Dr. Jill Caps Off Community College Teaching Career as Retirement Looms for ‘Big Guy’

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Dr. Jill Caps Off Community College Teaching Career as Retirement Looms for ‘Big Guy’

(Headline USA) President Joe Biden’s unprecedented pardon spree—including to Chinese nationals accused of stealing U.S. secrets, as well as the “unconditional” pardon of his son Hunter—likely hinted at the golden parachute that the “Big Guy” expects when he finally leaves office.

While in his 50 years as a civil servant, he has managed to amass a net worth of around $10 million, that may grow exponentially in his post-presidency.

But he isn’t the only Biden family member thinking about cashing out.

First Lady Jill Biden announced Monday that she had taught her final class at Northern Virginia Community College last week.

The surprise announcement came during a virtual “thank you” event with teachers tuning in from around the country alongside the bosses from the nation’s top teachers unions— Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association.

“Being your first lady has been the honor of my life. But being your colleague has been the work of my life,” said Biden, who has spent the past 40 years teaching in classrooms

“Last Thursday, I taught my last class of the semester and my final class ever at Northern Virginia Community College,” she continued. “I will always love this profession, which is why I continued to teach full time while serving as your first lady.”

Biden had taught English and writing at NOVA for 15 years. She is the first woman to continue her professional career outside the White House while serving as first lady.

It was not immediately clear whether Jill Biden, 73, was retiring from teaching altogether. Aides had no immediate comment.

Anne Kress, the college’s president, said Biden has been an “exceptional faculty member” who is respected and beloved by her students and colleagues.

“As she retires after an exemplary career, she leaves a lasting legacy in the lives of the students she taught, mentored and inspired over the years,” Kress said in a statement Tuesday. “She has been a remarkable, unequaled champion for America’s community colleges, and we know that her advocacy will continue.”

Jill Biden started teaching English and writing there in 2009 after Barack Obama and Joe Biden were elected president and vice president and the couple moved to Washington. She continued to teach there after Joe Biden’s term ended in 2017, riding the train down from their home in Delaware.

Before NOVA, she also taught English and writing at Delaware Technical Community College.

Jill Biden started her career in 1976, teaching English at a high school in Wilmington, Delaware, before becoming a reading specialist at another high school. She also taught English at a psychiatric hospital while she pursued her second master’s degree. She also has a doctorate in educational leadership.

She often said, “teaching isn’t what I do, it’s who I am.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Egyptian Arrested for Sending Bomb-Making Instructions to FBI Informant

Ken Silva
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Egyptian Arrested for Sending Bomb-Making Instructions to FBI Informant

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A teenage Egyptian national named Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan was arrested earlier this month for sending bomb-making instructions to an FBI informant, and allegedly telling the informant to attack the Israeli Consulate General of Israel in New York City.

According to charging papers, Hassan appears to be a teenager who’s currently in removal proceedings with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The charging papers, which were unsealed Monday and first reported by CourtWatch, say that the FBI interviewed him in 2022, when he was a juvenile, due to his pro-ISIS social media posts.

Some two years later, the FBI received a tip in May from Fairfax County Police that an anonymous Twitter/X user was engaging in “radical and terrorist-leaning behavior.” That user turned out to be Hassan.

In August, an FBI informant commented on one of Hassan’s tweets about Ahmad Musa Jibril—an Islamic cleric and convicted felon—saying that he wanted to attend one of Jibril’s lectures. The two began a dialogue after that.

Eventually, the two moved their conversation to an encrypted chat application called SimpleX. There, Hassan sent the FBI informant a pro-ISIS video on Nov. 16 that called for the killing of Jews. The FBI informant responded to the video by pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS and calling Hassan his emir, which is Arabic for ruler. The FBI informant also said he was “waiting on Hassan’s direction,” to which Hassan responded with a heart emoji, according to the FBI’s complaint.

Six days later, the FBI informant messaged Hassan again, saying that if he could not travel to join ISIS, then “maybe [Allah] wants me to act here.” Hassan allegedly responded that the informant should “aim for government buildings, use a Zastava rifle if you can access one to carry out your attack, and All Praises to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds…Or buy a 3d printed gun and just buy ammunition.”

