Politics|In Florida Recount Fight, Democratic Lawyer Draws Plaudits and Fire
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In Florida Recount Fight, Democratic Lawyer Draws Plaudits and Fire
Marc E. Elias, a Democratic election lawyer representing Senator Bill Nelson in the Florida recount fight, has been accused by President Trump of trying to steal the election.Credit...David Jolkovski for The Washington Post, via Getty Images
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Patricia Mazzei
WASHINGTON — He has been accused of rigging the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries to thwart Bernie Sanders and facilitating a deluge of big money into politics. He helped arrange financing for the dossier of sometimes salacious and unverified claims about President Trump's ties to Russia and now is under direct fire from the president, who has said he is trying to steal the Senate race in Florida from the Republican candidate, Gov. Rick Scott.
For an election lawyer, Marc E. Elias has drawn unusually intense attention and criticism.
But then, Mr. Elias, who is representing Senator Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent, in the Florida recount, has been at the center of an unusually large number of high-stakes political fights.
His role in the Florida battle, in which Mr. Scott's lead has shrunk from nearly 60,000 votes at the end of election night to less than 13,000 votes out of more than eight million cast, has thrust him even further onto center stage as the Democrats' lead lawyer and spokesman, making him a tempting foil for Mr. Trump.
Last week, Mr. Trump called him out by name, referring to "this guy Elias, who represented Hillary Clinton and a lot of very shady things." That was an apparent reference to Mr. Elias's secretly arranging funding from two of his clients — Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee — to compile research that became the dossier about Mr. Trump's ties to Russia.
A few hours after his off-handed swipe at Mr. Elias, the president took to Twitter to elaborate, writing, "As soon as Democrats sent their best Election stealing lawyer, Marc Elias, to Broward County they miraculously started finding Democrat votes. Don't worry, Florida — I am sending much better lawyers to expose the FRAUD!"
Mr. Elias is perhaps best known for his role in helping to deliver a handful of previous recounts to Democrats, including in the bitterly fought two-month battle over a Minnesota Senate election in 2008 that brought victory to Al Franken. But he has also worked mostly behind the scenes for the past decade shaping the laws and regulations governing American politics, from voting access to redistricting to campaign fund-raising and spending.
The work has yielded tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for his firm, Perkins Coie, from corporations, campaigns and political committees. In the process, Mr. Elias has earned a reputation as one of the most formidable election lawyers in the country, and arguably one of the most influential of unelected Democrats in Washington.
He has been a trusted adviser to the party's most senior leaders in Congress, and is admired by its campaign operatives for his knowledge of the way campaigns work and his willingness to use aggressive, pioneering tactics to help them win elections.
That approach, however, has earned him the ire of activists who support increased transparency and decreased money in politics. They say he has been among the biggest impediments to both causes, and has often put the short-term interests of the Democratic Party ahead of the interests of the party's base, and even of American democracy more broadly.
"He's doing really important work for voting rights that benefits all voters, but he's also pushed for a deregulation of money in politics that serves the interests of the wealthy," said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation for the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause.
The group joined with the League of Women Voters, another nonpartisan nonprofit group, to file a lawsuit on Monday seeking to force Governor Scott to recuse himself from overseeing the recount. Mr. Elias approvingly cited the suit during a Monday conference call with reporters.
Yet Common Cause and other government-reform groups have consistently opposed Mr. Elias's efforts to shape campaign finance rules, through legislative maneuvering, Federal Election Commission filings and court cases, to allow his clients to raise more money with fewer restrictions.
They objected when he requested exemptions for his clients Google and Facebook from political advertising disclaimer rules in 2010 and 2011, respectively, that some supporters later argued could have helped identify Russian election meddling in 2016.
Through filings with the Federal Election Commission, he helped lay the regulatory groundwork for the unlimited-money political committees known as super PACs, then helped clear the way for candidates to help raise money for super PACs, which are barred from coordinating other activities with candidates.
