Michael T. van der Veen, a lawyer who was not previously known to be representing Donald Trump until Monday’s filing relating to Trump’s impeachment trial, sued the then-president in August for interfering with the operation of the US Postal Service.
Another of Trump’s lawyer, Bruce Castor, also sued Trump over the summer in another lawsuit alleging the same thing: that Trump was attempting to obstruct the delivery of mail to influence the November election.
In a lawsuit filed in August, van der Veen stated that his client’s Constitutional rights were being violated by attempts by Trump to impede people’s ability to vote via mail-in ballots.
“In light of [the] expansion of mail-in voting, and the barriers to in-person voting posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of Pennsylvanians voting by mail will increase dramatically in the upcoming elections,” van der Veen stated in a press release about the suit. “However, their ballots will be subject to the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, thereby causing plaintiffs and many Pennsylvanians who vote by mail to face an impermissible risk of arbitrary disenfranchisement, in violation of their constitutional rights.”
Castor and van der Veen belong to the same Philadelphia-based law firm, van der Veen, O’Neill, Hartshorn, and Levin, which has six lawyers on staff and one “of counsel.”