On Nov. 23, the FBI informant asked Hassan to select the target, the date of the attack, and asked if he had any bomb-making manuals.

“HASSAN told CHS-1 that he could find a bomb-making instructions by looking for a specific search term on archive.org and provided CHS-1 advice for bypassing Google’s potential censorship of the search results,” the criminal complaint said.

“Eventually, however, HASSAN sent CHS-1 a direct link to the video with the bomb-making instructions. HASSAN suggested that, based on the size of the bomb, CHS-1 should get a backpack to put the bomb in.”

The next day, he sent the informant the land address for the Consulate General of Israel.

The two continued to talk over the next few days, with Hassan giving the informant more instructions, including to record the livestream footage of the operation to distribute it to the ISIS media department.

One of the final interactions was Dec. 3, when Hassan allegedly directed the FBI informant on “how to conduct an attack on the General Consulate of Israel in New York, NY and how to escape to a country with no extradition laws with the United States,” the charging papers said.

A court hearing for Hassan has not yet been publicly announced. He faces decades in prison if convicted.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

Suspect Charged w/ Killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO as an Act of Terrorism

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Suspect Charged w/ Killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO as an Act of Terrorism

(Headline USA) The man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO has been charged with murder as an act of terrorism, prosecutors said Tuesday as they worked to bring him to a New York court from a Pennsylvania jail.

Luigi Mangione already was charged with murder in the Dec. 4 killing of Brian Thompson, but the terror allegation is new.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Thompson’s death on a midtown Manhattan street “was a killing that was intended to evoke terror. And we’ve seen that reaction.”

Mangione’s New York lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, declined to comment.

Thompson, 50, was shot while walking to a hotel where Minnesota-based UnitedHealthcare—the United States’ biggest medical insurer—was holding an investor conference.

The killing kindled a fiery outpouring of resentment toward U.S. health insurance companies, as Americans swapped stories online and elsewhere of being denied coverage, left in limbo as doctors and insurers disagreed, and stuck with sizeable bills.

The shooting also rattled C-suites, as “wanted” posters with other health care executives’ names and faces appeared on New York streets and some social media users extolled Mangione’s deed as payback.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Tuesday that “any attempt to rationalize this is vile, reckless and offensive to our deeply held principles of justice.”

A New York law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks allows prosecutors to charge crimes as acts of terrorism when they’re “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping.”

Prosecutors have applied the statute to various contexts.

Some related to international extremism, but the law was first used against a Bronx gang member after a hail of gunfire killed a 10-year-old girl and paralyzed a man outside a christening party in 2002.

The state’s highest court later said the conduct didn’t amount to terrorism, and a retrial produced convictions on other charges.

Thompson’s killing, Bragg noted, happened early on a workday in an area frequented by commuters, businesspeople and tourists.

“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” the district attorney said.

After days of intense police searches and publicity, Mangione was spotted Dec. 9 at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and arrested.

New York police officials have said Mangione was carrying the gun used to kill Thompson, a passport and various fake IDs, including one that the suspected shooter presented to check into a New York hostel.

The 26-year-old was charged with Pennsylvania gun and forgery offenses and locked up there without bail.

His Pennsylvania lawyer has questioned the evidence for the forgery charge and the legal grounding for the gun charge. The attorney also has said Mangione would fight extradition to New York.

Mangione has two court hearings scheduled for Thursday in Pennsylvania, including an extradition hearing, Bragg noted.

Hours after his arrest, the Manhattan district attorney’s office filed paperwork charging him with murder and other offenses. The indictment builds on that paperwork.

Investigators’ working theory is that Mangione, an Ivy League computer science grad from a prominent Maryland family, was propelled by anger at the U.S. health care system.

A law enforcement bulletin obtained by The Associated Press last week said that when arrested, he was carrying a handwritten letter that called health insurance companies “parasitic” and complained about corporate greed.

