Election 2024 live updates: Trump begins transition; three charged in alleged Iranian plot to kill the president-elect

President-elect Donald Trump has named campaign chief Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role when he takes office on January 20, 2025.

“Susie Wiles just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history, and was an integral part of both my 2016 and 2020 successful campaigns,” President-elect Trump said. “Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected. Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America Great Again. It is a well deserved honor to have Susie as the first-ever female Chief of Staff in United States history. I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

A week ago, The Independent made a list of predictions for the US Senate, thinking it unlikely but possible that Democrats would hold the chamber. After a surprisingly powerful performance by Donald Trump on election night, it’s clear that won’t be happening.

John Bowden looks at what we got right and what we got wrong...

A Democrat, who was partly responsible for kickstarting Donald Trump’s first impeachment, has won a congressional seat in Virginia against a Republican candidate accused of parading a “fake family.”

Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman defeated Derrick Anderson on Tuesday to win the competitive seat in Central and Northern Virginia, according to The Associated Press.

His victory kept the seventh district, which is one of the state’s most purple, in Democratic hands, and put him in line to succeed Abigail Spanberger – a former intelligence officer who vacated the seat to run for governor.

Mike Bedigan reports.

The 2024 presidential election completely upended many people’s expectations. After Democrats booted Joe Biden from the top of their ticket to put Kamala Harris in place, she lost all seven of the major battleground states.

And now, as Republicans plan to drag Democrats’ “political dead bodies through the streets and burn them,” and Democrats deal with a reckoning, a few trends have emerged that continue to baffle some onlookers.

Here are five major shocks of the 2024 presidential election — and why they might have happened:

One of President-elect Donald Trump’s attorneys has been told by the FBI that his cellphone was tapped by Chinese hackers, CNN reports. The network cites three sources familiar with the matter.

Tapping the phone of Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in his hush money criminal trial, was part of a wide-ranging operation targeting top Republicans and Democrats in US politics that has been underway for months.

Per CNN:

The FBI informed the attorney, Todd Blanche, last week that the hackers were able to obtain some voice recordings and text messages from his phone, but that none of the information was related to Trump, one of the sources said. The FBI provided Blanche, who has had to start using a different number after the breach, what the hackers obtained, including communications with family, the source said.

Blanche is the second of two Trump attorneys believed to be targeted by foreign hackers.

In August, CNN reported that attorney Lindsey Halligan was targeted as part of a separate Iranian hacking effort.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday congratulated Donald Trump on his election victory in his first public comment on the U.S. vote, and he praised the president-elect’s courage during the July assassination attempt.

“His behavior at the moment of an attempt on his life left an impression on me. He turned out to be a brave man,” Putin said at an international forum following a speech in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

“He manifested himself in the very correct way, bravely as a man,” he added.

Putin also said that what Trump has said “about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to help end the Ukrainian crisis, in my opinion, deserves attention at least.”

The Kremlin earlier welcomed Trump’s claim that he could negotiate an end to the conflict in Ukraine “in 24 hours” but emphasized that it will wait for concrete policy steps.

″I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate him on his election as president of the United States of America,” Putin said in a question-and-answer session at the conference.

As to what he expects from a second Trump administration, Putin said, “I don’t know what will happen now. I have no idea.”

“For him, this is still his last presidential term. What he will do is his matter,” added Putin, who this year began a fifth term that will keep him in power until 2030 and could seek six more years in office after that.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday the Kremlin is not ruling out the possibility of contact between Putin and Trump before the inauguration, given that Trump “said he would call Putin before the inauguration.”

Peskov has emphasized that Moscow views the U.S. as an “unfriendly” country that is directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict. He dismissed arguments that Putin’s failure to reach out quickly to Trump could hurt future ties, saying that Moscow’s relations with Washington already are at the “lowest point in history” and arguing that it will be up to the new U.S. leadership to change the situation.

The Kremlin’s cautious stand reflected its view of the U.S. vote as a choice between two unappealing possibilities. While Trump is known for his admiration of Putin, the Russian leader has repeatedly noted that during Trump’s first term, there were “so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia like no other president has ever introduced before him.”

As Donald Trump’s victory became increasingly apparent on Tuesday night, tensions behind the scenes were reportedly already ramping up between those vying for influence in the president-elect’s future administration.

Specifically, Trump’s 2024 campaign chief Chris LaCivita and Corey Lewandowski, who ran his 2016 campaign, were said to be at each other’s throats.

Mike Bedigan has the story.

Richard Hall writes:

In the college town of Indiana, at the country fair in Bloomsburg, and in the former industrial boomtown of Scranton, the message was the same: working-class Pennsylvanians were struggling to get by.

As I traveled throughout the state during this presidential campaign, from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and the rural stretches in between, inflation and pessimism about the economy were at the forefront of people’s minds.

It would prove to be the deciding factor in the crucial swing state — and across the country.

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A judge has denied a January 6 defendant’s bid to stave off sentencing in the hope of receiving a pardon from Donald Trump when he takes office in January 2020.

“The potential future exercise of discretionary pardon power … is irrelevant to the court’s obligation to carry out the [court’s] legal responsibilities.”