Dozens of messages from foreign leaders await President-elect Joe Biden at the State Department but the Trump administration is refusing to let him access them, CNN reported on Wednesday.

Department officials told CNN that the messages have been arriving at the State Department since the President-elect’s victory over the weekend. But since President Donald Trump continues to refuse to accept he lost, the White House has instructed agency officials not to cooperate with the incoming Biden administration, and Biden has been kept from accessing State Department resources. 

In spite of the Trump administration’s efforts to block the incoming president, Biden’s team has been in contact with foreign governments without the help of State Department and the President-elect has held numerous calls with leaders, including German Prime Minister Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

But a source familiar with the issue told CNN that the Biden team “would prefer to be using the State Department resources” in an effort to facilitate the calls more smoothly.

State department officials told CNN that since leaving the White House Biden would have been able access the State Department operations center by phone to place a call to a foreign leader — a resource provided to former presidents and vice presidents. But now, as the President-elect, he is being denied that access to that resource by the Trump administration. 

The effort to block Biden from receiving messages at the State Department follows comments from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday when he refused to accept Trump’s defeat and  called for “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

According to CNN, foreign leaders appear to now realize that they will have to get in touch with the President-elect by other means, and their teams in some cases have reached out to former Obama-era diplomats for their assistance about sending congratulatory messages to Biden’s team.

The efforts by the Trump administration to prevent a smooth transition between administrations, as Trump’s GOP allies advance false claims about election fraud and Trump refuses to concede, raises questions about how Biden’s team will be briefed to hit the ground running on urgent matters.

Slow transitions in the past have also been cited for creating vulnerabilities to national securities that foreign adversaries can seize upon. 

Biden made clear that combating COVID-19 will be his first battle as president and on Monday announced a task force of scientists and experts that will be dedicated to the work of combating the virus, but the Trump administration’s efforts to ban the incoming administration’s access to many of its resources likely hampers those efforts to some degree.

 

Republican Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt said Wednesday that his city had “the most transparent and secure election in the history of Philadelphia,” pushing back on claims of widespread fraud that he said have “no basis in fact at all.”

The comments come after President Donald Trump and his campaign have leveraged baseless attacks on the integrity of the election, waging fizzling legal battles against fraud without evidence exclusively in battleground states that reported a projected loss for the one-term president who was defeated by President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday. 

Republican Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt told CNN on Wednesday: "we just had the most transparent and secure election in the history of Philadelphia" in spite of false claims of widespread fraud that have "no basis in fact at all." pic.twitter.com/XUCI5VyjGs

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) November 11, 2020

“What evidence of any widespread fraud have you seen in the count in Philadelphia?” CNN’s John Berman asked the elections official during an interview on Wednesday morning.

“I have not,” Schmidt said. The Republican commissioner’s defense of the election’s integrity in his city, come as Trump and his GOP allies continue to baselessly cast doubt over the election results in the state broadly, but in the city of Philadelphia in particular.

“I have seen the most fantastical things on social media, making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all and see them spread,” the Republican elections official said. While acknowledging that many people were unhappy with the results he said he unable to comprehend “how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true. ” 

He cited among a long list of examples, a false claim that “dead voters” had cast ballots in the city, a conspiracy theory that was shared last week by  both Giuliani and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), among others.

Schmit said that elections officials had taken the time to look at the ballot history of each deceased voter.

“Not a single one of them voted in Philadelphia after they died,” Schmidt said.

Giuliani, had falsely told Fox News over the weekend that Philadelphia is “an epicenter of voter fraud” adding that the campaign was “going to be looking at dead persons’ ballots, which may actually be very, very substantial.”

When asked to address efforts by the Trump campaign and its allies to spread falsehood about the integrity of the vote, Schmidt urged voters to be “mindful that there are bad actors who are lying to them.” 

“They need to turn to people that they trust and to sources of information that they trust and not rumors and not nonsense included in lawsuits or anything else like that to make sure that they have confidence in this system and that their vote, regardless of who they voted for, is going to be counted,” Schmidt said.