Beautiful Virgin Islands

Tuesday, Aug 12, 2025

Trump team persists in Pa. court fights despite COVID quarantine, quitting lawyers and courtroom losses

Trump team persists in Pa. court fights despite COVID quarantine, quitting lawyers and courtroom losses

A day of setbacks in and out of court left the president's 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.

“All Pennsylvanians can have confidence in our election system and the accuracy of the vote,” Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Allegations of fraud and unfounded rumors of illegal activity have been repeatedly debunked.”

Despite the impediments dealt the campaign throughout Friday, spokesman Tim Murtaugh vowed that Trump’s legal effort would forge ahead undeterred.

“The president’s team … will move forward with rock-solid attorneys to ensure free and fair elections for all Americans,” he said.

Active court battles continued on multiple fronts, including fights over late-arriving ballots, county-level disputes over individual votes and the case on which the campaign has pinned its greatest hopes: a bid to convince a federal judge in Williamsport to bar the Pennsylvania from certifying its final vote tally by the Nov. 23 deadline.

The judge in that case has scheduled hearings for next week. And, in its request to withdraw from the case filed late Thursday, attorneys for Porter Wright assured him that their decision to step aside would not interfere that schedule.

They offered no further explanation for their departure, saying only, in a motion, that the firm had reached a mutual agreement that the campaign "will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws.”

The firm’s representation of Trump’s evidence-free claims that election had been stolen from him through widespread and systemic fraud had made it a target for criticism in recent days.

The New York Times reported Monday that several attorneys at the Ohio-based firm had objected to the firm taking on Trump as a client, given his record of attacking the rule of law. One attorney, the newspaper said, had quit over the decision.

Then, the firm took down its Twitter account Tuesday amid a barrage of negative attention from users on the platform. It noted, in a statement, Porter Wright’s “long history of election law work” on behalf of Democratic, Republican and independent candidates.

“At times, this calls for us to take on controversial cases,” it read. “We expect criticism in such instances, and we affirm the right of all individuals to express concern and disagreement.”

The Trump campaign was less circumspect, accusing the firm Friday of succumbing to public pressure.
“Cancel culture has finally reached the courtroom,” Murtaugh said.

It was not clear whether the firm would continue to be involved in the campaign’s other pending litigation in Pennsylvania.

For instance, Jeremy Mercer, a Pittsburgh-based lawyer for the firm, had served as the central witness in a case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court over access Trump campaign monitors had to vote counting in Philadelphia.

Ronald Hicks and Carolyn McGee — also from Porter Wright’s Pittsburgh office — remained listed as lead lawyers the campaign’s myriad other cases before state courts. Though statements from their firm and the Trump campaign suggested they would not be involved in those either.

That left at the helm Kerns, a family law attorney who runs her own practice in Center City with the addition Friday of a new lawyer — John Scott, an Texas-based attorney and GOP lobbyist.

Kerns — a Darby native, a graduate of Loyola University and cofounder of the conservative website Broad + Liberty — has been a stalwart of GOP election battles in Philadelphia for years and has been as much involved in Trump’s Pennsylvania litigation as the Porter Wright team since it began Election Day.

She had been scheduled to appear in person Friday before a Common Pleas judge in Philadelphia in a case over roughly 8,000 disputed mail ballots, but due to what Judge James Crumlish III described as the legal team’s exposure to the coronavirus, the hearing proceeded instead over Zoom.

Crumlish appeared skeptical of Kerns' arguments to have the votes disqualified over technical errors voters made in filling out their ballots, such as failing to write their addresses on the outer envelope, and ultimately denied her requests.

“What consideration should the court give to the thousands of electors who are unaware that the [campaign is] seeking to invalidate their votes,” he pondered. “You are seeking to disenfranchise the voters … for whatever reason.”

Kerns disputed that assessment, though when pressed earlier by the judge, she acknowledged that she was not alleging that any of the votes in question had been fraudulently submitted.

“I’m not challenging their eligibility” to vote, Kerns said. “We’re not challenging these ballots on the basis that these are not registered voters.”

That refrain has become common as each of Trump’s Pennsylvania cases has made their way in front of a judge.

Despite the president’s continued rhetoric about widespread and systemic voter fraud in the state, his campaign’s legal filings have thus far failed to lodge even a single allegation — let alone provide evidence — of one ballot being deliberately cast illegally.

Instead, their complaints have focused entirely on the process of how state and local elections administrators oversaw the casting and counting of votes.

The only specific allegations to have surfaced so far of attempts to cast an illegal ballot in Pennsylvania have been isolated and lodged by county officials who caught the perpetrators in the act.

For example, Chester County prosecutors announced Friday that they had filed charges against a 71-year-old registered Republican who cast two ballots on Election Day — one on behalf of himself, the other in the name of his son.

