State Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, a Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, stands on stage with Jenna Ellis at a primary night election gathering in Chambersburg, Pa., Tuesday, May 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano on Monday hired lawyer Jenna Ellis, who was a part of former President Donald Trump’s legal team that promoted false voter fraud allegations and helped craft his stolen election narrative.

Ellis will serve as a senior legal advisor to the Republican candidate looking to replace retiring Gov. Tom Wolf (D). She previously campaigned with him during the primary election campaign.

“Jenna Ellis was the first to endorse us and was a champion for our campaign during the Primary Election,” Mastriano said in a statement. “The talent, experience, and legal expertise Jenna brings will be an important factor in helping us defeat Josh Shapiro and the extreme Democrat agenda in November.”

Ellis used to be a critic of Trump in 2016 when he was a Republican primary candidate and had harsh words for him on several occasions.

“Why should we rest our highest office in America, on a man who fundamentally goes back and forth and really cannot be trusted to be consistent or accurate in anything?” Ellis asked in an interview in 2016.

An apparent change of heart led to Ellis becoming a regular on Fox News and focusing her attention on election denial. She would then join Trump’s reelection campaign as an advisor in November 2019.

The Trump administration filed more than 60 lawsuits regarding stolen election fraud, and each one garnered no evidence of voter fraud or that the election was stolen to favor President Joe Biden. Last July, Ellis announced that she was leaving the Republican Party because they aren’t “conservative enough.”

Trump-endorsed Mastriano is running on a platform of “restoring election integrity,” and his website says he will appoint a secretary of state with experience in securing elections from fraud (he has yet to reveal whom that is.) The governor of Pennsylvania has the power to appoint the secretary of state, which is the position that oversees elections. After the 2020 election, President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and told him to “find 11,780 votes,” the exact number he needed to win the state.

6/15: In a previous version of this article, we said that each state’s governor can appoint the secretary of state. This is the case in Pennsylvania but not in other states. We regret the error.