Our picksFresh Look at Domestic Terrorism | Terrorists Plotted a Texas Jailbreak | Ransomware Attacks on Schools Escalate, and more

Biden Administration Urged to Take Fresh Look at Domestic Terrorism (Rachael Levy, Wall Street Journal)
First-ever White House post and more funding to combat violent extremists floated by working group that advised president-elect’s team

U.S. Election 2020: Vote Was Cleanest in History, Cybersecurity Chief Tells Trump (David Charter, The Times)
President Trump’s claims of voting fraud have been contradicted by his own election security agency, which called last week’s vote “the most secure in American history.”
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” the Election Infrastructure Government Co-ordinating Council (GCC) said yesterday, as Mr. Trump continued to tweet debunked allegations that software had “switched 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden.”

Christopher Krebs Hasn’t Been Fired, Yet (David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, New York Times)
Mr. Krebs’s government agency contradicted President Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged. At this point, Mr. Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, still has a job.

The Federal Government’s Chief Information Security Officer Is Helping an Outside Effort to Hunt for Alleged Voter Frau (Jon Swaine and Lisa Rein, Washington Post)
The federal government’s chief information security officer is participating in an effort backed by supporters of President Trump to hunt for evidence of voter fraud in the battleground states where President-elect Joe Biden secured his election victory.
Camilo Sandoval said in an interview that he has taken a break from his government duties to work for the Voter Integrity Fund, a newly formed Virginia-based group that is analyzing ballot data and cold-calling voters in an attempt to substantiate the president’s outlandish claims about illicit voting.
Sandoval is one of several Trump appointees in the federal government — some in senior roles — who are harnessing their expertise for the project, according to the group’s leader.
The participation of administration officials in the project shows the extent of the efforts by the president’s allies to justify his unfounded allegations of widespread ballot fraud.

Giuliani Adds Fuel to Discredited Theories about Voting Machines. (Zach Montague, New York Times)
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, continued on Saturday his effort to delegitimize votes cast through electronic voting machines, citing several conspiracies connected to the companies that make the machines and the software they run in a post on Twitter.

Federal Judge Rules Acting DHS Head Chad Wolf Unlawfully Appointed, Invalidates DACA Suspension (Dennis Romero, NBC News)
“This is really a hopeful day for a lot of young people across the country,” said Karen Tumlin, a lawyer in the case and director of the Los Angeles-based Justice Action Center.

When Terrorists Plotted a Texas Jailbreak and Other Stories We Almost Missed (Seamus Hughes, Bennett Clifford, And Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Daily Beast)
The post mortem on the Caliphate and particularly its reach into the American heartland will take years to complete, but what we know already is mind-boggling.

Biden Stocks Transition Teams with Climate Experts (Adam Aton, Jean Chemnick, E&E New / Scientific American)
The President-elect has included those with climate experience across a wide swath of federal agencies

‘My Information Is Out There.’ Hackers Escalate Ransomware Attacks on Schools (Tawnell D. Hobbs, Wall Street Journal)
Districts around the U.S. are fighting a wave of increasingly aggressive hackers, who are publicly posting sensitive student information