that the U.S. Constitution should treat every American equally, regardless of gender. And then, relying on her prodigious brain, steely character, and a practical, step-by-step strategy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly convinced an all-male Supreme Court to see it her way." —CNN

Ed. Note: Betsy West and Julie Cohen are the directors of "RBG," a 2016 documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

MORE: Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes first woman and first Jewish person to lie in state at US Capitol —The Wall Street Journal

That's what good neighbors do

Lane Unhjem farms durum wheat and canola on his farm near Crosby, N.D. After he suffered a cardiac arrest and was hospitalized in the midst of harvesting his crops, his neighbors got to work.

• — Putting their own crop-picking on hold, his neighbors gathered at the Unhjem farm with a menagerie of farming equipment in tow. Per Don Anderson, one of the neighbors who aided Unhjem, nearly a dozen combines were taken to the farm.
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• — Neighbors who got involved say that helping the family was "just kind of the farming way of life." As Unhjem convalesced, the group was able to harvest over 1,000 acres worth of crops in seven hours.
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• — "The Unhjems have a beautiful crop that will be safe in the bins today, and more importantly they have the comfort of knowing that they have a community of friends that are helping, praying, and doing whatever they can to help them get through this tough time," wrote Anderson in a social media post. —USA Today

"For Your Weekend" is a once-a-week opportunity to recommend to the TOPLINE community an interesting book, podcast, documentary, or other media you've come across. Today's suggestion is from Leonard C., Texas:

Nathaniel Philbrick in his account of Benedict Arnold's betrayal of patriot principles in "Valiant Ambition" notes that the "greatest danger to America's future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism." What rings true for Benedict Arnold in 1779 still rings true in 2020. Public service is a means for personal sacrifice for the greater good, not for self-enrichment by betraying it. The treachery of denouncing foundational values can never be justified by the blood money offered. Our leaders must demonstrate and embody virtue as Philbrook also wrote, "Since republics rely on the inherent virtue of the people, they are exceedingly fragile. All it takes is one well-placed person to destroy everything."

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