Marc Elias
Based on Wikipedia: Marc Elias
Steve Bannon, the combative former strategist for Donald Trump, doesn't hand out compliments easily. So when he called someone "pure evil" but immediately followed it with genuine admiration—"man, that brother is smart, tough... he's a fighter, and I admire fighters"—you know he was talking about a formidable opponent. The person who earned this backhanded tribute? Marc Elias, the lawyer who has become the Democratic Party's most feared legal warrior.
The Man Who Wins Elections in Court
Here's a number that tells you everything about Marc Elias: sixty-four out of sixty-five.
After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump's campaign launched a legal blitzkrieg, filing lawsuit after lawsuit in state after state, trying to overturn Joe Biden's victory. Marc Elias coordinated the Democratic response. When the dust settled, he had won sixty-four of those sixty-five cases. The one he lost? A minor procedural matter that was later overturned in his favor anyway.
The New York Times has described Elias as someone who "has arguably done more than any single person outside government to shape the Democratic Party and the rules under which all campaigns and elections in the United States are conducted." That's not hyperbole. This is a man who has served as general counsel to presidential campaigns for John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Kamala Harris in both 2020 and 2024. He's represented the Democratic National Committee, both congressional campaign committees, the Democratic Governors Association, and the leadership of both chambers of Congress.
In other words, if you're a Democrat running for any significant office in America, there's a decent chance Marc Elias is the lawyer keeping your campaign legal—and fighting for your victory if the election ends up in court.
Born to Argue
Marc Erik Elias was born on February 1, 1969, to a Jewish family in New York City. He grew up in Suffern, a small town in Rockland County about thirty miles northwest of Manhattan, nestled in the Ramapo Mountains. It's the kind of place where kids grow up with both the proximity to the big city and enough distance to develop their own identity.
Elias went to Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York known for its emphasis on writing and speaking. There, he took a class taught by a little-known Vermont politician named Bernie Sanders—years before Sanders would become a senator and a presidential candidate who would reshape American progressive politics. One imagines the young Elias absorbing lessons about political conviction and fighting against long odds.
After earning his bachelor's degree in government in 1990, Elias headed to Duke University, where he doubled down on his interests, earning both a master's degree in political science and a law degree. This combination—understanding how politics works academically and how to fight for it legally—would prove to be his superpower.
The Recount That Made His Name
In American elections, recounts are usually formalities. The candidate who's behind asks for one, some ballots get counted again, and the original result holds. Very rarely does anything change.
The 2008 Minnesota Senate race was different.
On election night, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman led Democrat Al Franken—yes, the former Saturday Night Live comedian—by just 215 votes out of nearly three million cast. What followed was the longest recount and legal contest in American history. Marc Elias served as Franken's lead counsel through all of it.
The recount dragged on for eight months. Eight months of counting, recounting, challenging ballots, and arguing in court. When it finally ended, Franken had won by 312 votes, flipping the outcome completely. That victory gave Democrats their sixtieth Senate seat, the magic number needed to overcome filibusters—at least briefly, before Ted Kennedy's death and other changes shifted the balance again.
The Franken recount established Elias's reputation as someone who could win in the trenches of election law, where every ballot matters and persistence is everything.
The Steele Dossier and Its Aftermath
Marc Elias's career hasn't been without controversy, and the biggest storm surrounds his role in creating the infamous Steele dossier.
To understand this, you need to know how opposition research works in American politics. Campaigns routinely hire firms to dig up damaging information about their opponents. This is perfectly legal and completely normal. What made the Steele dossier different was its content—and who ultimately produced it.
In April 2016, while serving as general counsel to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Elias hired a firm called Fusion GPS on behalf of both the campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS, in turn, hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with expertise on Russia, to investigate Donald Trump's connections to that country.
The result was the Steele dossier, a collection of memos alleging various ties between Trump and the Russian government, including some salacious claims that grabbed headlines. Many of the dossier's specific allegations have never been verified, and some have been directly contradicted by subsequent investigations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, known as the FBI, used some of the dossier's information in applications for surveillance warrants, which later became a major political controversy.