Mangione repeatedly posted on social media about how spinal surgery last year had eased his chronic back pain, encouraging people with similar conditions to speak up for themselves if told they just had to live with it.

In a Reddit post in late April, he advised someone with a back problem to seek additional opinions from surgeons and, if necessary, say the pain made it impossible to work.

“We live in a capitalist society,” Mangione wrote. “I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.”

He was never a UnitedHealthcare client, according to the insurer.

Mangione apparently cut himself off from his family and close friends in recent months. His family reported him missing in San Francisco in November.

After San Francisco authorities got a tip to their New York counterparts, investigators spoke to Mangione’s mother in San Francisco late on Dec. 7.

In that interview, “she said it might be something that she could see him doing,” New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Tuesday.

Before the case detectives could follow up on that lead, Mangione was arrested, Kenny said.

Mangione’s relatives have said in a statement that they were “shocked and devastated” by his arrest.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Congress Scrambles to Avoid Gov’t Shutdown before Friday Deadline

Matthew Doarnberger
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Congress Scrambles to Avoid Gov’t Shutdown before Friday Deadline

(Matthew Doarnberger, Headline USA) Federal lawmakers are attempting to find a way to pass a continuing resolution in order to prevent a government shutdown by the end of the week.

The resolution is said to fund the government at its current level through March 14, 2025. However, the text of the funding was not released.

It put pressure on Congress to pass the bill before Friday’s midnight deadline.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., expressed optimism that the contents of the CR would be made public by the end of the day on Tuesday.

“The CR is coming together, bipartisan work is ongoing,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

Johnson went on to praise the resolution as a stopgap funding measure to get the party into the new year.

But he went on to address certain allocations for disaster relief caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier this year.

“What would have been a very skinny, very simple clean CR, these other pieces have been added to it,” he added.

The speaker said he wishes to abide by the rule that gives members of congress 72 hours to review legislation before it is brought to the floor.

This would push the stopgap funding measure until the Friday deadline.

Despite Johnson’s optimism, other Republicans aren’t as thrilled about the CR.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, expressed his frustration at the whole process of attempting to pass the funding bill.

“This is not the process that we signed up for. We get this negotiated crap and we’re forced to eat this crap sandwich. Why? Because freaking Christmas is right around the corner,” Roy said. “It’s the same dang thing every year—legislate by crisis, legislate by calendar, not legislate because it’s the right thing to do.”

Criticism of Johnson came as Republicans are set to vote on a new speaker early next year.

The U.S. last experienced a government shutdown for 34-days from December of 2018 to January of 2019.

POLL: Trust in Nation’s Court System Hits Record Low after Years of Leftist Lawfare

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POLL: Trust in Nation’s Court System Hits Record Low after Years of Leftist Lawfare

(Headline USA) Democrats’ reckless gamble to use the U.S. justice system as a bludgeon to take down their political rival may not have achieved its desired ends.

Nonetheless, it has likely come with considerable collateral damage, with both the Right and Left believing themselves aggrieved after the lawfare abuse sputtered out with no satisfaction for the abused or the abusers.

At a time of heightened political division, Americans’ confidence in their country’s judicial system and courts dropped to a record low of 35% this year, according to a new Gallup poll.

The United States saw a sharp drop of 24 percentage points over the last four years, setting the country apart from other wealthy nations where most people on average still express trust in their systems.

The results come after a tumultuous period that included the indictment of former President Donald Trump and the subsequent withdrawal of federal charges, as well as regular attacks from the radical Left on the integrity of the Supreme Court as it attempted to find a justification for packing the court with additional Biden-appointed judges.

Confidence dropped among people who disapproved of the country’s leadership during Joe Biden’s presidency and among those who approved, according to Gallup. The respondents weren’t asked about their party affiliations.

It’s become normal for people who disapprove of the country’s leadership to also lose at least some confidence in the court system. Still, the 17-point drop recorded among that group under Biden was precipitous, and the cases filed against Trump were likely factors, Gallup said.

