By Paul Sperry
Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias had a rough election. Several of his clients, notably Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, fell to defeat.
But instead of accepting their losses, Elias disputed the presidential and senatorial results in Pennsylvania, leading to charges that Elias, a self-advertised “democracy defender,” is what he’s accused Donald Trump of being: an “election denier.”
With the races now settled – and many of his skeptical posts on X deleted – Elias is unrepentant and remains defiant. Not only is he shaking off the criticism, but he is vowing to fight Trump and Republicans even harder in court in 2026 and 2028.
“Democrats need to oppose, and not simply resist, a second Trump presidency,” the lawyer said last week.
This time, Elias promises to employ more “ruthless” tactics to stop Trump, Republicans, and their MAGA agenda.
“All legal tactics must be on the table,” he added in his recent blog post. “We must be comfortable using every legal tool available to challenge Trumpism in court.”
Elias believes he will get favorable rulings because “more than half of federal judges were appointed by Democratic presidents,” and “many state courts are controlled by liberals.”
“The judiciary is the best hope we have to stop Donald Trump from running through American democracy,” he asserted on his podcast.
Elias continues to bring legal challenges in several states. He recently noted there are still 211 voting or election cases pending in 40 states.
His anti-Trump crusade has gotten personal. In his trademark smashmouth style, Elias has called Trump both “Hitler” and a “buffoon.” Now he worries Trump has targeted him for attack.
“I fear the threat of retribution, political vengeance,” he said in a recent column. Elias notes that Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has branded him “an enemy.”
While claiming to protect voting rights, elections, and the democratic process, Elias’ partisan actions in the wake of the 2024 election stand in tension with his past statements excoriating Trump for denying the 2020 results and trying to “steal the election.”
After the Associated Press and ABC News called the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate race for GOP challenger Dave McCormick, Elias refused to accept the loss suffered by his client Casey.
“The Pennsylvania Senate race is not over,” Elias insisted on X (a post he has since deleted).
Instead of advising Casey to concede, he demanded a recount. Meanwhile, he sued state election officials over provisional ballots, which he argued should be counted even though they were ruled invalid.
When McCormick countersued to throw out such ballots, Elias complained: “Candidates who believe they have won don’t file lawsuits like this. Very strong Trump 2020 vibes.”
But the Republican National Committee said the desperate party was Elias.
“We actually have legal filings by the Bob Casey campaign filed by Marc Elias, where they have called on votes that are cast by individuals who are not registered to vote to be counted,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said. “They have taken every step that they can to try and engineer votes that would overturn this margin.”
In the end, Casey struck out on the recount, and his high-priced lawyer whiffed in court. Casey finally conceded the election to McCormick after 16 days of protesting the result on the advice of counsel.
Elias even disputed Trump’s own clear victory in Pennsylvania, where he beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 171,000 votes.
“Trump knows he is losing Pennsylvania,” the Harris campaign lawyer claimed in a post on X, also since deleted.
Asked for a response, Elias spokesman Blake McCarren did not comment.
It’s not the first time the controversial Duke-educated attorney, who keeps a “BEWARE OF ATTACK DEMOCRAT” sign behind his desk, has doubted the results of elections and used questionable tactics to try to overturn them.
In 2021, Elias pushed the House Democratic leadership to nullify the victory of GOP Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks over his Democratic client Rita Hart. Meeks’ narrow win had already been certified by Iowa when Elias asked Congress to essentially kick her out of office; she remains in Congress. In 2018, he represented Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson in his recount loss to Republican challenger Rick Scott. And in 2008, Elias was able to switch a Senate seat in Minnesota from an incumbent Republican to Democrat Al Franken by shopping for a friendly judge to count previously rejected ballots and overturn the lead of GOP Sen. Norman Coleman.
‘Extreme’ Gerrymandering
While Elias has decried what he calls “grotesque partisan gerrymandering” by Republicans in red states like North Carolina, court records show he defended Democrats doing the same thing in blue states, including New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maryland.
In Maryland, a state court ruled in 2022 that the Democrat-drawn map pushed by Elias was so one-sided against Republicans that it “subverts the will of those governed.” The judge tossed out the map for “extreme partisan gerrymandering.” The same year, a federal judge in New York rejected Elias’ lawsuit to reshape congressional districts to favor Democrats as a “Hail Mary pass.”
Federal Election Commission records reveal Elias has earned millions of dollars from redistricting clients – such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, along with its affiliate, the National Redistricting Action Fund – to assist their efforts to redraw electoral maps to protect Democratic congressional seats in blue states.
