President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his administration will be joining a Hail Mary effort by the Republican attorney general in Texas to overturn the election in four battleground states carried by Joe Biden.

And seventeen state attorneys general – all Republicans and all hailing from states that Trump carried in November – are lending their names to the effort, signing a friend of the court brief filed later Wednesday.

'Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,' wrote the states, who are seeking to have the court step in to overturn the vote in four other states.

'States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States,' they write. 

Signing on were the top law enforcement officers of Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.  

The attorneys general joined Trump's effort at a time when House Republicans were circulating a petition to support it – the latest sign of how the president maintains his grip on the Republican Party despite losing to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and having just weeks left in office. 

In the suit, filed late Monday in the name of the State of Texas, its attorney general Ken Paxton argues that the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia violated the Constitution's Elections Clause with their dramatic expansion of mail-in ballots amid the coronavirus pandemic.   

The case has already been called 'insane' by one University of Texas law professor, and follows a series of legal defeats for Team Trump. Paxton is himself under FBI investigation over alleged bribery and abuse of his office.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to another case seeking to overturn the certification process in Pennsylvania by voiding its mail-in ballots. No justice registered a dissent - suggesting that the decision could have been 9-0 against Republican Mike Kelly, whose case would have also voided the presidential election result if it had succeeded.

And in Nevada late Tuesday, the state Supreme Court slapped down Trump's bid to overturn the election unanimously, ruling he had provided no evidence of significant fraud.