All three attorneys representing President Donald Trump’s campaign in its federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania filed a motion on Monday to withdraw from the case seeking to stop the certification of the state’s election results.
Linda Kerns, John Scott and Douglas Bryan Hughes filed the motion the day before a judge is set to hear the case. Attorney Marc A. Scaringi will now represent the campaign in the case, according to the filing.
Major media outlets called the presidential election for former Vice President Joe Biden on Nov. 7 after determining that the remaining ballots left to be counted in Pennsylvania would not result in Trump catching up. The president has refused to concede, baselessly accusing states like Pennsylvania, where Biden won, of voter fraud and ballot-counting irregularities.
The new attorney for the case, Scaringi, published a blog post earlier this month on his law firm’s website that called Biden “President-Elect” and said the Democrat “has successfully claimed the role of the 46th president of the United States.”
Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis told HuffPost in a statement that substituting the attorneys “is consistent with routine managing of complex litigation.” The campaign did not answer HuffPost’s question about whether it was aware of Scaringi’s blog post.
This is now the second set of lawyers to withdraw from the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania case. Attorneys Ronald Hicks, Carolyn McGee and firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP filed a motion to withdraw on Thursday ― Kerns remained as counsel at the time, but filed a motion to withdraw on Monday.
On Friday, a federal appeals court rejected an effort by the Trump campaign to block about 9,300 mail-ballots that arrived after Election Day in Pennsylvania. A Philadelphia judge that same day refused to reject about 8,300 mail-ballots in the area, finding no evidence of any widespread voter fraud.
And a Michigan judge refused to stop the certification of Detroit-area election results on Friday, rejecting claims by the Trump campaign that the city had committed fraud with how it handled absentee ballots.
On Saturday, Trump announced that he had placed personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in charge of his national legal team and local counsel for the many campaign lawsuits challenging election results. Sources told The New York Times that Trump advisers were unhappy with the decision, complaining that Giuliani gives the president “unwarranted optimism” about his chances of overturning the election.
The Trump campaign filed a slimmed-down version of the federal lawsuit on Sunday in Pennsylvania that drops an allegation central to the case: that hundreds of thousands of mail-in and absentee ballots were illegally processed without the campaign’s representatives watching.
The remaining claim in the lawsuit focuses on invalidating ballots cast by voters who were given an opportunity to fix mail-in ballots that were going to be disqualified for a technicality. There is no provision in Pennsylvania law that prevents counties from helping voters fix a ballot that contains a technical deficiency.
The campaign still maintains that Pennsylvania election officials treated Democratic voters more favorably than their Republican counterparts. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar ― a Democrat who is the defendant in the case ― responded in court on Sunday asking the judge to dismiss the case. The state’s lawyers say that state courts are the proper jurisdiction for the subject, and that the lawsuit contains no “plausible claim for relief on any legal theory.”