Kamala Harris has called Donald Trump to concede the election, the BBC’s US news partner CBS says, after Trump’s historic US presidential victory.
The vice president discussed the importance of a peaceful transfer of power and being a president for all Americans, the aide said.
She spent the morning and afternoon working on her concession speech, according to two other aides, that she is set to deliver at 9pm UK time.
One of those aides said Harris’s team had spent very little time before today working on either a concession or victory speech.
Instead, they had spent time working on a speech that would tell the public to “hold on” and be patient, due to the expectation that the result of the election could take longer to be known, as in 2020.
In a saparate development Trump’s legal team planning to halt criminal cases quickly
Donald Trump’s election victory has turned some thoughts to the future of his criminal cases.
According to a source directly involved in discussions, his legal team is evaluating the next steps to get the cases resolved.
His lawyers are not in a rush, the source said, but certainly intend to argue these cases “must stop immediately”.
Their view is that, as president-elect, Trump’s status has now meaningfully changed.
This means for the Justice Department, in particular, there are serious constitutional concerns with moving forward with two remaining federal cases – which concern his involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots back in 2021 and allegedly taking classified documents.
