Marc Elias, Democratic superlawyer, ousted from Biden team following DNC split
Gabe Kaminsky
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President Joe Biden‘s team has reportedly split from working with the scandal-plagued Marc Elias, the top Democratic lawyer who helped push the Steele dossier that falsely sought to link former President Donald Trump to Russia.
The split was due to Biden’s team having differences in opinion with Elias when it comes to his aggressive legal strategies, as well as tensions, including between the superlawyer and Bob Bauer, Biden’s head personal attorney, Axios reported. Details concerning the divorce come months after multiple reports on the Democratic National Committee cutting ties with Elias, who represented it since 2009.
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“If I hated America and wanted to f*** it up, I’d hire him, too,” Dan Backer, a Republican campaign finance lawyer for Committee to Defeat the President, an anti-Biden PAC, told the Washington Examiner. He added that Elias deploys a style of litigation benefiting a “Democratic Party that only likes the laws that work for them.”
Heading into the 2024 elections, Elias Law Group is working on behalf of various Democratic House and Senate committees and has recently received payments from campaign accounts affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), to name a few, Federal Election Commission filings show. Elias and his tactics have long been ripe for scrutiny from Republicans, who slammed the lawyer last year for boosting that the 14th Amendment could hypothetically be used to disqualify those who purportedly were tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot from political office.
The Biden administration reportedly soured on Elias over him not consulting the White House or DNC prior to filing election and voting rights lawsuits, and government officials sometimes only learned about lawsuits once he announced them on MSNBC or social media. The rift is a window into setbacks of late linked to Elias, who was general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and commissioned the Trump-Russia dossier.
Elias hired the firm Fusion GPS, which, in 2016, brought on British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was offered “up to $1 million” by the FBI before the election to prove the dossier’s claims against Trump but never got the cash due to a lack of evidence, FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified in October 2022.
Elias was also sanctioned in 2021 by a Texas appeals court in connection to “misleading” statements of his over an election dispute. In April 2023, Backer’s group accused the lawyer’s firm and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in an FEC complaint of “apparent civil violations” over election law. However, Elias Law Group recently touted how it scored a win in Moore v. Harper at the Supreme Court, which rejected the “independent state legislature theory” holding that states can handle federal elections barring state court review.
“It’s no surprise that the DNC severed ties with Marc Elias, considering his many losses, leaving Arabella Advisors and their deep-pocketed donors to pick up the tab for his misadventures,” Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, told the Washington Examiner, referring to how Elias has worked alongside major left-wing dark money organizations to launch election litigation.
Speaking to Axios, a source familiar with the tensions between Elias and Biden’s team said the attorney “was consistently giving [the DNC] and the president’s team the middle finger.” Another source emphasized that Elias “created a legal strategy he has convinced people is a political strategy, that it is actually a business strategy.”
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Some of the tension reportedly stems from Elias and Bauer’s “complicated relationship.” Elias, for instance, openly slammed a piece of 2022 election legislation that Bauer helped shape. Still, some sources in Bidenworld hold that Elias could lead the reelection campaign’s possible recount efforts in states in 2024.
“Elias Law Group represents a wide range of Democratic parties and candidates and progressive organizations,” an Elias Law Group spokesperson said. “It is ultimately our clients’ decision if and when to provide notice of a lawsuit to others.”