Trump said on Twitter it had been delayed till Friday; U.S. intelligence officials and other Obama administration officials say it was always scheduled for Friday. A senior U.S. intelligence official who was not toeing the official line told NBC News the Trump transition team was told it would happen "early this week," which might explain the confusion. But Sean Spicer, Trump's spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday it would be "later this week."
All of which would seem to add up to a mundane dispute, but the fact that it is playing out in public represents what is shaping up to be an extraordinary breach between Trump and the intelligence agencies he is poised to lead--one that threatens to expose rifts between Trump and Congressional Republicans.
John McCain at Senate hearing on Russian hacks:"What do you do in the case of an attack? There's not been an answer" https://t.co/7FrqMRbbZr
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) January 5, 2017
A joint congressional session is scheduled to ratify the 2016 Electoral College vote this Friday. While there have been calls to challenge that certification—including one women-led effort saying Trump's victory is due to voter suppression targeting people of color—the analysis that scores of Trump electors were illegally seated, and the additional finding that most states won by Trump improperly filed their Electoral College "Certificates of Vote" with Congress, is unprecedented.
Their research and report grew out of the legal activities surrounding the December 19 Electoral College meeting, where Clayton and others urged Republican electors to reject Trump saying they had a constitutional responsibility to pick a more qualified president.
Clayton is hoping that sufficient numbers of Republicans in Congress will not vote to ratify the Electoral College results, thus depriving Trump of the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidency. If that transpires, the House would then decide between the three top Electoral College vote-getters—Trump, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, he said. But before any of that can happen, there needs to be a formal challenge to ratifying the 2016 Electoral College results in Friday’s joint session of Congress, which is where the research finding that scores of Trump votes were illegally cast comes in.