It's all just gotten to be too embarrassing for another of the big law firms representing two-time popular vote loser impeached lame duck Donald Trump in elections fights in Pennsylvania. Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a suit it had filed in federal court for Trump earlier in the week. "Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws," the firm said in a filing with the court.
That challenge is an effort to essentially toss all the votes in Pennsylvania's Democratic counties and prevent certification of the legislation. The Democratic National Committee has moved for dismissal, countering that Trump has "enlisted the federal judiciary to air a laundry list of purported election administration grievances—from the notification provided to voters whose absentee and mail-in ballots were deficient, to the distance between a poll watcher and the canvassing proceedings—and attempt to evade the Commonwealth's election contest procedures, but effectively seek the same remedy: to overturn the election." But, they argue, Team Trump "provides no basis for such extraordinary relief, nor does it justify the consequent intrusion on state sovereignty" in trying to take the votes cast from more than 6.75 million people. So, yeah, apparently Porter Wright's attorneys finally decided that this was all just a bit too much.
A report in The New York Times Monday described the growing internal unrest in the firm as it filed more and more specious claims on behalf of Trump and the role they were playing in undermining the integrity of the elections process. One of their lawyers had already quit over the summer because of work with Trump, and that was before they started in on this nonsense. It's worse than nonsense. It's total garbage. Like another challenge brought by Trump "voters" in Pennsylvania that was filed without any evidence. They say they'll collect the evidence after the challenge is accepted. It just doesn't work like that.
It doesn't work at all the way Trump's lawyers are pretending. If you have some time to spare and need a dark laugh, these Twitter threads from the Times' Alan Feuer and Law & Crime's Adam Klasfeld on the second "Sharpiegate" challenge in Maricopa County, Arizona, (the conspiracy theory that involves Sharpies and overvotes and undervotes and ink drying) will provide that. This was an absolutely bonkers hearing in which, among other things, one of the star witnesses for Trump was exposed as the business partner of the lawyer representing Trump in that hearing. The lawyer for the Democrats asked him if he was getting paid to testify. "Not that I know of," he said. "I haven't discussed it." Asked if it was possible he was being paid. "I'm not sure," he said.
Another highlight was when the Democrats' lawyer called the Trump campaign's top person in the state to testify. Feuer: "She says she had an open line of communications with election officials all day. But never worried about poll workers overriding a voter's decision. She says she got some reports about voter confusion. But … says she was totally satisfied about how the county handled the issue." She went on, "I did not raise any issues about poll workers," as Feuer says, which is "the heart of this complaint." All of this something like seven hours of testimony, by the way, was over 191 votes. As of Friday morning, Joe Biden's lead in Maricopa County is more than 45,000 votes.
No wonder the largest firm in Arizona that had been working on Trump’s challenges withdrew this week. Leaving Trump with just Phoenix political law firm Statecraft with attorney Kory Langhofer, the guy who calls his own business partner as his star witness.
At some point, somebody should have to pay some fines or spend a few nights in jail for the massive contempt of court—and contempt of democracy—all these nuisance cases reflect.