MADISON, Wis. -- President-elect Donald Trump pressed forward Friday with two more administration picks, as failed Green Party candidate Jill Stein took new steps to force recounts of ballots in a handful of Midwestern battleground states.
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Stein, who earned little more than 1 percent of the national vote, formally requested a Wisconsin recount Friday afternoon, vowing to do the same in the coming days in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Wisconsin officials confirmed Friday evening they would move forward with the first presidential recount in state history.
There is no evidence of election tampering in the states where Trump scored narrow victories, but Green Party spokesman George Martin insisted that "the American public needs to have it investigated to make sure our votes count."
"We're doing this to ensure the integrity of our system," he said.
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Trump's team ignored questions about the looming recounts. Set to assume the presidency in 55 days, he was focused instead on the task of building an administration from scratch.
Gathered with family at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., estate and event center, for the holiday weekend, the president-elect made two senior-level staff appointments and scheduled meetings with several more prospective administration officials.
He chose Fox News analyst Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland to serve as deputy national security adviser and campaign attorney Donald McGahn as White House counsel. In a statement, Trump cited McFarland's "tremendous experience and innate talent" and said McGhan "has a brilliant legal mind, excellent character and a deep understanding of constitutional law."
Having faced criticism about what some said was the inexperience of his initial picks, Trump finds in McFarland someone who previously worked under three presidents, although none since Ronald Reagan. McGhan, a veteran Republican election lawyer, served as Trump's attorney during the campaign.
Neither position requires Senate confirmation.
Trump transition spokesman Sean Spicer said the president-elect scheduled Monday meetings with eight more prospective administration hires, a group that includes several business leaders; U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa.; and David Clarke, the Wisconsin sheriff who is an opponent of the Black Lives Matter movement.
There were also signs of discord within the president-elect's small inner circle as Trump weighed his choices for secretary of state.
The options for the nation's chief diplomat include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was intensely loyal to Trump, and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who aggressively opposed Trump's candidacy.
Trump spokesman Kellyanne Conway took the unusual step of shining light on the split over the Thanksgiving holiday, tweeting that she had been "receiving a deluge of social media & private concerns re: Romney Some Trump loyalists warn against Romney as sec of state."
Transition aides declined to comment Friday on billionaire investor Wilbur Ross' selection for commerce secretary, or the possible choice of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson to be secretary of housing and urban development. Trump had tweeted Tuesday that he is "seriously considering" Carson for the HUD post, and Carson tweeted Wednesday that "an announcement is forthcoming about my role in helping to make America great again," though he declined to be more specific.
Carson, who has no known experience with housing matters, ran against Trump in the Republican primary before becoming an adviser and confidant.
Picks Praised
Trump's Friday announcement included bipartisan statements of support from former Sen. Joe Lieberman, who was the Democratic Party's 2000 vice presidential nominee, and Robert "Bud" McFarlane, who worked with McFarland as Reagan's national security adviser.
"As a friend and colleague, I've watched KT's depth of knowledge and understanding grow," said McFarlane, who called Trump's choice "one of our country's most insightful national security analysts."
As a national security analyst and contributor for Fox News since 2010, she has called President Barack Obama weak on counterterrorism, criticized what she calls "open borders" in Europe and echoed Trump's calls for a crackdown on letting Syrian refugees into the United States because of potential terrorism fears.
McGahn, who spent nearly a decade as the general counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee, is known for his work from 2008-13 as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, where he fought to ease many campaign-finance restrictions. He served as general counsel for Trump's campaign.
"It will be interesting to see how Don's suspicion of government -- his deep libertarianism -- will affect his advice on questions of executive authority," said Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel for Obama. "And as somebody who has never shied away from a fight, he would not likely be a 'yes man' in this or any other aspect of the job."
McGahn's appointment was praised by Edwin Meese III, an attorney general under Ronald Reagan, who said he would make "an excellent counsel."
Request for Recount
After requesting the recount in Wisconsin, Stein said on her website that she has raised enough money to fund a recount Pennsylvania and was pursuing additional funding to do the same in Michigan. A new goal of $7 million was set Friday to cover all three states.
The effort follows a report, published in New York magazine on Tuesday, that some election lawyers and computer experts suspect election returns "may have been manipulated or hacked" in those three states.
"After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual email accounts are causing many Americans to wonder if our election results are reliable," Stein stated on her website. "These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust."
In some areas, they detected a pattern in which Democrat Hillary Clinton fared worse in precincts where votes were recorded electronically, without a paper trail to confirm the digital record is correct, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
The basis for this week's concerns, however, appears to be circumstantial. One of the experts in the magazine report, University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, wrote separately that machines had "probably not" been hacked, but the only way to be sure was "to closely examine the available physical evidence."
Clinton leads the national popular vote by close to 2 million votes. Trump scored narrow victories in key battleground states, however, giving him the necessary 270 electoral votes to assume the presidency.
Trump won in Pennsylvania by roughly 70,000 votes, and in Wisconsin, he broke a Democratic winning streak dating back 32 years. He holds a slim lead in Michigan, where a Republican presidential candidate hasn't won since 1988; The Associated Press still hasn't officially called that race. The Detroit Free Press on Friday called a victory for Trump, leading by 10,704 votes.
The Clinton campaign has not pressed for recounts, and Democrats seemed dubious about the notion on Wednesday, according to the Post-Gazette article.
"If there were something to do here, there are a lot of us who would be jumping on it," said Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia election law attorney who represents Democrats.
Bonin said that while every election has "little hitches and glitches, I haven't seen anything which would cause me to question the results." Nor, he said, "have I ever seen evidence that would lead me to call the machines into question. ... You can't just go on a fishing expedition. You have to have allegations of specific fraud, or machines that didn't accept votes."
In Michigan, Trump's lead is expected to be certified by the state elections board Monday. The deadline to ask for a recount there is Wednesday.
Wisconsin, where Trump leads by little more than 22,000 votes, has never conducted a presidential recount.
In Michigan, a statewide recount would cost Stein roughly $790,000, said Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state. An opposing candidate would have seven days to file objections to the recount petition, after which the board would schedule a public hearing and later issue a ruling on the objections.
Trump's transition team indicated he was focused on the challenges of governing.
Since arriving at his Palm Beach estate Wednesday, they said, the president-elect has spoken to the prime ministers of Greece, Hungary and Sweden, along with the presidents of Panama and Slovenia, the country where his wife, Melania, was born.
He is expected to return to his New York City home Sunday.
Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples, Todd Richmond and David Eggert of The Associated Press; by Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; by Jerry Markon, Karen Tumulty, Karoun Demirjian and Ben Terris of The Washington Post; and by Mari A. Schaefer of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
A Section on 11/26/2016