McAuliffe spends big in final days on sanctioned lawyer who sued to overturn Iowa House race

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s campaign has made a late-game push before the election, spending nearly $60,000 on a high-profile attorney known for representing Democrats and masterminding some election-related legal challenges.

Attorney Marc Elias on Aug. 3, 2016. (David Jolkovski for The Washington Post via Getty Images) ( ) Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe speaks during his campaign rally in Dumfries, Virginia Oct. 21, 2021.  (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Elias’ name has been linked to Democrats running for office for years, as he was previously a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie. That is the same firm that was hired by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and it was Elias who was involved in bringing on Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump – the research that included Christopher Steele’s dossier.

Elias founded the firm in August of this year after leaving Perkins Coie. Several months earlier, in March, a judge ordered sanctions against Elias in a case where he represented Democrats challenging a Texas law barring "straight ticket voting" going into the 2020 election. Elias and other attorneys filed a motion in the case in February without mentioning that they had already filed what the court called a "nearly identical" motion in September 2020 that had been denied.