President-elect urges Obama via Twitter: No more releases from Guantanamo

It was been a busy Tuesday for president-elect Donald Trump on Twitter, but he took the time to prepare his supporters for a late flurry of transfers from Guantánamo Bay that President Barack Obama plans in the coming days.

The New York Times reported last month that the Obama administration had deals to transfer about 18 of the remaining 59 detainees before Obama leaves office on Jan. 20. If all goes as planned, most would go to three Persian Gulf nations — Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and be placed in custodial rehabilitation programs. One would go to Italy.

All of the men set to leave the prison are on a list of those recommended for transfer, if security conditions can be met in the receiving country, by six U.S. security agencies. Most have been held for about 14 years in wartime detention without trial and are from unstable countries, like Yemen, which complicated efforts to find a place to send them.

While Obama failed to fulfill his vow to close the Guantánamo prison, he refused to place any new detainees there and has whittled its population from the 242 prisoners he inherited from the administration of President George W. Bush.

Trump has vowed to keep the prison open and “load it up with some bad dudes.”

— CHARLIE SAVAGE

Clintons Say They Plan to Attend the Inauguration

She called Donald Trump “unfit” to be the commander-in-chief. He called her a “nasty woman.”

But Hillary Clinton will be attending Trump’s inauguration, along with her husband.

Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, will also be in Washington on Jan. 20 for the inaugural festivities.

Not since Al Gore shared the stage with George W. Bush in 2001 has such an awkward pairing occurred at an inauguration. Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and only conceded the loss after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to stop a recount in Florida.

Hillary Clinton’s loss was less contested, but her victory total in the popular vote, by 2,864,974 million votes, dwarfed Gore’s 543,895 margin in 2000.

Hillary Clinton’s total popular vote was the largest for a losing candidate since 1876.

— AMY CHOZICK

Ex-Governor Patrick Calls Sessions Wrong Person’ to Lead Justice Dept.

Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor, made a forceful plea on Tuesday for the Senate not to confirm Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as attorney general, recalling when the two men were on opposite sides of a racially tinged case three decades ago, and calling Sessions “the wrong person to place in charge of our justice system.”

In 1985, Sessions, then a federal prosecutor in Alabama, brought criminal charges against three black voting rights activists for helping older black voters, many of whom had been barred from voting for most of their lives, fill out absentee ballots. One of the lawyers for the defense in that case was Patrick, who was working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and later became head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Bill Clinton.

A jury acquitted the defendants.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick, who is black, wrote that Sessions relied on a baseless theory — that helping someone to vote is illegal — and did so selectively, targeting black people who had helped black voters. Patrick is a Democrat, and Sessions, nominated by President-Elect Donald Trump to lead the Justice Department, is a Republican.

“To use prosecutorial discretion to attempt to criminalize voter assistance is wrong and should be disqualifying for any aspirant to the nation’s highest law enforcement post,” he wrote. And while absentee ballots were in widespread use, “Mr. Sessions investigated only the use by black voters and only where white incumbents were losing political ground.”

— RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

A Fellow ‘Apprentice’ Star Is Set to Join Trump in the White House

Omarosa Manigault, an original series star of President-elect Donald Trump’s reality television show “The Apprentice,” is expected to have a senior role in the Office of Public Engagement at the White House, a senior transition official said.

Manigault has no government experience. But she has been deeply loyal to Trump and was among his few well-known black supporters during the campaign.