CHICAGO, Illinois — Vice President Kamala Harris has hired disgraced “Russia collusion” hoaxer Marc Elias to help lead her massive team of election lawyers as they prepare to fight former President Donald Trump and the Republicans over voting results.
Elias will join a team of lawyers that is reportedly ten times larger than the team of 600 lawyers that then-candidate Joe Biden boasted he had hired in the summer of 2020 to challenge election results in close contests nationwide.
The New York Times reported Elias’s new role in the Kamala Harris campaign on the opening day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The legal apparatus within the Harris campaign will oversee multiple aspects of the election program, including voter protection, recounts and general election litigation, and it is adding Marc Elias, one of the party’s top election lawyers, to focus on potential recounts.
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Mr. Elias, who has had tensions with Mr. Bauer and other Democratic lawyers in the past, will also bring lawyers from his growing firm, Elias Law Group. He has also previously worked for Ms. Harris, serving as general counsel for her primary campaign in 2020.
The Times article does not mention Elias’s colorful history, including his leading role in the “Russia collusion” hoax.
As Breitbart News has noted:
Elias runs the so-called “Democracy Docket,” suing on behalf of Democrats and claiming to defend “democracy” in doing so. He played a key role in planting the “Russia collusion” hoax, which sought to undermine the results of the 2016 presidential election. He was also instrumental in suing states to change their voting laws ahead of the 2020 presidential election to enable mass vote-by-mail, a tactic that was crucial to Democratic turnout in swing states.
Elias parted ways from his former law firm, the Democrat-aligned Perkins Coie LLP, before he was called as a witness in the trial former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann.
Elias admitted on the stand that during the 2016 election, he had the power to direct the activities of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that produced the fraudulent “Steele dossier,” which was the basis for the “Russia collusion” hoax and, later, for the FBI’s unjustified surveillance of a Trump foreign policy aide.
(Sussmann was acquitted by a District of Columbia jury of lying to the FBI; Elias later bragged that Trump could not get a fair trial before a DC jury in his own criminal case.)
Elias’s push for vote-by-mail in 2020 was crucial to what Time later described as a “shadow campaign” to “save” the 2020 presidential election. He mocked Republicans for raising questions about voting machines; ironically, he later claimed that faulty voting machines cost Democrats a close congressional race in New York. The Fifth Circuit slapped sanctions on Elias in 2021 for having “violated his] duty of candor to the court” in challenging a Texas law allowing straight-ticket voting.
More recently, Elias was behind a “secretive local media network” in Arizona that disseminates political messages that look like ordinary news articles. Elias went to court to argue that the network should not be subject to campaign finance disclosure laws.
In 2023, President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign dropped Elias “because of disagreements with Elias’ legal strategies and strained personal relationships,” according to Axios. But Kamala Harris has brought him back.
While lawyers for President Trump have faced prosecution, Bar complaints, smear campaigns, and pressure to drop their representation, Elias has been welcomed back into Democratic Party fold — at the top.
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 Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.