Here's where Elias's role became problematic: when the Clinton campaign and the DNC were asked about their involvement with the dossier, they initially denied it. Elias had structured the arrangement so that campaign officials could truthfully say they didn't know the details of what their lawyer was doing—even though their money was paying for it. It wasn't until October 2017 that Perkins Coie, the law firm where Elias worked, released Fusion GPS from its confidentiality obligation, finally allowing the full story to emerge.
In May 2022, Elias was called to testify at the trial of his former law partner Michael Sussmann, who had been charged with lying to the FBI about his role in bringing information about potential Trump-Russia connections to the bureau. Elias acknowledged hiring Fusion GPS but framed it as standard opposition research and protection against potential lawsuits. According to CNN, his testimony actually hurt the prosecution's case rather than helping it, as he turned the narrative against both Trump and the FBI's handling of the investigation. Sussmann was ultimately acquitted.
Democracy Docket and the New Era
In 2020, Elias launched something new: Democracy Docket, a website dedicated to tracking voting rights and election litigation across the country. It was a recognition that the legal battles over elections had become so numerous and so consequential that they needed their own dedicated platform.
The following year, in 2021, he left Perkins Coie after years as head of their political law practice to start his own firm, the Elias Law Group. The timing wasn't coincidental. After Trump's defeat and the January 6th attack on the Capitol, Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country began passing new laws restricting voting access. Elias saw his mission clearly: challenge those laws in court.
His approach was aggressive. When Georgia passed its controversial election law, Elias filed suit within hours. The same pattern repeated across the country. Republican legislators would pass a bill, the governor would sign it, and before the ink was dry, Marc Elias was in court.
The American Lawyer noted that Elias had gained a reputation for "strident election and voting rights litigation on behalf of the Democratic Party." The word "strident" is telling—it suggests someone who doesn't apologize for fighting hard. Reid Wilson of The Hill went further, calling him "the most prominent Democratic attorney in America" and "the Democrats' last best hope of preserving a House majority."
The Dark Money Paradox
Marc Elias presents an interesting paradox. He's dedicated his career to protecting voting rights and fighting what he sees as attempts to suppress Democratic votes. At the same time, he's been instrumental in helping Democrats access the same kinds of big-money political financing that progressives often criticize.
In 2014, Elias advised Senator Harry Reid on a provision tucked into a must-pass spending bill that dramatically increased how much wealthy donors could give to national party committees. The irony? Republicans later used those same provisions to pay Donald Trump's legal fees while he was president and to fund political advertising.
In 2024, Elias petitioned the Federal Election Commission, known as the FEC, to allow a political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros to coordinate with Democratic campaigns. The FEC approved the request—which immediately meant that Donald Trump could do the same thing with groups funded by Elon Musk. It was a case of opening doors that swing both ways.
The New York Times noted that Elias "has played a key role in carving new pathways for big money into the political process and assisting Democrats as they caught up to Republicans in difficult-to-trace unlimited spending, advising their efforts to use so-called dark money to finance voter registration, canvassing, post-election lawsuits – even news outlets."
Dark money refers to political spending by organizations that don't have to disclose their donors. It's called "dark" because the source of the funding is hidden from public view. Critics argue it allows wealthy interests to secretly influence elections. Defenders say it protects donors from harassment and allows controversial speech to be heard without fear of retaliation.
Elias's pragmatic approach seems to be: if these tools exist and Republicans are using them, Democrats must use them too. Whether that's cynical or realistic depends on your perspective.
The Sanctions and the Critics
Not everyone admires Marc Elias's fighting style, and some of his critics are on his own side of the political spectrum.
Richard Hasen is a legal scholar who runs the Election Law Blog and is widely respected across the political spectrum for his expertise. He and Elias have publicly disagreed about tactics, with Hasen outlining their different approaches to defending election law. Hasen tends to favor more cautious, precedent-respecting arguments, while Elias is willing to push harder even when it means making aggressive claims.
In March 2021, Elias faced a more serious rebuke. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sanctioned him and other attorneys from Perkins Coie for filing "redundant and misleading" motions in a case challenging Texas's elimination of straight-ticket voting. The court found that Elias's team had filed a motion that was "nearly identical" to one they had filed months earlier without telling the court about the earlier filing.
