Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has hired notorious election meddler Marc Elias to join their legal team to focus on potential recounts.
Elias is bringing along “lawyers from his growing firm” this go-around after having previously served as general counsel for Harris’ primary campaign during the 2020 election cycle, The New York Times (NYT) reported. Other members of Harris’ legal team include Bob Bauer, “who served as personal counsel to President Biden for years,” Dana Remus, who served as general counsel to Biden’s 2020 campaign, and Vanita Gupta, a former “top Biden Justice Department official” who will serve as an “informal adviser,” The Times reported.
But if Elias’ past (and present) tells us anything, it’s that Harris’ team is gearing up to fight tooth and nail to win this election in the courts if it can’t win at the ballot box.
Russia Collusion
Elias is perhaps best known for helping construct the Russia collusion hoax, which was one of the first explicit instances of Democrat election interference targeting Donald Trump. Elias commissioned the discredited Steele Dossier that was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Elias was a top lawyer for Clinton in 2016.
Fusion GPS was hired by Elias — yet funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee — to get dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christopher Steele, who later disseminated uncorroborated allegations that Trump was a Russian asset to media and U.S. spy agencies. The dossier’s primary source was Igor Danchenko, who, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland explained in a breakdown of the Russia-collusion hoax, “fed Steele false information about the Trump campaign, which a Clinton booster had invented and then passed on to Danchenko.”
The FBI used this uncorroborated evidence to illegally spy on the Trump campaign in what later became known as “Crossfire Hurricane.” Subsequent investigations from both Special Counsels Robert Mueller and John Durham found no evidence Trump conspired with Russian operatives.
Sanctioned for Deception
Elias was sanctioned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 2021 after he deceptively refiled a motion that was previously rejected “without disclosing the previous denial.” Elias was ordered to pay “attorneys’ fees and court costs incurred by their opponents over the ‘duplicative’ motion and any related response and also to pay ‘double costs,’” as explained by Reuters.
The sanctions were a result of Elias’ efforts to reinstate straight-ticket voting in Texas. Straight-ticket voting allows voters to vote for all their party’s preferred candidates by just marking their ballot once.
Elias “demanded that the judges rethink the ‘unprecedented’ penalties and asked for an appeals court hearing to remove the sanctions,” as my colleague Jordan Boyd explained. The court refused in a unanimous decision.
Election Integrity
But what makes Elias so dangerous to the future of this republic are his efforts to undermine election safeguards and create an electoral free-for-all.
Nevada automatically sends a ballot to every active voter on their voter rolls. But the state’s voter rolls allegedly include hundreds of “suspect addresses” like strip clubs, bars, parking lots, and commercial addresses, my colleague Matt Kittle explained, citing an investigative report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation. But state law requires that a voter register where he lives, so PILF is asking “elections officials to enforce the law.” To do so, the foundation filed a petition in Nevada’s second-most populous county, Washoe, to force elections officials to investigate the commercial addresses on voter rolls.
[READ NEXT: Russia Hoaxer Marc Elias’ Firm Sues To Let Foreign Billionaires Buy Ohio Elections]
But Elias’ team is having none of that, intervening in the case to argue, as Kittle put it, that “forcing Washoe election administrators to follow the law and clean up the county’s dirty voter rolls will ‘threaten’ voting rights.”
Elias was also recently lambasted by U.S. District Court Chief Judge James D. Peterson for bringing a “novel” absentee ballot complaint against Wisconsin that Peterson — an Obama appointee — called “head-scratching.”
Elias and his firm claimed Wisconsin’s requirement that a U.S. citizen witness and sign an absentee voter’s ballot is a violation of voting and civil rights.
But Peterson ruled that “the most obvious problem with plaintiffs’ interpretation is that it simply does not make any sense.” The judge went on to explain that the state statute is “intended to serve legitimate and important purposes, such as deterring voter fraud, undue influence, and ballot harvesting.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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