With his listless campaign losing steam by the day, Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has turned to a notorious Clinton fixer for help.
McAuliffe has hired former Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias. Records show the Democrat’s campaign spent $53,680 on the services of the Elias Law Group which filed multiple lawsuits this year against audit teams of the 2020 election in Arizona.
"Elias is a critical figure in the ongoing Durham investigation and has been accused of lying to the media to hide the role of the Clinton campaign in funding the Steele dossier," George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley noted on Oct. 28.
Elias's former law partner at Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann, was recently indicted by Durham in the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia hoax.
Related: Arizona’s director of elections worked under Marc Elias who is filing multiple audit lawsuits, July 20, 2021
"Elias has also led efforts to challenge Democratic losses, even as he denounces Republicans for such election challenges," Turley noted.
In March, a judge ordered sanctions against Elias in a case where he represented Democrats challenging a Texas law barring "straight ticket voting" going into the 2020 election. Elias and other attorneys filed a motion in the case in February without mentioning that they had already filed what the court called a "nearly identical" motion in September 2020 that had been denied.
Perkins Coie – and Elias in particular – had close ties to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and the bogus dossier authored by ex-British spy Christopher Steele. According to Law.com, the firm billed the DSCC, DCCC and the Democratic National Committee a total of $27 million, more than double what they charged them and Clinton's campaign in 2016.
Elias and Perkins Coie drew notoriety for their involvement with the DNC and Clinton's 2016 campaign for their role in hiring research firm Fusion GPS, who in turn hired Steele to conduct opposition research that produced the infamous dossier on alleged Trump campaign ties to Russia.
Turley said that the McAuliffe campaign's hiring of Elias is "astonishing" given Elias's history and McAuliffe’s own previous assertion that “someone who lies about the little things will lie about the big things, too.”
"Elias also was the subject of intense criticism after a tweet that some have called inherently racist," Turley noted.
Democrats used the recent Georgia election law as a rallying cry for federalizing elections by labeling the law, as described by Joe Biden, “Jim Crow on steroids.” Biden has been repeatedly called out for demonstrably false statements about the law.
"Elias argued that Georgia voters could not be expected to be able to read their driver’s licenses correctly — a statement that seemed to refer to minority voters who would be disproportionately impacted by such a requirement," Turley noted.
Turley added: "There are a host of election lawyers but McAuliffe selected an attorney accused of lying to the media, advancing rejected conspiracy theories, and currently involved in a major federal investigation that has already led to the indictment of his former partner. Then again McAuliffe previously declared 'You help me, I’ll help you. That’s politics.' "
INFORMATION WORLD WAR: How We Win . . . . Executive Intelligence Brief
