Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 01m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred fifth day and the forty-sixth day.
On this day in 1944, German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: “Nuts!”
Recommended for reading in full —
Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Emma Brown report Trump assembles a ragtag crew of conspiracy-minded allies in flailing bid to reverse election loss:
Members of the group assembled in the Oval Office on Friday for a marathon meeting that lasted more than four hours and included discussion of tactics ranging from imposing martial law in swing states to seizing voting machines through executive fiat. The meeting exploded into shouting matches as outside advisers and White House aides clashed over the lack of a cohesive strategy and disagreed about the constitutionality of some of the proposed solutions.
Trump’s desire to remain in power was dampened further Monday as Barr said that he saw no basis for the federal government to seize voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud.
“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said during a news conference.
Cary Aspinwall and Simone Weichselbaum report Colorado Tries New Way To Punish Rogue Cops:
Now police officers who violate people’s civil rights can be held personally responsible in state court.
And they can’t use the defense that experts say has stymied many efforts to hold police to account: “qualified immunity.” It’s a legal doctrine that says government workers can’t be held liable for what they do on the job, except in rare circumstances.
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In 1967, the Supreme Court carved out a “qualified immunity” exception that helps government officials: They couldn’t be sued if they were acting in good faith and didn’t know what they were doing was illegal. Over the years, the court expanded that doctrine so that now, even police officers who knowingly violate someone’s rights are protected—unless a court has ruled that their behavior was unconstitutional in a previous case involving nearly identical circumstances.
Last year, for example, a federal appeals court found that a police officer who shot a 10-year-old by mistake while aiming for the family’s dog was protected from liability under qualified immunity. The judges ruled that he couldn’t be held responsible because there wasn’t a previous case where an officer was found at fault in almost identical circumstances.
Qualified immunity has blocked lawsuits for people who were killed by police during arrests; a man who was shot and killed after a 911 dispatcher put him in harm’s way; and a man who gouged his own eyes out in jail after he was denied mental health care.