Kamala Harris Taps Disgraced Democratic Superlawyer for Campaign Legal Team

Marc Elias, who blamed voting machines for a client’s loss in 2021, will now ‘defend democracy’

Vice President Kamala Harris has tapped a controversial Democratic elections lawyer, with whom the Democratic National Committee cut ties just last year and who was laughed out of court in 2022 for what a federal judge described as a “Hail Mary” scheme to impose Democrat-led gerrymandering on New York State, to serve on her campaign legal team.

The lawyer, Marc Elias, will assist with any ballot recounts that may emerge from the November election, the New York Times reported over the weekend—a job that Elias described as working to “defend democracy.” Elias, who has represented controversial clients such as disgraced outgoing senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), said that he is “thrilled and honored” to join the campaign and committed to seeing Harris “sworn in on January 20 as the next president of the United States.”

But Elias’s controversial history could raise questions about how exactly he plans to help Harris win. While Democrats hail Elias as a hero for his bare-knuckle tactics, Republicans have accused him of using a seemingly bottomless bag of dirty tricks to win elections. Those tactics run the gamut from mounting legally dubious challenges to voting machine tallies, to fighting for gerrymandered election maps that favor Democrats, to peddling fabricated evidence linking Republicans to Russia. The Biden campaign and the DNC last year cut ties with Elias and his firm, Elias Law Group, over his aggressive tactics.

In 2022, a federal judge in New York laughed Elias out of court over his “Hail Mary” attempt to redraw congressional districts in Democrats’ favor. A Texas judge sanctioned Elias in 2021 for submitting “misleading” court filings in a case involving the state’s straight-ticket voting ballots. Earlier that year, Elias claimed in a lawsuit that “voting tabulation machines” misread thousands of votes for his client, then-congressman Anthony Brindisi (D., N.Y.). Republicans noted that Elias at that time had publicly mocked allegations that machines undercounted votes for Donald Trump.

Republicans have accused Elias of election meddling over his work on the infamous Steele dossier in 2016. As general counsel to the Hillary Clinton campaign, Elias funded former British spy Christopher Steele’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. The result was a 35-page dossier that accused the Trump team of colluding with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election. The dossier also alleged the Kremlin blackmailed Trump with video of him with prostitutes in Moscow.

Elias approved a plan to pass the dossier to Washington, D.C., journalists, some of whom published stories with the dossier’s most salacious allegations before the election. Much of the dossier has since been debunked, and its primary source was indicted for making false statements to the FBI. Republicans have accused Elias and the Clinton campaign of election interference for trying to pull votes from Trump before the election.

Harris was keenly aware of Elias’s involvement in the scandal. She served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated the allegations of Trump-Russia collusion and the origins of the Steele dossier. According to a report from the committee, Elias failed to tell investigators about his funding for the dossier during a deposition with his client, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, in September 2017.

Elias’s antics didn’t dissuade Harris from hiring him for her first presidential campaign. She hired Elias in 2019 to serve as general counsel for that ill-fated effort and thanked him in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, for his “wise counsel.”