He’s the man with the biggest influence over the last several elections that you’ve probably never heard of.
His influence over how Americans vote, and how those votes are counted, has made him a Democratic “super-lawyer,” and his handiwork has been on elections around the country for more than a decade.
He is a man who understands that elections can be won in the days or weeks after voting has completed. He is Democratic election law specialist Marc Elias, and he’s the topic on the last pre-election episode of The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer.
“We’re talking about a master of the dark political arts,” says host Peter Schweizer. “The way he shapes the manner in which elections are cast, how names stay on voter rolls… This guy is presented as the champion, the biggest protector of democracy, to the extent that Donald Trump is seen by so many as the biggest threat to democracy.”
Marc Elias is behind efforts to kick third-party candidate Cornel West off the ballots in several states, and simultaneously keep the libertarian candidate on the ballots. His law firm files state-level suits to allow unsecured ballot drop boxes, to extend deadlines for absentee ballot counting, and other efforts to increase the likelihood of Democratic victories.
Operating with money from billionaire leftists like George Soros, Elias’s mission is to oppose election integrity measures in various states. In five pages of background contained in his 2018 book FRAUD, co-host Eric Eggers zeroed in on Elias’s influence, noting his starring role in soliciting and paying for the now-debunked Steele Dossier. His client then was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“Elias’s job is to manipulate the laws and the rules to skew them in a direction that benefits his clients,” Schweizer says. “He’s done this more successfully than anyone else in this space.”
Hillary Clinton is not Elias’s only famous client. Back in 2008, former Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken ran for Senate in Minnesota and lost very narrowly according to the election tallies. Franken hired Elias to contest ballots, and what had been a narrow victory by his challenger, Republican Norm Coleman, eight months later became a Franken victory through aggressive Elias lawyering. Franken recently featured his old friend on his podcast.
Elias is hard at work right now for clients such as the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee. He scored a big victory over the summer when Wisconsin’s progressive-dominated Supreme Court reversed its own prior ruling and threw out the state’s redistricting plan, as the Wall Street Journal noted. Eggers summed up Elias’s strategy as “sue until blue.”
Elias is of course at the center of Democratic legal shock teams to contest election results across the country, with “hundreds” of lawyers already on board, drafting legal briefs in advance of the election. As many as 10,000 lawyers around the country are standing by to become involved, should Elias beckon. This is a major operation for the Democrats, and they clearly plan to contest close races in every state. With tightening polls in many of the swing states, they are expecting many battles.
As Eggers notes, in 2015 Elias worked for the white-shoe Washington law firm of Perkins-Coie, handling Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He arranged for a company called Fusion GPS to solicit the debunked Steele Dossier from a former MI-6 operative, and masked that it had been funded by Clinton’s campaign. After his investigation of the dossier and alleged Russian “collusion” by Trump, John Durham found that Elias “intentionally sought to conceal Hillary Clinton’s role,” and her campaign paid a fine to the Federal Elections Commission of $113,000.
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