Last night the Trump campaign lost yet another set of lawyers on its shitshow circus of a lawsuit to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania. They would have you believe that having two sets of lawyers enter and withdraw their appearance inside 10 days is totally normal, NBD.
"The President announced Saturday that he has asked Mayor Rudy Giuliani to lead the national legal team, along with local counsel," wackass campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis said in a statement. "Our substitution of local counsel is consistent with routine managing of complex litigation."
Because Jenna Ellis is full of shit. Just like she was full of shit yesterday when she insisted that the campaign wasn't retreating from its effort to get millions of ballots tossed out in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh based on spurious claims that Republican observers were excluded from the vote count. A claim she backed up by tweeting an image of that very language with a line through it indicating it had been stricken from the complaint. Yes, for real .
Trump's fancy lawyers at Porter Wright Morris & Arthur filed the federal complaint on November 9, but withdrew their appearance just three days later, leaving local counsel Linda Kerns, who was joined by two lawyers from Texas. Kerns is a well-known Republican litigator who has spent a decade fighting to make it harder for people in Philadelphia to vote. Her dogs are literally named "Gipper" and "Thatcher." Again, yes, for real .
But Kerns is not an idiot, which is why she amended the Trump campaign's complaint after the Third Circuit ruled over the weekend that a local candidate did not have standing to sue Pennsylvania for failure to enforce its own election laws, meaning that Trump didn't have standing either. Which is the second to last thing she did before moving to withdraw from the case yesterday. The last thing she did was throw a massive tantrum because she got a mean voicemail from one of the 2,700 lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis who is not representing the Pennsylvania Secretary of State.
But lawyers can't just drop clients mid-case without sign-off from the court, particularly if no locally admitted counsel has entered an appearance. So US District JudgeMatthew Brann let the Texas lawyers go back to the Lone Star State, but he's not letting Kerns out just yet.
Meanwhile, local talkshow host/lawyer Marc Scaringi entered an appearance for the Trump campaign, asking the court to postpone today's hearing so he could get up to speed, a request which was promptly denied . As John Whitehouse of Media Matters noted, Scaringi himself acknowledged on air that the litigation to overturn election results in Pennsylvania was pointless.
Marc Scaringi is Trump's new lawyer in Pennsylvania https: //t.co/xeKoMNdpzl On his radio show on Nov 7, Scaringi s… https://t.co/ax9mEPxdh5
— John Whitehouse (@John Whitehouse) 1605576646.0
"There really are no bombshells that are about to drop that will derail a Biden presidency, including these lawsuits," he said on his November 7 show. "At the end of the day, in my view, the litigation will not work. It will not reverse this election."
But wait, there's more! Guess who's coming to Pennsylvania to argue that letting people who botched their mail-in ballots cast provisional votes on Election Day violates the Equal Protection clause?
Can you guess?
That's right, it's Rudy Giuliani, an American success story, movin' on up from a landscaper's yard next to the porno shop to a federal court in just one week. But ... has our Roods litigated in federal court recently? We know that he appeared in a traffic case in Florida for his girlfriend's daughter a couple years back. But when was the last time America's Mayor argued a federal case?
According to PACER, the last time Rudy Giuliani entered an appearance in federal court was 1992 https: //t.co/0tSdbjlUNe
— Zoe Tillman (@Zoe Tillman) 1605625315.0
PERFECT. No, really, we could not have scripted this thing better if we tried. Well, if Rudy does show up and turn this hearing into an even bigger three-ring circus than it already is, you know we will liveblog the shit out of it. Always assuming the court's phone line doesn't get jammed up by 11 a.m. since every reporter in the country will be racing to get on the line.
See you then, Wonkers!
[ Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Kathy Boockvar docket at Court Listener]
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Scrapple.
Evidently you don't have a repug mind.
Me neither.