Among those who did approve of the country’s leadership, there was an 18-point decline between 2023 and 2024, possibly reflecting dissatisfaction with court rulings favoring Trump, Gallup found. Confidence in the judicial system had been above 60% among that group during the first three years of Biden’s presidency but nosedived this year.

Trump had faced four criminal indictments this year, but only a porn-star case in New York ended with a trial and conviction before he won the presidential race.

Since then, special counsel Jack Smith has ended his two federal cases, which pertained to Trump’s efforts to challenge the disputed 2020 election results, as well as and allegations that he hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The latter charges were dismissed after a parallel investigation of Biden deemed the sitting president unfit to stand trial, with Florida Judge Aileen Cannon also questioning the validity of Smith’s appointment to the post.

In both cases, Smith was accused of playing fast and loose with the normal legal protocals as he rushed to process the cases in order to maximize their political impace—to no avail.

A separate state election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, is largely on hold due to prosecutorial misconduct—a common theme among all of the cases, many of which were undertaken by George Soros-backed prosecutors who specifically campaigned on a “Get Trump” platform before any evidence existed.

Politically, the abuse of power had the opposite effect, with voters voicing their disapproval at the ballot box, delivering a strong mandate to Trump to hold accountable those who had made a mockery of the justice system.

Other Gallup findings have shown that Democrats’ confidence in the Supreme Court dropped by 25 points between 2021 and 2022, the year the justices overturned the federal abortion mandate, sending the issue back to the state level for the first time in 50 years.

Their trust climbed a bit, to 34%, in 2023, but dropped again to 24% in 2024, after a Supreme Court opinion that Trump and other former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution.

While previous presidents have enjoyed a similar inferred immunity, Smith’s overreaching cases, in collusion with socialist D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, were the first to ever challenge the notion by suggesting that presidents might be criminally culpable for their executive decisions.

The Supreme Court decision specifically rebuked the partisan Chutkan for her haste in refusing to take legal precedent under consideration. But for low-information leftists, it was the right-leaning court that was to blame.

Trust in the court among Republicans, by contrast, reached 71% in 2024.

Confidence in the federal government also declined to 26% during the Biden administration. However, that 20-point drop was not as steep as the decline in confidence in the courts, with many on the Left continuing to have blind faith in the 82-year-old president’s ability to get things done.

The trust drop is also steep compared with other countries around the world. Only a handful of other countries have seen larger drops during a four-year period. They include a 46-point drop in Myanmar during the period that overlapped the return of military rule in 2021, a 35-point drop in Venezuela amid deep economic and political turmoil from 2012 to 2016 and a 28-point drop in Syria in the runup and early years of its civil war.

The survey was based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,000 U.S. adults between June 28 and Aug. 1.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Fast & Furious Whistleblower Reportedly under Consideration to Lead ATF

Ken Silva
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Fast & Furious Whistleblower Reportedly under Consideration to Lead ATF

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives official Peter Forcelli, who blew the whistle on the Obama-era Operation Fast & Furious scandal, is reportedly one of the names under consideration to be the next ATF director.

“Those said to be under consideration are: Blake Masters, a far-right conservative in Arizona who is close to the financier Peter Thiel and who mounted a failed bid for a House seat; Peter J. Forcelli, a former bureau official who wrote a book on the ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal; Larry Keane, the head of the gun manufacturers’ trade association; and several current and former top A.T.F. officials, including Robert Cekada, Daniel Board and Rick Dressler,” the New York Times reported over the weekend.

Headline USA has reported extensively on Forcelli’s disclosures, which he chronicled in a book he published in March entitled The Deadly Path: How Operation Fast & Furious and Bad Lawyers Armed Mexican Cartels.

As his book explains, the Fast & Furious scandal entailed the U.S. government allowing illegal gun purchases under the guise of tracking organized crime. The operation never resulted in the arrests of any organized crime leaders, and it became a national scandal when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by a Fast & Furious firearm in 2010.

Forcelli said in an interview in February that he believes that the government is still allowing the streets to be flooded with illegal weapons.

