Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Infamous Democrat election meddler Marc Elias will not commit to accepting the results of the election if former President Donald Trump wins.
Elias, whose election litigation services have been retained by Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, declined to answer multiple requests from The Federalist about accepting the results of this year’s election. While his client, Harris, persistently demands that Trump promise not to challenge election results no matter what, even if there’s evidence of wrongdoing or fraud, Elias will not commit to the same standard in order to leave the door open to file suits if Harris loses.
“Elias only pretends to care about democracy. Democrats, not democracy, are his real concern,” Derek Lyons, president and CEO of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, told The Federalist. “Whether it is characterizing voting by non-citizens as a victory for voting rights, working to nullify a referendum to preserve in-person voting requirements in New York, or encouraging House Democrats to nullify a certified Republican victory in an Iowa congressional race, he will resort to any tactic that might invalidate or dilute Republican votes.”
“Few, if any, have done more to politicize our elections, to the great detriment of our democracy,” Lyons said of Elias.
Elias has been meddling in elections, and sometimes successfully overturning them, for most of his career, despite paying lip service on television to calling Republicans who challenge things like noncitizens voting or the lack of election integrity safeguards “election deniers.” In an MSNBC interview, he even called for the disbarment of Republican lawyers who challenge elections like he does, while maintaining that he, the Democrat Party, and their allies should be able to file lawsuits that can tip election results their way.
“We have to ask ourselves whether or not the legal institutions here, including the bar, have, again, shifted the Overton Window in such a way that, sure, there are disbarments at the very outer lens, but we have sort of normalized a contentious behavior towards democracy,” he said, referencing the California bar’s disbarment of election lawyer John Eastman. “I don’t think any lawyer should have a bar license for the privilege of destroying our country’s democratic traditions.”
Elias said there needs to be an “outer limit to attacking free and fair elections” that sets the standard to whether lawyers are allowed to file election litigation, but in the same breath argues that his election litigation is defending “democracy” while Republicans’ election challenges should lead to personal, political, and professional destruction.
The longtime election lawyer may be displeased about Republican election litigation, which has ramped up in recent years, but it is not over concerns about democracy, it is because Republicans could finally have a legal team up for the challenge. Elias, on the other hand, has a sinister past of either overturning, or attempting to overturn, the legitimate results of elections.
“While much of Elias’s reputation is thanks to the fact that he is an amazing self-promoter who amplifies his victories and hides his many defeats, Elias has operated on a level well beyond that of his Republican counterparts, particularly when it comes to dirty tricks that have undermined confidence in America’s elections,” The Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway wrote in her book Rigged. One of the examples of Elias’s contributions is hiring on behalf of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign the outfit Fusion GPS to invent the “Steele dossier,” which provided the fodder for the Russia hoax and gave the Obama administration an excuse to launch a Federal Bureau of Investigations inquiry into Democrats’ political opponents.
Elias’s tactics go beyond falsified opposition research. Perhaps his largest claim to fame was overturning Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election in 2008, canceling enough votes to turn a 727-vote Republican victory into a 312-vote victory for former Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., which cemented a Democrat supermajority in the upper chamber during Obama’s first term, as Rigged details.
More recently, in 2021, just as Democrats were whining about Republican election challenges from the Trump campaign and others (including in lawsuits Elias himself litigated), Elias was behind a push to unseat a dually elected representative from Iowa, Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
While Miller-Meeks’s victory was decided by just six votes, it was certified by the Iowa Board of Canvass, driving the losing Democrat, Elias, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to mount a bizarre attempt to have the U.S. House of Representatives vote to unseat her anyway, using the procedures in the Federal Contested Elections Act and the House Administration Committee.
Miller-Meeks opponent Rita Hart retained Elias to make her case, even though that would have allowed the lawyer who represented many of the House Democrats who would be voting to remove Miller-Meeks to also be the lawyer demanding that they do so. Hart eventually dropped the challenge to the election only after her and Elias’s attempt to steal the seat became a public relations nightmare for Democrats.
In 2022, Elias signaled to Democrats that they needed to start getting comfortable with election challenges of this kind, even calling for ostensibly Democrat-approved standards for what a “free and fair election” means and an “accountability structure” for those who would challenge it.
Yet another House seat during the 2020 election saw an Elias attempt to steal it. What eventually became Rep. Claudia Tenney’s, R-N.Y., seat was the subject of an Elias-backed claim that faulty voting machines were behind incumbent Democrat Rep. Anthony Brindisi’s loss. Ultimately, the nonsense was halted by a judge, and Tenney was sworn into office.
Elias is now expanding Democrat scare tactics to demonize conservatives, even claiming in his MSNBC interview that Republicans claim they have have a “constitutional right to harass and intimidate election officials.”
“They’re doing that because they want to lay the predicate to allow grassroots activists in, you know, whether it’s people with guns or wearing body armor like we saw in Arizona in 2022, or it’s people filing mass challenges or what we’ve seen in Georgia, they want to enable and promote the idea of election vigilantism,” he added.
While it is not totally clear to which case Elias was referring, it may be a four-year-old case that seeks to stop Republicans from partaking in most kinds of normal, legitimate election administration to which Democrats have always had access.
As The Federalist reported, Democrats are attempting to block Republicans from engaging in recounts, certifications, and other standard post-election activities by having a left-wing judicial ally reinstate a 1981 decision from another Democrat judge that stripped Republicans from participating equally in election litigation for more than three decades.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.