One year after publicly mocking Trump and his campaign lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, over their unfounded claims that Dominion voting machines switched Trump votes to Biden in 2020, Elias himself blamed the same Dominion “voting tabulation machines” for a Democratic client’s loss in New York. In 2021, Elias unsuccessfully claimed machine “irregularities” had somehow undercounted thousands of votes for Rep. Anthony Brindisi. But a judge rejected his complaint, ruling that there were “no discrepancies” with the machine counts while denying his request for a hand recount of the votes. FEC records show Brindisi paid Elias $8,230 for legal services.
Publicly, Elias has railed against the infusion of “dark money” in Republican campaigns. But behind the scenes, he’s lobbied to lift campaign finance caps and is credited with helping create the so-called “super PAC,” political committees that can accept unlimited contributions from dark money groups.
“Well before Marc was litigating major voting cases, he was a campaign-finance lawyer, fighting against regulation on the Democrat side,” said UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen. “It was Marc working to loosen campaign-finance limits on political parties, a move that has increased the role of big money in influencing candidates through the political parties.”
Shortly before the 2016 election, billionaire left-wing donor George Soros, whom Elias views as “a hero,” gave at least $5 million to Elias and his law firm to fight voter ID requirements at polling places. Dark money groups also helped fund his legal work in the 2020 election. When reporters pointed this out, he threatened to make it easier to sue journalists for defamation he threatened to make it easier to sue journalists for defamation, arguing the courts should “revisit New York Times v Sullivan,” the landmark libel case that makes it harder for public figures to sue for defamation. (He’s since deleted the tweet.)
‘Dark Money’ Double Standard
What’s more, two nonprofit groups Elias founded, Democracy Docket Legal Fund and Democracy Docket Action Fund, are “both projects of the Arabella Advisors dark money funding network,” according to the Capital Research Center. They provide him almost unlimited cash to file lawsuits across the country to block GOP measures to prevent voter fraud. Arabella manages several nonprofit “dark money” funders, who in turn channel money to Elias’ groups, according to the Capital Research Center.
Notwithstanding his rhetoric about “protecting voting rights,” critics say Elias’ primary concern is making sure Democrats have the advantage in elections. Indeed, his law firm, the Elias Law Group, acknowledges on its website that it is “committed to helping Democrats win.”
When Elias says he’s fighting against “voter suppression” by Republicans, detractors say he’s really fighting against laws to stop voter fraud, such as non-citizens illegally casting votes for Democrats. Former White House press secretary and GOP pundit Ari Fleischer warned that what Elias did in Pennsylvania is a harbinger of how Democrats plan to count votes in future close races. “They want people who aren’t registered, don’t have IDs, or live out of state to be counted,” he said on X.
After the election, Elias complained he had lost more than 50,000 followers on X. He has used the political platform to plug his digital newsletter, “Democracy Docket,” and attract paid subscribers for the for-profit website, which he started in 2020. He has done this even while defending Media Matters against a defamation lawsuit brought by Elon Musk. The liberal watchdog claimed X promotes Nazism.
While Elias claims “Donald Trump tried to subvert the election results in a lot of different ways in 2020,” he himself used a variety of dirty tricks to influence the election held four years earlier, which caught the eye of federal prosecutors who subpoenaed him to testify about his election meddling in court in 2022.
In 2016, while working as Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, Elias hired D.C. opposition research shop Fusion GPS and former FBI informant Christopher Steele to feed the FBI false information about connections between Trump and the Kremlin to generate an investigation of the Republican opponent so, as Special Counsel John Durham suggested, he could turn around and tell his media contacts that Trump was being investigated in the hopes of swinging the election in Clinton’s favor. During the same month he commissioned Steele, Elias hired the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to write a public report blaming Russia for hacking the Clinton campaign. In his since-debunked dossier, Steele went a step further, pinning the hacking on not just Russia but also the Trump campaign.
Also in 2016, Elias collaborated with Clinton campaign official Jake Sullivan (now President Biden’s national security adviser) on the Russian Alfa Bank hoax targeting Trump, resulting in another dead-end FBI probe. After Elias’ campaign schemes fell under the scrutiny of Durham in 2020 and 2021, Elias scrubbed several years of posts from his X feed.
Critics say Elias seems to morph into those he denounces.
“Elias insisted that [Trump] was an election denier and [a] threat to democracy,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. “What is hypocrisy to some is a living to others.”