Dubbed Democrats’ “best Election-stealing lawyer” by former President Donald Trump, Steele dossier mastermind Marc Elias has splintered off from his longtime law firm, Perkins Coie.
Elias—along with 11 partners and three counsel from the leftist law firm—announced the formation of Elias Law Group.
Some personal news.@EliasLawGroup pic.twitter.com/2R2PLT6fmY
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) August 22, 2021
According to the firm’s slogan, listed above its Twitter page, “We help Democrats win. We help citizens vote. We help progressives make change.”
However, the surprise departure fueled speculation that the move could be designed to shelter either Elias himself or the law firm from liability as his nefarious political schemes fall under new scrutiny.
It comes shortly after Elias and two other Perkins Coie lawyers were sanctioned by the 5th Circuit US Court of Appeals for failing to disclose a prior ruling in a challenge to Texas’s straight-ticket voting rules.
The sanctions said Elias had violated his “duty of candor to the court” for issuing a “redundant and misleading submission” in a request that previously had been overruled by a different judge.
However, Breitbart speculated that the real reason for the departure could be related to the much more significant role Elias played in the Russia-collusion hoax stemming from Hillary Clinton‘s defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
Perkins Coie represented both the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. It was Elias who personally commissioned ex-British spy Christopher Steele‘s since-debunked opposition research from the firm Fusion GPS.
The firm then used back-channel connections to disseminate it to the top brass of the FBI, who, in turn, are suspected to have leaked it to the media.
Following Trump’s exoneration in the two-year-long special-counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller and a series of damning inspector-general reports implicating the FBI in procedural abuses, then-Attorney General William Barr appointed then-US Attorney John Durham in May 2019 to probe possible criminality on the other side.
Barr designated Durham as special counsel in the aftermath of the 2020 election, allowing him to extend the probe into the Biden administration without substantial partisan interference and grant him the power to empanel a grand jury for any indictments.
Thus far, only one individual, low-level FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, has been charged after he was found to have altered an exculpatory email from the CIA that acknowledged Trump advisor Carter Page’s role as an informant.
Durham has been rumored to be in the final stages of his probe, with the report expected to be filed in a matter of weeks, along with possible indictments for other low-level FBI officials. However, the decision likely rests with radical leftist Attorney General Merrick Garland whether to make the full report public.
Regardless, constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley said many deep-staters within the DC swamp were on edge about what the Durham report may say.
“[E]ven if they are not indicted, Durham could implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics in his final report,” Turley wrote in a recent blog post.
That includes Elias, who repeatedly lied to the media and may be implicated in advising Clinton campaign officials including John Podesta to lie to Congress about their role in funding the Steele dossier.
When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying “You (or your sources) are wrong.” https://t.co/B5BZwoaNhI
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) October 24, 2017
However, Elias—like the Clintons—has only been emboldened by the controversies surrounding him, including suspicions about his role in past elections where mysterious bags of absentee ballots emerged, reversing the outcome in Democrats’ favor.
Bill McGinley, a former adviser to the Trump administration and Senate Republicans, warned that the move from Perkins Coie could be a means to give Elias and his team more room to engage in political tactics prior to the 2022 midterms without alienating the law firm’s corporate clients.
“Basically what this means is that he’s gonna be able to be more aggressive in some of the things that he does on behalf of the outside groups of the Democratic party,” McGinley warned on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.
He advised Republicans to remain “clear-eyed” about the maneuvers so as not to be caught flat-footed and forced into a reactive position, as happened in 2020.
Turley noted that the corrupt attorney brazenly listed “campaign-finance disclosure” and “ethics” as two of the specialties for his new practice.
…Among other areas, Elias is pitching his new legal group as specializing in “campaign finance disclosure and ethics.” https://t.co/IUkXEOfXGl
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 22, 2021
