A Pennsylvania lawyer who represented the Trump campaign in one of its early election challenges told a federal judge Thursday “the client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime,” one day after a mob of Trump supporters turned violent and stormed the US Capitol Building.
The attorney, Jerome Marcus, is asking to withdraw from a case in which the Trump campaign sued the Philadelphia County Board of Elections over where ballot processing observers could stand, part of the early effort by Trump to spread false claims that the campaign’s observers were blocked from watching vote counting.
“The client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant and with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement,” Marcus wrote to the court on Thursday.
In a statement to CNN, Marcus defended the case as “factually based,” but said Trump had used the filing and other court cases to incite the violence, specifically referring to Wednesday’s riots by pro-Trump supporters on the Capitol.
“I refer specifically to his urging people to come to Washington for a ‘wild’ protest,” Marcus said in his statement. “I want absolutely no part of that. Therefore I have asked the court to allow me to withdraw as counsel.”
In the case in Pennsylvania’s Eastern District, the Trump campaign sued claiming they were being unfairly blocked from observing ballot canvassing in Philadelphia. But the federal judge, Paul Diamond, his patience clearly tried with the legal complaint, confirmed the GOP observers were allowed to watch.
When the judge pressed the Trump campaign lawyer, Marcus, if there were observers in the room from the campaign, Marcus, said, “There’s a non-zero number of people in the room.”
