Several senior officials in the incoming Trump administration were targeted by false bomb threats this week, the transition announced.

• "Last night and this morning, several of President Trump's Cabinet nominees and Administration appointees were targeted in violent, unAmerican threats to their lives and those who live with them," transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, said in a statement.
• The attacks included both threats and attempted "swatting," in which someone calls in a fake emergency at someone else's home, with the intent to provoke a large police presence.

🚔 Targeted officials include Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Trump's nominee for ambassador to the UN, and former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), his pick to lead the EPA, Axios' Andrew Solender reports.

• A family member of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Trump's now-withdrawn first choice for attorney general, was targeted, law enforcement said.

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"Democrats are eating our own, to a very high degree," Quentin Fulks, who was Vice President Harris' principal deputy campaign manager, says in a new post-mortem podcast.

• "And until that stops, we're not going to be able to address a lot of things that just need to be said."

Four senior Harris campaign officials — Fulks, campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon and senior advisers David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter — largely defended their strategy during an interview on "Pod Save America."

• "This political environment sucked," Plouffe said. "We were dealing with ferocious headwinds, and I think people's instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance."

The intrigue: Harris was "ready and willing to go on Joe Rogan" — just not to leave the campaign trail for a full day to tape in his Texas studio, O'Malley Dillon said.

• 🐔 The campaign reached out to popular podcasts like "Hot Ones," where celebrities are interviewed as they eat increasingly hot chicken wings. But they wanted to steer clear of politics.

📱 The bottom line: "We're losing the culture war," Fulks said.

• Watch the episode ... Full transcript.

1. 🔭 The Northern Lights may be visible tomorrow and Friday over some parts of the northern U.S., including Washington, Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine. Go deeper.
2. 🇺🇦 President-elect Trump picked Keith Kellogg, who was an adviser to Vice President Pence during Trump's first term, to be a special envoy to Russia and Ukraine. Go deeper.
3. 🇨🇳 Three Americans were freed in a prisoner swap with China. Go deeper.

If you've always wanted to run a marathon, but the idea of covering 26.2 miles of terrain is holding you back, here's a solution: the "backyard ultra."

• How it works: "The rules are simple," The Wall Street Journal explains. "Run one 4.167-mile loop in an hour. Then do it again and again, each hour on the hour. The race keeps going — sometimes for days — until there's only one person standing."

👟 Runners in the backyard ultra often end up going much farther than they would running a marathon — sometimes hundreds of miles over a few days.

• "I've never been a superfast 5K runner," one participant told The Journal. "But I'm really stubborn, and I really like just seeing how far my body will go — and how far my mind will go, too."

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