Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani seeks to join Pa. vote challenge case after much of legal team quits effort to deny Joe Biden victory

President Donald Trump‘s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday asked a judge to let him appear in court for a hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to stop Pennsylvania from certifying its election results showing a projected victory for President-elect Joe Biden.

Giuliani’s last-minute bid to be admitted into the case came after two sets of lawyers for Trump’s reelection campaign quit the case over the past week.

It also came after a federal judge denied a request by a new attorney for the campaign to postpone Tuesday’s hearing, which is set for 1:30 p.m. ET.

A former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, Giuliani is not currently admitted to practice law in Pennsylvania federal court, so he needs permission from the judge to appear in the case.

On the same day that Biden was projected to win the election, Giuliani led a widely panned press conference outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a small business in Philadelphia located between a crematorium and a sex shop. Trump originally announced that the presser would be held at the “Four Seasons,” the name of an upscale hotel, before pointing out the actual location in a subsequent tweet.

Speaking at a lectern set up in the back parking lot of the landscaping business, Giuliani assailed Philadelphia for having a “sad history” of voter fraud, and scoffed at journalists when they told him that news outlets had called the race for Biden.

Trump last week said that the New York-based Giuliani would lead his campaign’s efforts in multiple states to challenge ballots and reverse Biden’s victory.

Those efforts so far have come to naught. Legal and election analysts have said Trump appears to have little, if any chance of winning enough cases, in enough states, to invalidate enough ballots to win a second term in the White House.

During an interview Tuesday on Fox Business, Giuliani claimed that the Pennsylvania case hinges on 700,000 ballots that he alleged “were counted surreptitiously.”

“Frankly, that is a case that we would like to see get to the Supreme Court,” he said.

Giuliani also said “we’re probably gonna sue in at least eight or nine” states where Republican ballot watchers allegedly were blocked from observing the vote tallying processing.

“The only remedy the court has is to just cancel out those votes,” he said.

“I believe we have amassed more than enough evidence in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Georgia,” he said when asked if there are enough questionable ballots to overturn Biden’s victory.

“I believe we’re very close in Nevada.” 

But the new attorney for Trump’s campaign in the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Marc Scaringi, who is also a talk-radio host, had said on his show on Nov. 7 before joining the team that attempts to reverse Biden’s projected electoral victory “will not work.”

That was the same day that NBC News and other media outlets called the national election for Biden, after they projected he would win Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes.

The lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania alleges that a number counties evaluated mail-ballots on an “entirely parallel track to those ballots cast in person.”

It also claims that a number of Democrat-heavy counties illegally reviewed mail-in ballots earlier than they should have, which gave voters there extra time to “cure” problems with their ballots.

On Sunday, the Trump campaign amended its complaint, abandoning a claim that election officials in certain counties had blocked some observers from watching ballots being counted.

Less than a week before Tuesday’s hearing, lawyers on the Trump campaign’s team from Porter Wright Morris & Arthur had withdrawn from the case.

“Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” those lawyers said in a court filing.

On Monday, three more lawyers asked the judge to let them leave the case.

U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann granted the request for two of them — John Scott and Douglas Hughes, both of whom are based in Texas.

But the judge was silent on the request to withdraw by Linda Kerns, a Philadelphia-based attorney whose practice previously specialized in family law matters.

Scaringi, the attorney who also has a radio show, then joined the Trump campaign’s legal team.

Hours later, Scaringi asked Brann to reschedule Tuesday’s oral arguments, as well as an evidentiary hearing set for Thursday.

“Having only been retained today, Plaintiffs’ new counsel need additional time to adequately prepare this case for the upcoming oral argument and evidentiary hearing,” Scaringi wrote in a court filing.

“Furthermore, this is a case of significant complexity and importance to the people of the United States of America,” Scaringi wrote.

Brann promptly denied the request.

“Counsel for the parties are expected to be prepared for argument and questioning,” the judge wrote in an order Monday night.