He structured an arrangement under which one political outfit he represented that included a super PAC began directly coordinating with Mrs. Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, which was also a client of his. That sparked howls of protest from independent election watchdogs, as did his leading role in writing a provision that was quietly slipped into a 2014 year-end spending bill that allowed national party committees to accept donations of $97,400 per person to fund legal costs associated with recounts like the ones in Florida.
His defenders point out that Mr. Elias's legal work also has placed him at the cutting edge of expanding voting access, including a lawsuit he brought in May on behalf of the League of Women Voters that led a judge to strike down Florida's ban on early voting sites on college campuses.
In some ways, Mr. Elias's efforts to expand big-money fund-raising and spending undermine his efforts to protect and expand voting access, said Craig Holman, an official at the government watchdog group Public Citizen.
"While he supports leveling the playing field when it comes to the right to vote, it's ironic that he opposes any legislation or policies that would level the playing field when it comes to money in politics," Mr. Holman said. "Marc does not understand that in a world of unlimited and undisclosed money in politics, the Republicans generally hold a strategic advantage."
Right now, though, the Democratic Party's leadership and base appear united in cheering for Mr. Elias's aggressive tactics in the Florida recount, and galvanized by Republican attacks on him.
In announcing his role leading the recount efforts last week, Mr. Elias declared that "we believe that at the end of this process, Senator Nelson is going to be declared the winner."
That prompted umbrage on the right, with Governor Scott asserting it proved that Mr. Elias did not care about a fair recount, and was, in fact, "here to steal this election."
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, one of Mr. Elias's clients, has gone so far as to send out summaries of the coverage of Mr. Elias's conference calls with reporters, a treatment more typically reserved for the candidates themselves.
Mr. Elias has cast his efforts on the recount as motivated by a desire to ensure that every vote is counted fairly and accurately, and that the recount process is allowed to play out. But after the 2016 North Carolina governor's election, when Mr. Elias's Democratic client led by 6,300 votes in an official count that was still ongoing, Mr. Elias called on the Republican candidate to "graciously concede" rather than waste taxpayer money by calling for a recount.
"Marc is a very smart campaign finance and election lawyer, but his legal positions are usually designed to serve the best interests of his Democratic Party clients in winning elections rather than any particular legal principle," said Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election lawyer who has worked against Mr. Elias in several recounts, including in Florida.
Mr. Elias did not respond to requests to be interviewed.
A fast-talking native of Rockland County, N.Y., Mr. Elias, 49, joined the Washington office of Perkins Coie shortly after graduating from the Duke University Law School in 1993.
He rose through the ranks to become a partner, joining with the head of the firm's political practice, Robert F. Bauer, to build Perkins Coie into the dominant Democratic firm in the lucrative election law industry.
When Mr. Bauer stepped down to become White House counsel under President Barack Obama, Mr. Elias took over as chairman of the practice. He expanded its dominance and reach, adding voter protection groups and super PACs to a portfolio of clients that now includes most of the party's members of Congress and all its national committees.
The firm has been paid nearly $80 million since 2001 by federal candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Those fees, which do not include the millions more paid by nonprofit groups represented by Mr. Elias, are most likely rising further with the Florida recount, in which several of his clients are active.
He brought a team from Perkins Coie with him to Orlando, where its members set up a command center in the building that housed Mr. Nelson's campaign headquarters, though the team has since moved to another building. They have filed lawsuits on behalf of several clients, including the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which sued to extend the deadline for mailed-in ballots to be counted. And Mr. Elias filed suit on behalf of the Nelson campaign challenging the state's ballot signature-validation process as unconstitutional.
On Twitter, where Mr. Elias is an active and combative presence, he urged lawyers to sign up to oversee the ballot recounting process around the state through a nonprofit group called We the Action, for which he serves as chairman of the board.
"Elias is a really sharp, credible attorney," said Jon Soltz, a co-founder of VoteVets, another group that signed on to one of his lawsuits in Florida. "If you're credible and you're dangerous to the president, his playbook is to attack. So Marc Elias should wear this as a badge of honor that he's being effective."