“The U.S. Attorney is turning a blind eye to straw purchases, which is fueling what’s going on in Mexico,” he said.

“The prosecutors who work there haven’t changed their ways. They have a habit of kicking the can down the road and not taking straw purchase cases. These are not purchasers who are buying guns for target shooters. These are guys who are sending guns to Mexico to slaughter human beings.”

Forcelli also accused current ATF Director Steven Dettelbach of being a “tool for the gun-control lobby.” Dettelbach, for his part, has reportedly said he plans to quit before Trump takes office.

However, the Times also reported that Trump isn’t expected to choose an ATF director until the spring, though transition officials reportedly cautioned that he is “just as likely to tap somebody on impulse, at any moment.”

Second Amendment activists cheered Forcelli’s potential nomination.

“Forcelli didn’t just write a book on Operation Fast & Furious. He was one of the whistleblowers who called attention to the gunwalking scandal, and suffered retaliation from higher-ups in Obama’s Justice Department for his actions,” wrote journalist Cam Edwards.

Responding to the reports of his candidacy, Forcelli said he knows all of the other candidates besides Masters, and that Cekada, Board and Keane would all be an improvement over current ATF leadership.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

Al Sharpton Fumes over Daniel Penny’s Football Invite with Trump/Vance

Maire Clayton
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Al Sharpton Fumes over Daniel Penny’s Football Invite with Trump/Vance

(Maire Clayton, Headline USA) MSNBC host Al Sharpton expressed anger Monday over U.S. Marine Daniel Penny attending the Army-Navy football game with President-elect Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Vance extended the invitation to Penny after he was found not guilty in a New York City manslaughter trial.


Sharpton appeared with Joy Reid on The Reid Out and attacked the move.

“It is amazing to me that you would have someone that choked to death an unarmed man who had mental problems and act as though he’s some kind of hero,” he said. “The clear message is that you are now giving legitimacy to vigilanteism, and it could make others feel that they can take the law into their own hand.”

Sharpton tried to use the race card and claim it would be different if Penny was not white.

“It ought to be insult to all Americans beyond race,” he said. “If the race was the other way around, would the reaction be the same?”

He claimed Trump was sending a message with the invite.

“You have to ask yourself, is that not a purposeful signal?” he continued. “This is the same Donald Trump that claimed black men were going to vote for him but look at what he did to a homeless black man, what Penny did to a homeless black man with mental problems.”

Sharpton then went after Vance in his unhinged rant and said Vance views black people “as animals.”

After Penny accepted the invitation, Vance expressed he was happy he would be joining.

“Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone,” Vance wrote. “I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”

The soon to be vice president later posted images on social media of Penny attending the football game with American flag emojis.

Report: Elon Musk is under 3 Federal Investigations

Ken Silva
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Report: Elon Musk is under 3 Federal Investigations

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The New York Times reported Tuesday that Twitter and SpaceX owner Elon Musk is under three federal investigations related to alleged violation of security clearance regulations.

Citing eight anonymous officials with varying degrees of knowledge about the situation, the Times reported that the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General opened a review into the matter this year. Last month, the Air Force and the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security separately initiated reviews, the newspaper added.

Among the complaints against Musk is that he doesn’t provide the government with some details of his meetings and travel plans.

“Yet at least as of 2021, Mr. Musk and his team began not providing some details of his meetings and travel plans,” the Times reported. “His private security employees who travel with him report some of his activities to SpaceX, which in turn reports the information to the government. But often, not all the details of each trip are divulged—such as what was discussed in meetings—while some appointments are not mentioned at all.”

He also reportedly didn’t disclose to the DoD when he used ketamine, an anesthetic with psychedelic properties that he tweeted about last year.

Nine countries have raised concerns about Musk, according to the Times.

“In meetings about Starlink between Israeli military intelligence officers and U.S. defense officials in early 2023, the Israeli Ministry of Defense called Mr. Musk ‘a wild card,’ two people with knowledge of the conversations said,” the Times reported.

