Democratic VP contender Josh Shapiro made his name battling Trump in court as Pennsylvania AG

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump could be about to face off against a familiar foe he sparred with when he was in office: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Shapiro, now considered a potential running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, built his national profile when he was the commonwealth's attorney general, filing challenges to Trump policies and battling his efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

Shapiro’s battles with Trump “were a huge part of raising his profile and cementing a real track record on a lot of important issues,” said J.J. Abbott, who at the time was a spokesman for then-Gov. Tom Wolf.

Just days after he took office in 2017, Shapiro was part of the coalition of state attorneys general who opposed Trump's proposed travel ban on people entering the country from Muslim-majority countries.

And as Trump left office four years later, Shapiro was heavily involved in efforts to push back against the many lawsuits questioning Biden's victory, including in Pennsylvania itself.

“We did a lot of work together on a lot of different cases,” Brian Frosh, a Democrat who was Maryland’s attorney general at the time, said of Shapiro. “He’s very smart, very capable. He’s hard-working. He’s willing to take risks.”

When he ran for governor in 2022, "a big part of Shapiro’s appeal to voters was that he had taken on Trump and election deniers," Frosh added. Shapiro's Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, was himself an election denier who had traveled to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Frosh said Shapiro's investigation of sex abuse allegations against the Catholic Church was a blueprint for his own probe in Maryland.

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