Russia Collusion Hoaxster Marc Elias Boasts: I Learned ‘to Fight for Democracy’ from Harry Reid

Marc E. Elias, the Democrat lawyer who pushed the Russia collusion hoax and the sweeping changes to election laws in 2020, boasted Wednesday that he learned “to fight for democracy” from the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Reid infamously claimed during the 2012 presidential election that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had not paid federal taxes for many years. He made the claim on the Senate floor, which protected him from a defamation lawsuit.

Reid never revealed his source for the claim, which fueled establishment media narratives for months, and which Romney denied. The claims were untrue, but after the election, Reid refused to apologize. Instead, he appeared proud of the hoax, when confronted about it by CNN’s Dana Bash in an interview as he was retiring from active politics: “Romney didn’t win, did he?” Reid proclaimed.

Even the Washington Post was shocked, with Chris Cilizza calling Reid’s hoax “appalling.”

On Wednesday, Elias tweeted: “If you want to know where I learned to fight hard for democracy, remember I was Harry Reid’s lawyer when he was the Senate Majority Leader.”

As the Post revealed in 2017, Elias, then at the Perkins Coie law firm, hired the Fusion GPS opposition research firm on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to prepare the fraudulent Russia “dossier,” which fueled an FBI investigation and media conspiracy theories.

The parallel to Reid’s own hoax is obvious: both Reid and Elias made wild claims, citing sources they would not reveal, using the cover of officialdom to insert a conspiracy theory into the media that they hoped would damage their opponents.

As Breitbart News warned throughout 2020, Elias was using lawsuits across the country to force key states to change their voting rules for the election, despite the absence of any scientific support for the idea that in-person voting was hazardous.

Elias’s link to Reid was reported by Politico reported in 2014, when it noted that he was advising Reid’s Senate legislative staff and that he had “helped craft a provision that was slipped into a year-end spending bill allowing political parties to raise huge new pools of cash — including some for legal fees that are likely going to be collected by his own firm.” Elias also served as an attorney for Reid and his leadership political action committee (PAC), which funded other Democrats.

Reid left a checkered record in the Senate. Though he was known for being accessible to media outlets across the political spectrum — a practice that is rare on Capitol Hill today — he also orchestrated the smear campaign against Romney and eliminated the filibuster for some judicial nominees so that then-President Barack Obama could confirm nominees to district and appellate courts. The latter maneuver cost Democrats dearly once Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

As Breitbart News’ Peter Schweizer documented in 2011’s Throw Them All Out, Reid also became wealthy during his Senate tenure, partly by using legislative earmarks to fund infrastructure or sway zoning near land he owned back home in Nevada.

Elias left Perkins Coie earlier this year prior to the indictment of Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann by Special Counsel John Durham for allegedly lying to the FBI during Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia collusion hoax.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.