“Israeli officials were concerned that he could pass sensitive data about Israel to others, though they eventually allowed Starlink into the country this year.”

Israel’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. Musk also did not return requests for comment. The Times further reported that a Defense Department spokesman declined to comment, while a spokesman for the department’s Office of Inspector General, which is a quasi-independent watchdog arm, said the office could “neither confirm nor deny the existence of an ongoing investigation.”

The Times noted that no federal agency has actually accused Musk of disclosing classified material, and that Donald Trump will have constitutional authority to grant a security clearance to anyone—even if others in the government object.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

‘Yeah, I Did That’: Kamala Harris Smug as Ever in Post-Election Speech to Students

Julianna Frieman
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‘Yeah, I Did That’: Kamala Harris Smug as Ever in Post-Election Speech to Students

(Julianna Frieman, Headline USA) Vice President Kamala Harris was as smug as ever Tuesday morning in a post-election speech to students in Prince George’s County Community College in Maryland.

Harris, 60, blew her own mind as she laced her staple “context in which you exist” line into yet another public appearance following her historic election loss to President-elect Donald Trump.

“The true test of our commitment is whether in the face of an obstacle do we throw up our hands and or do we roll up our sleeves?” the failed presidential candidate rambled with incremental pauses and exaggerated gestures.

Harris stopped for a moment to soak in the silence before laughing after saying, “And as we approach.”

“And I ask you to remember,” Harris continued after the audience was done laughing and cheering at her disjointed phrase, “the context in which you exist.”

The vice president grinned as she folded her hands on the podium. Nodding with sly satisfaction, she told the audience, “Yeah, I did that.”

Harris released a hardy cackle as the crowd began to cheer once more.

Harris has increased her public appearances as the Christmas holiday approaches.

She first reemerged the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, stoking allegations of post-Hawaii drunkenness due to her demeanor, slurred speech and glossy eyes.

In another post-election appearance, Harris rambled to a crowd of Democrats while appearing drunk at a Christmas party at her Naval Observatory residence on Wednesday.

“And I give you permission that if you are going to someone’s house who doesn’t know how to cook, bring your own dish! You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying? I’m all about no regrets!” she told the small group in video mocked among conservatives on X.

Julianna Frieman is a freelance writer published by the Daily Caller, Headline USA, The Federalist, and The American Spectator. Follow her on Twitter at @JuliannaFrieman.

SPERRY: If Past Is Prologue, Marc Elias Has Made the Case for His Own Prosecution

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SPERRY: If Past Is Prologue, Marc Elias Has Made the Case for His Own Prosecution

(Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations) Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias had a rough election. Several of his clients, notably Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, fell to defeat.

But instead of accepting their losses, Elias disputed the presidential and senatorial results in Pennsylvania, leading to charges that Elias, a self-advertised “democracy defender,” is what he’s accused Donald Trump of being: an “election denier.”

With the races now settled—and many of his skeptical posts on X deleted—Elias is unrepentant and remains defiant. Not only is he shaking off the criticism, but he is vowing to fight Trump and Republicans even harder in court in 2026 and 2028.

“Democrats need to oppose, and not simply resist, a second Trump presidency,” the lawyer said recently.

This time, Elias promises to employ more “ruthless” tactics to stop Trump, Republicans, and their MAGA agenda.

“All legal tactics must be on the table,” he added in his recent blog post. “We must be comfortable using every legal tool available to challenge Trumpism in court.”

Elias believes he will get favorable rulings because “more than half of federal judges were appointed by Democratic presidents,” and “many state courts are controlled by liberals,” the principles of impartiality and blind justice notwithstanding.

“The judiciary is the best hope we have to stop Donald Trump from running through American democracy,” he asserted on his podcast.

Elias continues to bring legal challenges in several states. He recently noted there were still 211 voting or election cases pending in 40 states at the time of publication. (The far-left Brennan Center for Justice listed 27 states with pending litigation as of Tuesday afternoon.)

Elias’s anti-Trump crusade has gotten personal. In his trademark smashmouth style, he recently called Trump a “buffoon” and has compared hime to Hitler. Now he worries Trump has targeted him for attack.

