President Donald Trump’s effort to contest the Nov. 3 election in court suffered a series of setbacks Friday, leaving his house-of-cards legal strategy to reverse the results teetering on the edge of collapse.
The law firm leading Trump’s battles in Pennsylvania, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, abruptly withdrew its representation — a decision a campaign spokesperson dismissed as the lawyers “buckling” under attacks from “liberal mobs.”
That left Linda Kerns, a solo practitioner in Philadelphia, as the primary attorney now representing the campaign on multiple legal fronts. But her in-person appearance in a Philadelphia courtroom Friday was scuttled, after the judge announced Trump’s legal team had been exposed to the coronavirus through meetings with campaign staff.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected a request to overturn an earlier ruling on Pennsylvania’s three-day grace period for late-arriving mail ballots postmarked by Election Day — a fight Trump’s campaign has sought to take to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And defeats continued to add up elsewhere, including in Michigan, where a judge dismissed campaign accusations of fraud as “incorrect” and “not credible” and in Arizona, where Trump lawyers dropped a suit there, acknowledging the president trailed too far behind in that state’s vote tally for the legal challenge to make a difference. In Georgia, major news networks declared Biden the victor even as a state-mandated recount began.
All of that came as Joe Biden’s lead over Trump in Pennsylvania continued to widen — up to 60,000 votes — with vote counting drawing toward completion.