‘This is not a third Obama term’: Biden sits for his first post-election interview – as it happened

Call it a bit of a turkey.

At a much diminished White House ceremony earlier today, marking the annual Thanksgiving tradition during which a president pardons a bird from the dinner table ahead of the holiday, Donald Trump seemed to realize his star had already begun to wane, the Guardian’s David Smith writes …

On Tuesday, Biden introduced the brainy grownups of his government-in-waiting at a weighty event with lofty talk of restoring America’s moral leadership and saving the planet from the climate crisis.

An hour later, at the White House, a turkey was pardoned by a lame duck discovering how fickle the media circus can be.

The gathering in the Rose Garden was naturally diminished by the coronavirus pandemic, but his last Thanksgiving ceremony was a muted affair that also struggled to break through on cable news.

“Ladies and gentleman, the president of the United States and Mrs Trump,” said an announcer, the words suddenly elegiac as abnormal administration fades to black.

Tomorrow, Biden will deliver a Thanksgiving address, from Wilmington, Delaware, and will “discuss the shared sacrifices Americans are making this holiday season and say that we can and will get through the current crisis together”, per the transition team.

It will likely stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s turkey pardoning today. Trump thanked healthcare workers and celebrated vaccine development advances, but did not offer condolences for the families of the quarter-million who’ve died of the coronavirus.

Joe Biden also said that he wouldn’t “use the Justice Department as my vehicle” to investigate Donald Trump and his allies.

In the interview with NBC Nightly News, he told Lester Holt: “There are a number of investigations that I’ve read about that are at a state level. There’s nothing at all I can or cannot do about that.”

“We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration,” Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt, in the president-elect’s first televised interview since winning the election.

He’d like his administration to represent the “spectrum of the American people as well as the spectrum of the Democratic party” Biden added, agreeing that he’d even consider appointing a Republican who voted for Trump.

“I want this country to be united,” Biden said.

Progressive Democrats, including representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, have signed a petition advising against a role for former Biden chief of staff Bruce Reed in the Biden-Harris Administration.

“Reed has a history of putting deficit reduction ahead of economic recovery,” the petition reads. “We are extremely concerned by the reports that Reed is a frontrunner to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the Biden administration, given his history of antipathy towards economic security programs that working people rely on.”

So far, progressives have lauded Biden’s choice of Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary, and Ron Klain as chief of staff.

After the party united to help Biden defeat Donald Trump, progressives have pushed the president-elect to welcome progressive candidates and policies into his incoming administration.

Joe Biden told NBC News’ Lester Holt that the transition “has already begun”.

“They’re already working out my ability to get Presidential Daily Briefs,” he told Holt. “We’re already working out meeting with the Covid team in the White House. And how to not only distribute, but get from a vaccine being distributed, to a person being able to get vaccinated. So I think we’re going to not be so far behind the curve, as we thought we might be in the past. And there’s a lot of immediate discussion, and I must say, the outreach has been sincere. There’s has not been begrudging so far. And I don’t expect it to be.”

Speaking to reporters, Joe Biden said he’d like to avoid seeing a guarded border between the UK and Ireland.

“We do not want a guarded border. We want to make sure – we’ve worked too long to get Ireland worked out, and I talked with the British prime minister, I talked with the Taoiseach, I talked with others, I talked to the French. The idea of having a border north and south once again being closed is just not right, we’ve just got to keep the border open,” he told reporters, according to the press pool.

Another lively few hours in US politics. Joe Biden’s interview with NBC’s Lester Holt is coming up a little later and my California colleague Maanvi Singh will bring you some of that and any other developments.

Here are the main events of the day so far:

• President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly now to receive the president’s daily brief, after Donald Trump has spent almost three weeks withholding permission for the classified intelligence briefing he receives daily to be shared henceforth with his successor.
• Incoming vice president Kamala Harris hailed the beginnings of a Biden-Harris cabinet that “looks like America” with much greater diversity and representation than the one it will replace.
• John Kerry, former Democratic presidential nominee (who lost to George W Bush in 2004) and former secretary of state (2013 to 2017 for Barack Obama), declared upon accepting his nomination to a new cabinet position as climate envoy that the international Paris climate accord that the US will re-enter under Biden was not by itself enough to avert climate catastrophe.
• Joe Biden introduced his new foreign policy and intelligence cabinet choices at an event in Wilmington, Delaware, including his picks for secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations.