President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has parted ways with Marc Elias, the election lawyer who helped arrange the “Russia collusion” hoax and filed many of the lawsuits that transformed voting to enable Biden’s win in 2020.
Axios.com reported Monday:
President Biden’s team recently split with the Democratic Party’s longtime lawyer, Marc Elias, because of disagreements with Elias’ legal strategies and strained personal relationships, according to several people familiar with the dispute.
Why it matters: The divorce has created a divide in the party’s legal apparatus going into the 2024 election — with Elias representing Democrats’ committees for House, Senate and state legislative races, while Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee mostly get legal help elsewhere.
Axios describes various differences in strategy and style between Elias and Biden lawyer Bob Bauer. It does not mention any of Elias’s past controversial roles.
Elias has long been notorious for challenging election results, dating back to Al Franken’s win over incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman in 2008 — a race that tipped the Senate toward a filibuster-proof majority for Democrats. He is also a frequent guest on MSNBC, attacking and mocking Republicans’ election challenges.
In 2017, the Washington Post revealed that Elias, who was then working for the Democratic Party0aligned Perkins Coie law firm, hired Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to prepare the so-called Russia “dossier.” That, in turn, helped launch an FBI investigation and fueled media conspiracy theories that sought to overturn the 2016 election.
Elias split with Perkins Coie shortly before he became a key witness in the trial of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. He admitted he had discretion to direct Fusion GPS’s efforts. Sussmann was acquitted by a District of Columbia jury in what some observers called an act of “jury nullification”: Trump is simply so hated inside the Beltway that he and his supporters are presumed guilty, and his opponents are presumed innocent.
In 2020, Elias helped lead Democratic Party efforts to challenge voting laws to allow for universal vote-by-mail, using the coronavirus pandemic to accelerate a strategy the party had begun to embrace in an effort to turn out their voters in higher numbers. Ironically, he also led efforts to challenge election results when Democrats lost, and even claimed in one case that voting machines were to blame.
In 2021, Elias was sanctioned by the Fifth Circuit for filing a nearly identical motion to one that had been rejected and ordered to complete a new course in legal ethics.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
