Biden Will Kick Off Inaugural Events at a Ceremony Honoring Victims of Covid-19
Events on Wednesday, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes the oath of office, will have a more celebratory theme.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. worked a conveyor belt assembling food boxes with his daughter and granddaughter in Philadelphia on Monday.Credit.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Jan. 18, 2021
WASHINGTON President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will arrive in the nation’s capital on Tuesday evening for an inauguration eve ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool honoring the nearly 400,000 people who have died during the coronavirus pandemic that will be his first priority after he is sworn in the next day.
A majority of polled voters say President-elect Joe Biden's top priorities once he is sworn in Wednesday should be coronavirus vaccinations and passing a new stimulus package, according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll
“After several conversations with Avril, there is no doubt in my mind that President-elect Biden has chosen someone who has all the capabilities and qualities, experience, and leadership to be the next director of national intelligence,” Coats said ahead of Haines’s opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
According to acting panel Chairman Marco Rubio
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Coats, who served as DNI for Trump between 2017 and 2019, described Haines as an “exceptional choice,” praising her stated goal of “bringing non-politicized truth to power and restoring trust and confidence in the intelligence community and the American public.”
Coats left the role of DNI after clashing with Trump on multiple issues during his tenure, most notably over Trump’s comments at a 2018 press conference in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin
As President Biden completed his transition into the White House, several social media companies were completing their own transitions of highly followed official accounts.
But the handoff wasn’t as seamless as it was four years ago, when President Barack Obama turned over the keys of much of his social empire to President Donald J. Trump.
In 2017, Mr. Obama passed on official Twitter accounts to Mr. Trump, along with the millions of followers the accounts had gathered. Since then, Mr. Trump’s digital team used the accounts as megaphones for his administration’s agenda and built the follower numbers higher: before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, @POTUS had 33.3 million followers, @WhiteHouse had 26 million, @FLOTUS had 16.4 million and @VP had 10.3 million. The @POTUS account alone had nearly tripled in followers under Mr. Trump.