Elias fought back, asking the full court to reconsider the sanction. His attorney, Paul Clement—himself a former U.S. Solicitor General who has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court—called the panel's action unprecedented and argued that Elias had made good-faith mistakes rather than engaged in egregious misconduct. The appeals court denied the motion.
The sanction didn't slow Elias down, but it illustrated something about his approach: he pushes to the limits, and sometimes beyond.
Target of a President
On March 22, 2025, President Donald Trump—back in the White House after winning the 2024 election—issued a presidential memorandum with an ominous title: "Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court." It was aimed at lawyers and law firms who filed what the administration judged to be "frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation" against it.
Marc Elias was mentioned by name.
The memorandum accused Elias and his firm of being "deeply involved in the creation of a false 'dossier' by a foreign national designed to provide a fraudulent basis for Federal law enforcement to investigate a Presidential candidate in order to alter the outcome of the Presidential election." It claimed that Elias had "intentionally sought to conceal the role of his client—failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—in the dossier."
The legal community reacted with alarm. Many saw the memorandum as an attempt to intimidate lawyers into refusing to represent clients who wanted to challenge government actions. If firms feared punishment for taking on cases against the administration, the thinking went, people's ability to fight back in court would be chilled.
Elias's response was defiant.
"President Trump's goal is clear. He wants lawyers and law firms to capitulate and cower until there is no one left to oppose his Administration in court. Elias Law Group will not be deterred from fighting for democracy in court. There will be no negotiation with this White House about the clients we represent or the lawsuits we bring on their behalf."
It was vintage Elias: confrontational, unapologetic, ready for the fight.
The Challenge of Complexity
Elias himself has written about one of the fundamental problems in his field: campaign finance laws are so complicated that virtually no one fully understands them.
He made this observation after the trial of David Rosen, a Clinton campaign official who was acquitted of charges related to fundraising violations. Even judges, Elias noted, struggle to follow the labyrinthine rules governing political money. And yet violations of these rules can result in criminal charges.
This complexity helps explain why lawyers like Elias are so valuable to political campaigns. Navigating the maze of federal and state election laws requires specialized expertise that most people simply don't have. A single mistake—filing the wrong form, missing a deadline, exceeding a contribution limit—can derail a campaign or lead to legal jeopardy.
It also helps explain some of the controversy around Elias. When the rules are this complicated, there's a lot of room for interpretation. Aggressive lawyers will interpret the rules in ways that favor their clients, pushing right up to the line of what's allowed. More cautious lawyers will stay farther from that line. Elias is clearly in the first camp.
The Fighter's Legacy
What should we make of Marc Elias?
To his supporters, he's a tireless champion of democracy, someone who goes to court day after day to protect voting rights and ensure that every ballot counts. His record speaks for itself: sixty-four out of sixty-five cases against Trump's election challenges, the Franken recount victory, countless successful lawsuits against restrictive voting laws.
To his critics, he's a hyper-partisan operative who will use any legal tool available—including the dark money and procedural tricks he claims to oppose—to help Democrats win. The Steele dossier controversy, the sanctions from the Fifth Circuit, and his role in expanding big-money political spending all raise legitimate questions about his methods.
Perhaps both perspectives contain truth. Elias operates in a system where the rules of engagement have grown increasingly brutal. Republicans and Democrats alike have pushed the boundaries of campaign finance law, gerrymandered districts to cement their advantages, and used the courts as a battlefield for political warfare. In that environment, fighting clean might mean losing.
Elias clearly believes that the stakes are too high for restraint. He's seen what happens when elections are close—he knows from the Franken recount that a few hundred votes can determine control of the Senate. He's watched Republican legislatures pass law after law making it harder for certain people to vote. He's concluded that the other side isn't playing fair, so neither will he.
Whether that makes him a hero or a villain—or something more complicated in between—depends on whether you think the ends justify the means. What's certain is that as long as American elections remain battlegrounds, Marc Elias will be in the fight.
Steve Bannon was right about one thing: he is a fighter.