The 5th Circuit US Court of Appeals refused to drop its ethics-based sanctions against the man dubbed Democrats’ “best Election-stealing lawyer” by former president Donald Trump.
Marc Elias—whose litany of moral crimes against democracy includes having commissioned the debunked Steele dossier that set in motion the years-long deep-state Russia hoax—was punished for violating his “duty of candor to the court” in a relatively low-profile case that challenged straight-ticket voting restrictions in Texas.
After neglecting to disclose a prior judgment against a motion that Elias and other Democrat attorneys with the Perkins Coie law firm had made, the legal team was slapped with fees and required to pay double the court costs to the state.
“Appellees’ only explanation for their redundant and misleading submission is that they construed the original denial of their motion to supplement the record as an order that applied only to the emergency stay proceedings,” said the court. “…There is no legal basis to support Appellees’ post hoc contention that motions to supplement the record apply only to one stage of an appeal,” it continued.
Elias—who also has been at the forefront of the recent attempt to intimidate Arizona’s legislature away from conducting an audit of the 2020 election—did what he does best, attempting to argue his way out of the punishment by finding a legal loophole.
To assist with the effort, he procured former George W. Bush-era US solicitor-general Paul Clement.
Clement argued that courts “generally reserve sanctions for egregious misconduct and the disregard of clearly established rules” rather than “good-faith mistakes,” according to Westlaw Today.
That was enough to compel the court to vacate its sanctions against three Perkins Coie lawyers. However, it left them intact for Elias, legal partner Bruce Spiva and counsel Skyler Howton, saying that they should have known better given their decades of experience and direct involvement with the earlier case.
The court was “not required to find bad faith when imposing sanctions for violations of local rules,” the ruling determined.
Nevertheless, it is rare to see anyone but Elias himself characterize his dubious legal wranglings as exercises of “good faith.”
After having led countless lawsuits in which he downplayed—and may, himself, have been deeply involved in—fraudulent efforts to reverse Republican election victories, Elias attempted, hypocritically, to argue in a 2018 North Carolina case that the very same tactics, such as ballot-harvesting, were grounds to annul the election when used against Democrats.
In the 2020 election, he flip-flopped yet again—this time on the Democrat mantra that the pandemic-marred voting was handled perfectly—in order to claim that a faulty voting machine in upstate New York had rigged the outcome in favor of Republicans.
In a telling 2013 speech at Syracuse University, Elias even acknowledged that he used his ruthless legal mind while attempting to cheat at a children’s board game in order to beat his then-6-year-old daughter.
“[T]he first thing I did, being a lawyer, was I said, ‘Fine, I’ll play Chutes and Ladders, but I want to read the instructions, because I want to figure out how I can win,’” Elias admitted.