“I fear the threat of retribution, political vengeance,” he said in a recent column. Elias notes that Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has branded him “an enemy.”

While claiming to protect voting rights, elections, and the democratic process, Elias’s partisan actions in the wake of the 2024 election stand in tension with his past statements excoriating Trump for denying the 2020 results and trying to “steal the election.”

After the Associated Press and ABC News called the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate race for GOP challenger Dave McCormick, Elias refused to accept the loss suffered by his client Casey.

“The Pennsylvania Senate race is not over,” Elias insisted on X (a post he has since deleted).

Instead of advising Casey to concede, he demanded a recount. Meanwhile, he sued state election officials over provisional ballots, which he argued should be counted even though they were ruled invalid.

When McCormick countersued to throw out such ballots, Elias complained: “Candidates who believe they have won don’t file lawsuits like this. Very strong Trump 2020 vibes.”

But the Republican National Committee said the desperate party was Elias.

“We actually have legal filings by the Bob Casey campaign filed by Marc Elias, where they have called on votes that are cast by individuals who are not registered to vote to be counted,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said. “They have taken every step that they can to try and engineer votes that would overturn this margin.”

In the end, Casey struck out on the recount, and his high-priced lawyer whiffed in court. Casey finally conceded the election to McCormick after 16 days of protesting the result on the advice of counsel.

Elias even disputed Trump’s own clear victory in Pennsylvania, where he beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 171,000 votes.“Trump knows he is losing Pennsylvania,” the Harris campaign lawyer claimed in a post on X, also since deleted.

Asked for a response, Elias spokesman Blake McCarren did not comment.

It’s not the first time the controversial Duke-educated attorney, who keeps a “BEWARE OF ATTACK DEMOCRAT” sign behind his desk, has doubted the results of elections and used questionable tactics to try to overturn them.

In 2021, Elias pushed the House Democratic leadership to nullify the victory of GOP Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller–Meeks over his Democratic client, Rita Hart.

Meeks’s narrow win had already been certified by Iowa when Elias asked congressional Democrats to essentially kick her out of office (she remains in Congress).

In 2018, he represented Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson in his recount loss to Republican challenger Rick Scott.

And in 2008, Elias was able to switch a Senate seat in Minnesota from an incumbent Republican to Democrat Al Franken by shopping for a friendly judge to count previously rejected ballots and overturn the lead of GOP Sen. Norman Coleman. The seat flip gave newly elected President Barack Obama the 60-seat majority he needed in the Senate to pass legislation such as the controversial Affordable Care Act without any Republican support.

Similar election reversals may have had major influences on key state races in Virginia and North Carolina, giving Democrats the opportunity to flip the traditionally red states blue, which they did successfully in the case of Virginia with the election of former Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe as governor and Mark Herring as attorney general by dubiously razor-thin margins.

‘Extreme’ Gerrymandering

While Elias has decried what he calls “grotesque partisan gerrymandering” by Republicans in red states like North Carolina, court records show he defended Democrats doing the same thing in blue states, including New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maryland.

In Maryland, a state court ruled in 2022 that the Democrat-drawn map pushed by Elias was so one-sided against Republicans that it “subverts the will of those governed.”

The judge tossed out the map for “extreme partisan gerrymandering.” The same year, a federal judge in New York rejected Elias’s lawsuit to reshape congressional districts to favor Democrats as a “Hail Mary pass.”

Federal Election Commission records reveal Elias has earned millions of dollars from redistricting clients—such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, along with its affiliate, the National Redistricting Action Fund—to assist their efforts to redraw electoral maps to protect Democratic congressional seats in blue states.

One year after publicly mocking Trump and his campaign lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, over their unfounded claims that Dominion voting machines switched Trump votes to Biden in 2020, Elias himself blamed the same Dominion “voting tabulation machines” for a Democratic client’s loss in New York.

