When Washington, DC super-lawyer Marc Elias gleefully “threaded” a story about Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows telling the U.S. Department of Justice to go jump in the Gulf of Maine after it requested access to the state’s voter registration rolls, he neglected to note that Bellows’ campaign for governor has been cutting his law firm checks. That wasn’t, after all, the point.
At the 30,000-foot level in swampy maneuvers, such disclosures are — as former Elias client Hillary Clinton once famously said — “for little people.” If any Augusta swamp-creatures have noted a new spring in Bellows’ step recently, it is because she appears to now have Elias on retainer.
Who is Marc Elias anyway, anyone not dripping in swamp sludge might reasonably ask. If you don’t know, it speaks to your character.
The election attorney engaged by progressive Democrats on re-districting and political law questions became famous for his role in peddling the now-discredited Steele Dossier in 2016 when Elias’ firm at the time, Perkins Coie, was representing the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. (One of his associates from that period was later charged with lying to the FBI, but then acquitted by a reliably-blue DC jury.)
In 2021, and only after inflicting a cosmic degree of damage to its reputation, Elias slithered out of Perkins Coie and founded his own law firm, which Shenna Bellows’s gubernatorial campaign has paid at least $8,000, according to its first campaign finance report last month.
“I’m not panicking. I’m outraged,” reads the tag-line to Elias’ social media accounts. To progressive partisans, this is apparently a signal he’s the sort of fellow you’d want to take along on a tiger hunt.
His tactics, some Democrats have complained, are “more grandstanding than constructive.” Though he had been of counsel to the Democratic National Committee since 2009, in 2023, President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign cut him loose because, sources at the time told Axios, his tactics simply rubbed too many the wrong way.
Earlier this year, Elias sent ripples through the legal community by forcing his subordinates at the Elias Law Group to sign arbitration agreements if they wanted to keep their jobs. This is not the sort of thing a nice-guy boss does, but then again, no one has every accused Elias of being nice.
“I am lucky enough to have no major regrets, and I don’t let the little ones hold me back,” Elias told the legal publication Chambers in the same interview in which he said “to be honest, if I were applying to day, I doubt that I would hire me.”
But Bellows clearly thinks differently. Why would an ostensible expert in elections need to hire a lawyer like Marc Elias, whose greatest attributes seem to be grandstanding, crowing about how bad Donald Trump is, election re-counts, and general skullduggery?
There are a few theories.
First, in the world of Marc Elias, $8,000 barely entitles you to read one of the magazines in his firm’s waiting room, so the engagement could just be a placeholder. In other words, by engaging him at a threshold level, Bellows’ more serious primary opponents like Angus King III or Hannah Pingree cannot.
Then there is Bellows unique ethical quandary: as the Maine’s top election official, shouldn’t she step down before running for governor in a race her office will supervise, people cursed with common sense might ask. Divining a reason why she shouldn’t might require the talents of a man like Elias.
Finally, there is the founding myth of Shenna Bellows: she is a warrior who valiantly endeavored to keep the monstrous Trump off Maine’s 2024 ballot in a move that would have made Josef Stalin blush. A salvo like that sets a pace that is tough to maintain.
Maine’s outgoing Governor Janet Mills has upped her political capital by publicly defying Trump on the trans-gender question, and Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey has busied himself in recent months attaching the state to nearly 30 lawsuits against the Trump administration. By hiring a big gun lawyer like Elias, Bellows burnishes her credentials a “player” capable of jousting, in however pyrrhic a fashion, with an American president.
As the old saying goes, more will be revealed. For now, it’s enough to know that candidate Bellows, much like the fierce secretary of state she plays on television, is loaded for bear. The legal letters may soon be flying.