Donning sunglasses to hide his identity, prosecutors said, Ralph Thurman, returned to his polling place in Malvern after voting once and tried to pass himself off as his son.

Poll workers recognized him and, according to the affidavit filed in his case, Thurman “hurriedly fled the building.”
Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
Trump Proposes Land Concessions to End Ukraine War
New Road Safety Measures Proposed in the UK: Focus on Eye Tests and Stricter Drink-Driving Limits
Viktor Orbán Criticizes EU's Financial Support for Ukraine Amid Economic Concerns
South Korea's Military Shrinks by 20% Amid Declining Birthrate
US Postal Service Targets Unregulated Vape Distributors in Crackdown
Duluth International Airport Running on Tech Older Than Your Grandmother's Vinyl Player
RFK Jr. Announces HHS Investigation into Big Pharma Incentives to Doctors
Australia to Recognize the State of Palestine at UN Assembly
The Collapse of the Programmer Dream: AI Experts Now the Real High-Earners
Security flaws in a carmaker’s web portal let one hacker remotely unlock cars from anywhere
Street justice isn’t pretty but how else do you deal with this kind of insanity? Sometimes someone needs to standup and say something
Armenia and Azerbaijan sign U.S.-brokered accord at White House outlining transit link via southern Armenia
Barcelona Resolves Captaincy Issue with Marc-André ter Stegen
US Justice Department Seeks Release of Epstein and Maxwell Grand Jury Exhibits Amid Legal and Victim Challenges
Trump Urges Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to Resign Over Alleged Chinese Business Ties
Scotland’s First Minister Meets Trump Amid Visit Highlighting Whisky Tariffs, Gaza Crisis and Heritage Links
Trump Administration Increases Reward for Arrest of Venezuelan President Maduro to Fifty Million Dollars
Armenia and Azerbaijan to Sign US-Brokered Framework Agreement for Nakhchivan Corridor
British Labour Government Utilizes Counter-Terrorism Tools for Social Media Monitoring Against Legitimate Critics
OpenAI Launches GPT‑5, Its Most Advanced AI Model Yet
Embarrassment in Britain: Homelessness Minister Evicted Tenants and Forced to Resign
President Trump nominated Stephen Miran, his top economic adviser and a critic of the Federal Reserve, to temporarily fill an open Fed seat
The AI-Powered Education Revolution: Market Potential and Transformative Impact
Chikungunya Virus Outbreak in Southern China: Over 7,000 Hospitalized
French wine makers have seen catastrophic damage to vines that were almost ready to be harvested after the worst fires in more than 70 years burned through the south of the country
US Lawmaker Probes Intel CEO’s China Ties Amid National Security Concerns
Brazilian President Lula says he’ll contact the leaders of BRICS states to propose a unified response to U.S. tariffs
Trump Open to Meeting Putin as Soon as Next Week, with Possible Trilateral Summit Including Zelenskiy
Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau spark dating rumors, joining high stakes world of celeb-politician romances
US envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow to seek a breakthrough in the Ukraine war ahead of President Trump’s peace deadline
WhatsApp Deletes 6.8 Million Scam Accounts Amid Rising Global Fraud
Nine people have been hospitalized and dozens of salmonella cases have been reported after an outbreak of infections linked to certain brands of pistachios and pistachio-containing products, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada
Karol Nawrocki Inaugurated as Poland’s President, Setting Stage for Clash with Tusk Government
Trump Signals JD Vance as ‘Most Likely’ MAGA Successor for 2028
US Charges Two Chinese Nationals for Illegal Nvidia AI Chip Exports
Texas Residents Face Water Restrictions While AI Data Centers Consume Millions of Gallons
U.S. Tariff Policy Triggers Market Volatility Amid Growing Global Trade Tensions
Tariffs, AI, and the Shifting U.S. Macro Landscape: Navigating a New Economic Regime
Representative Greene Urges H-1B Visa Cuts Amid U.S.-India Trade Tensions
U.S. House Committee Subpoenas Clintons and Senior Officials in Epstein Investigation
Sydney Sweeney Registered as Republican as Controversial American Eagle Ad Sparks Debate
Trump Accuses Major Banks of Politically Motivated Account Denials and Prepares Executive Order
TikTok Removes Huda Kattan Video Over Anti-Israel Conspiracy Claims
Trump Threatens Tariffs on India Over Russian Oil Imports
German Finance Minister Criticizes Trump’s Attacks on Institutions
U.S. Proposes Visa Bond of Up to $15,000 for Some Applicants
U.S. Farmers Increase Lobbying Amid Immigration Crackdown
Elon Musk Receives $23.7 Billion Tesla Stock Award
Texas House Paralyzed After Democrats Walk Out Over Redistricting
Mexican Cartels Complicate Sheinbaum’s U.S. Security Talks
×