At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, protesters from the group Code Pink berated invited speaker Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security advisor and secretary of state, with chants of "Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes." The demonstration really got under the nerves of committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said, "I've been a member of this committee for many years, and I have never seen anything as disgraceful and outrageous and despicable as the last demonstration."

When one member of Code Pink protested, McCain, doing his best Dirty Harry impersonation, growled, "Get out of here you low-life scum!" Watch the whole exchange below. —Ryu Spaeth

More than 130 Secret Service officers have been required to isolate or quarantine after either testing positive for COVID-19 or having close contact with a co-worker infected with the coronavirus, The Washington Post reports.

These Secret Service officers help protect President Trump and the White House, and the COVID-19 spread that is "believed to be partly linked to a series of campaign rallies" held by Trump in the weeks leading up to the presidential election has "sidelined roughly 10 percent of the agency's core security team," the report says.

The Post's reporting did not make clear how many of the 130 officers tested positive for COVID-19 and how many of them are isolating due to close contact with someone who contracted the coronavirus.

The Secret Service is also "examining whether some portion of the current infections are not travel-related" but "instead trace back to" the White House, the Post says. In recent days, numerous White House officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, have tested positive for COVID-19.

The Post notes that this many Secret Service officers needing to isolate or quarantine will "force many officers to forgo days off and work longer hours to compensate for absent co-workers," and a former Secret Service supervisor told the Post, "Being down more than 100 officers is very problematic. That does not bode well for White House security." Read more at The Washington Post. Brendan Morrow

White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro sees no reality in the very real election of President-elect Joe Biden.

In a Friday interview with Fox Business, Navarro once again relayed President Trump and his supporters' refusal to accept the results of last week's election. "We're moving forward here at the White House under the assumption that there will be a second Trump term," Navarro said. He then outlined how the Trump campaign and the White House "seek verifiable ballots" and "an investigation into what are growing numbers of allegations of fraud" in the election, and declared anyone who believes Biden won to be operating under "an immaculate deception."

Biden has secured the electoral votes — and then some — he needed to win the 2020 election. His win margin in critical swing states Trump hopes to overturn is far wider than recounts have overturned in the past, and not a single election official across the U.S. found evidence of widespread voter fraud the Trump campaign is alleging. Kathryn Krawczyk

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is joining the fight against Democrats blaming their left wing for a less-than-perfect election day.

While Sanders is "very proud of the hard work that the progressive community put into electing Joe Biden," the results coming out of the House and Senate were "disappointing," he detailed in an op-ed published Thursday in USA Today. But "corporate Democrats" blaming "so-called far-left policies like Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal for election defeats" are "dead wrong," Sanders continues.

As Sanders notes, every one of the 112 co-sponsors of Medicare-for-all won their elections, and only one of the 98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal lost their election. In contrast, the vast majority those who lost their seats did not support those progressive policies. "It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy," Sanders remarked. "It also is good politics." Other progressive policies likewise won big in individual states, namely Florida's vote to increase the minimum wage and measures to legalize marijuana across several states.

Sanders' rebuttal comes after House Democrats were projected to lose at least six seats from the House and so far failed to flip the Senate fully in their favor. Some moderate Democrats who narrowly retained their seats blamed "socialism" for the losses; Progressives in turn said the Democratic party needs to organize better to regain a stronger majority. Kathryn Krawczyk

A law firm that was representing President Trump's 2020 campaign as it challenged the election results in Pennsylvania has reportedly "abruptly" withdrawn from a lawsuit it filed just a few days ago.

Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a lawsuit filed on Monday in the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on behalf of Trump's campaign over alleged "irregularities" in the presidential election, The New York Times reports.

"Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” Porter Wright Morris & Arthur reportedly said in a court filing.

Pennsylvania was the key battleground state where a win for Joe Biden was projected by major news networks on Nov. 7, taking him over the threshold of 270 electoral votes and making him president-elect. Trump has yet to concede the election and has been mounting legal challenges in battleground states but has not provided evidence of widespread voter fraud that might result in a change in the outcome.

The Times previously reported that lawyers at Porter Wright Morris & Arthur held meetings to voice "concerns" about the firm's work for Trump. In a statement on Wednesday, the firm said it has a "long history of election law work," which sometimes "calls for us to take on controversial cases." But according to the Times, some employees were "concerned that the firm was being used to undercut the integrity of the electoral process." Brendan Morrow

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly defended not suspending Stephen Bannon from the platform after the former White House strategist suggested FBI Director Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, should be beheaded.

During a meeting with staff on Thursday, Zuckerberg said Bannon didn't violate enough Facebook policies to earn a suspension, Reuters reports.

"We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely," Zuckerberg reportedly said. "While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line."

In a recent episode of his web show, Bannon suggested Fauci and Wray should be beheaded, recommending President Trump fire them before adding he would like to "put the heads on pikes" as a "warning to federal bureaucrats." A spokesperson for Bannon told Reuters that his comments were "clearly meant metaphorically" and that he "would not and has never called for violence of any kind."

In addition to taking down the video of Bannon's comments, Facebook also recently removed a network of pages linked to Bannon that were pushing false election claims, Reuters notes. After the beheading remarks, Twitter permanently suspended the account of Bannon's show. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that Bannon's page would be subject to further action "if there are additional violations." Brendan Morrow

President Trump is very likely to issue a raft of pardons in the last 10 weeks of his presidency. Many presidents do, and Trump in particular has been "obsessed with the power of pardons" ever since he learned he had that power in 2017, a former White House official tells CNN. "I always thought he also liked it because it was a way to do a favor."

Unidentified sources tell CNN that Trump is most likely to pardon former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn; former campaign chair Paul Manafort; Rudy Giuliani; Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner; Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg; his children; and maybe even himself. "Trump has been asking aides since 2017 about whether he can self-pardon," CNN reports, citing former aides, and he himself tweeted in June 2018: "As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself."

It isn't clear at all Trump does have that power. The courts haven't been asked to decide whether a president can self-pardon, and when the Nixon White House looked into it, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said no. "Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself," the OLC wrote in August 1974.

Would Trump really test this out? "Of course he will," one former official said. "Others believe it's unlikely, because doing so would imply he's guilty of something," CNN reports. Garrett Graff suggested Trump might try to pardon a corporation, the Trump Organization.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance told MSNBC Thursday night she fully expects Trump to at least try to self-pardon, but noted it won't protect him from civil charges from New York Attorney General Letitia James or "criminal investigations that are clearly being done by Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance." She also marveled at "the audacity of a president who's so clearly concerned about his own criminal culpability, and that of his family members, that pardons are a major obsession with him." Watch below. Peter Weber