In 2021, Elias unsuccessfully claimed machine “irregularities” had somehow undercounted thousands of votes for Rep. Anthony Brindisi. But a judge rejected his complaint, ruling that there were “no discrepancies” with the machine counts while denying his request for a hand recount of the votes. FEC records show Brindisi paid Elias $8,230 for legal services.

Publicly, Elias has railed against the infusion of “dark money” in Republican campaigns. But behind the scenes, he’s lobbied to lift campaign finance caps and is credited with helping create the so-called “super PAC,” political committees that can accept unlimited contributions from dark money groups.

“Well before Marc was litigating major voting cases, he was a campaign-finance lawyer, fighting against regulation on the Democrat side,” said Rick Hasen, an election-law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It was Marc working to loosen campaign-finance limits on political parties, a move that has increased the role of big money in influencing candidates through the political parties.”

Shortly before the 2016 election, billionaire left-wing donor George Soros, whom Elias views as “a hero,” gave at least $5 million to Elias and his law firm to fight voter ID requirements at polling places.

Dark money groups also helped fund his legal work in the 2020 election. When reporters pointed this out, he threatened to make it easier to sue journalists for defamation, arguing the courts should “revisit New York Times v Sullivan,” the landmark libel case that makes it harder for public figures to sue for defamation. (He’s since deleted the tweet.)

‘Dark Money’ Double Standard

What’s more, two nonprofit groups Elias founded, Democracy Docket Legal Fund and Democracy Docket Action Fund, are “both projects of the Arabella Advisors dark money funding network,” according to the Capital Research Center.

They provide him almost unlimited cash to file lawsuits across the country to block GOP measures to prevent voter fraud.  Arabella manages several nonprofit “dark money” funders, who in turn channel money to Elias’s groups, according to the Capital Research Center.

Notwithstanding his rhetoric about “protecting voting rights,” critics say Elias’s primary concern is making sure Democrats have the advantage in elections. Indeed, his law firm, the Elias Law Group, acknowledges on its website that it is “committed to helping Democrats win.”

When Elias says he’s fighting against “voter suppression” by Republicans, detractors say he’s really fighting against laws to stop voter fraud, such as non-citizens illegally casting votes for Democrats.

Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary and GOP pundit, warned that what Elias did in Pennsylvania is a harbinger of how Democrats plan to count votes in future close races. “They want people who aren’t registered, don’t have IDs, or live out of state to be counted,” he said on X.

After the election, Elias complained he had lost more than 50,000 followers on X. He has used the political platform to plug his digital newsletter, “Democracy Docket,” and attract paid subscribers for the for-profit website, which he started in 2020. He has done this even while defending Media Matters against a defamation lawsuit brought by Elon Musk. The Soros-backed propaganda group claimed X promotes Nazism.

While Elias claims “Donald Trump tried to subvert the election results in a lot of different ways in 2020,” he himself used a variety of dirty tricks to influence the election held four years earlier, which caught the eye of federal prosecutors who subpoenaed him to testify about his election meddling in court in 2022.

In 2016, while working as Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, Elias hired D.C. opposition research shop Fusion GPS and former FBI informant Christopher Steele to feed the FBI false information about connections between Trump and the Kremlin to generate an investigation of the Republican opponent.

As special counsel John Durham suggested, Elias’s objective was to turn around and tell his media contacts that Trump was being investigated in the hopes of swinging the election in Clinton’s favor. During the same month he commissioned Steele, Elias hired the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to write a public report blaming Russia for hacking the Clinton campaign. In his since-debunked dossier, Steele went a step further, pinning the hacking on not just Russia but also the Trump campaign.

Also in 2016, Elias collaborated with Clinton campaign official Jake Sullivan (now President Biden’s national security adviser) on the Russian Alfa Bank hoax targeting Trump, resulting in another dead-end FBI probe. After Elias’s campaign schemes fell under the scrutiny of Durham in 2020 and 2021, Elias scrubbed several years of posts from his X feed.

Critics say Elias seems to morph into those he denounces.

“Elias insisted that [Trump] was an election denier and [a] threat to democracy,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. “What is hypocrisy to some is a living to others.”

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