Trump Campaign Senior Legal Advisor Jenna Ellis speaks as Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn whispers to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to President Donald Trump, during a news conference about the 2020 U.S. presidential election results at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, November 19, 2020.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
A top advisor to President Donald Trump‘s campaign said Wednesday that he has tested positive for the coronavirus, six days after attending a controversial press conference led by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
The disclosure of the Covid-19 diagnosis by Boris Epshteyn came as Giuliani, the Trump lawyer who led that press conference, headed to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for what was being called a hearing by the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on the state’s election.
Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who also attended his father’s press conference Thursday at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, revealed last Friday that he tested positive for the coronavirus. Andrew Giuliani is a White House special assistant to Trump.
The Gettysburg hearing comes a day after Pennsylvania certified its election results showing a win there for President-elect Joe Biden, the former Democratic vice president.
Epshteyn in a tweet said, “I am experiencing mild symptoms, and am following all appropriate protocols, including quarantining and contact tracing.”
Jenna Ellis, a senior legal advisor to the campaign, who also was at the press conference, tweeted about a half hour before Epshteyn’s tweet that she was “Headed to Gettysburg, PA with @RudyGiuliani.”
The campaign has said that the hearing, called by Republican state senators, will hear testimony from people who have submitted affidavits claiming they were aware of election fraud.
Epshteyn, a former special assistant to Trump, was physically very close to both Giuliani and Ellis during the press conference, where those two lawyers and then-campaign lawyer Sidney Powell made broad claims of election fraud for which they have offered no evidence.
During that press conference, Rudy Giuliani was sweating heavily, so much so that what appeared to be hair dye ran down both of his cheeks.
Giuliani is leading legal efforts by the Trump campaign to challenge the outcomes of voting results in multiple states, in a long-shot bid to reverse Biden’s projected victory in the Electoral College.
Legal experts have given those efforts little chance of succeeding.
On Saturday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, who is a former Republican official, brutally dismissed Giuliani’s arguments in a lawsuit seeking to block certification of the state’s voting tally, saying that they were “without merit.”
The Trump campaign and its allies have lost or withdrawn about 36 legal challenges to ballots and voting processes around the country.
Biden currently is projected to win 306 electoral votes, 36 more than needed to secure a White House victory.
Gettysburg is the site of the most famous battle in the U.S. Civil War. Over three days in July 1863, Union forces defeated traitorous Confederate forces led by Robert E. Lee, thwarting their bid to invade the North.
Four months later, President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, delivered the famed Gettysburg Address at the battle site, urging his listeners to act so that “these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”