Trump’s new Pennsylvania lawyer once said that lawsuits ‘will not reverse this election’

Barely a week later, Scaringi is playing a key role in one piece of that litigation, representing the Trump campaign in what may be its last stand in Pennsylvania — an unlikely lawsuit intended to block the Keystone State from certifying its election results.

Last week, two lawyers withdrew from the Pennsylvania lawsuit, which claims it was unfair that voters in some Democratic-leaning counties were allowed to fix ballot mistakes. In a court filing on Monday, three more attorneys moved to do the same, The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine and Aaron Schaffer reported.

On Monday night, Scaringi was retained by the Trump campaign in their place. And now, the 51-year-old lawyer is set to argue an unlikely case that — even if it were successful — would not come close to reversing Biden’s vote margin of more than 70,000 ballots in Pennsylvania.

Scaringi himself argued on his radio show that it’s the kind of case that will be an uphill climb.

“In my opinion, there really are no bombshells that are about to drop that will derail a Biden presidency, including these lawsuits,” he said during his Nov. 7 show.

He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.

Scaringi, who began his political career as a legislative aide to former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, made an unsuccessful Republican primary run in 2012 to challenge Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.). In 2016, he volunteered on the Trump campaign and served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, according to his law firm’s website.

“He captured so much of the conservative base that has been ignored by the Republican Party establishment,” Scaringi told a chain of small Pennsylvania newspapers before the election. “He’s hitting his stride with his full-throated defense of traditional American culture.”

But about an hour after Pennsylvania — and the White House — was called for Biden on Nov. 7, Scaringi sounded unsurprised by the result.

“I’ve been saying since Wednesday morning that Biden would win,” he said on his self-named AM radio show. While several legal challenges regarding the results “had merit,” he said, including one brought by the state Republican Party about late-arriving ballots, others were unlikely to grant Trump another four years on practical terms.

On his law firm’s website, an unattributed blog post — which appears to have since been deleted — described Biden as the president-elect, saying he “successfully claimed the role of the 46th president of the United States.”

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was pushing unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and unrolling a legal blitz to challenge results in several battlegrounds. That included a federal case filed Nov. 9 in the U.S. District Court for Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Amid rising scrutiny of the law firms representing the Trump campaign, several cases underwent a rapid turnover in legal counsel. On Friday, two of the initial attorneys on the Pennsylvania federal lawsuit, both with the Ohio-based Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, withdrew.

Scaringi addressed that turnover during his show Saturday, calling it “very unusual” and saying it would “cause some disturbance” in the case. All of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties must submit their official results for certification at the state level by next Monday.

“The race to the date of certification in several of these key states, including Pennsylvania, is on, and it’s up to the Trump lawyers to get some good results in these lawsuits to try to flip the vote count,” he said.

On Monday, three of the attorneys who had since taken up the Pennsylvania case — Linda A. Kerns, John Scott and Douglas Bryan Hughes — moved to withdraw as well, writing in a court filing that they had “reached a mutual understanding that [the campaign] will be best served” by their departure.

Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement Monday that its “substitution of local counsel is consistent with routine managing of complex litigation.” She added that Trump has appointed his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to lead a national legal team overseeing all election challenges.

Scaringi, now in charge, said that he intended to file another amended version of the Pennsylvania lawsuit and asked U.S. District Court Judge Matthew W. Brann to delay a hearing in the case scheduled for Tuesday.

Having only been retained on Monday, Scaringi said, he needed more time to prepare. But Brann quickly shot down that request.

“Oral argument will take place as scheduled,” he wrote. “Counsel for the parties are expected to be prepared for argument and questioning.”

Swaine and Schaffer contributed to this report.