The Lawyer Behind The Recount Effort
The lawyer representing Hillary Clinton’s recount efforts recently led legal battles against state voting laws with an infusion of funding from billionaire George Soros.
On Saturday, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, announced Clinton’s campaign would participate in Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount effort in Wisconsin. Elias also said the Clinton campaign would participate if Stein decides to pursue recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Elias is a senior lawyer at the Perkins Coie law firm, which also represents Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
In July, the New York Times reported Soros had pledged up to $5 million for a legal fight led by Elias against what the newspaper characterized as “restrictive voting laws enacted in recent years by Republican-controlled state governments.”
In August, the Washington Post spotlighted the Soros-funded legal work of Elias in a profile titled, “The crusade of a Democratic superlawyer with multimillion-dollar backing.” The newspaper described Elias as the “go-to lawyer for Democrats in recount fights and redistricting battles.”
The Post reported on Elias’s top benefactor: “With a multimillion-dollar commitment from liberal mega-donor George Soros, Elias is challenging laws that, he argues, diminish the impact of important Democratic Party constituencies of African Americans, Latinos and young people.”
“I don’t think people should think we’re done filing lawsuits for this election cycle,” Elias said in a taxicab interview after two flights and a two-hour weather delay delivered him to Phoenix.”
The Post detailed the evolution of Soros’s financial backing:
“While Elias will not discuss the funding for his project, Soros’s spokesman Michael Vachon said Elias approached them with a set of proposals for challenging state restrictions that would be helpful ‘up and down the ballot.’
“That was appealing to Soros, who began his political giving with voter mobilization efforts, Vachon said. And they agreed with Elias that there was work to be done beyond what the civil rights groups, to which Soros also contributes, were doing. …
“Soros has given $5 million to the trust that funds the litigation, Vachon said, and Elias said he has picked his shots with an eye toward ‘protecting the Obama coalition’ of African Americans, Latinos and young people.”
Clinton’s direct involvement through Elias in the recount efforts follows a New York Magazine article by contributing editor Gabriel Sherman last week first revealing that her campaign had been urged by “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” to call a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
“The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked,” Sherman reported.
Bonifaz is the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), where he also served as General Counsel.
The NRVI’s website documents it is the recipient of “generous foundation and institutional support” from 24 past and present grantors, including Soros’s Open Society Institute.
The NRVI is also funded by the Soros-funded Tides Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation, which has partnered with the Open Society Foundations on numerous projects. President Obama served as a paid board member of the Joyce Foundation for eight years from 1994 to 2002. Joyce has also been a prominent donor to the Soros-funded Media Matters For America progressive activist group.
It is worth noting that from 2012 to 2014, New York Magazine’s Sherman was the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at New America, a think-tank that, like the NRVI, received funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Joyce Foundation in addition to scores of other liberal groups. Another New America donor is the Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation. Jonathan is George Soros’s son.
The recount efforts jumpstarted after Jill Stein at the last minute last Friday filed a petition for a recount in Wisconsin. According to Politico, Stein was prompted by Sherman’s article.
PA, France Seek Renewed Peace Effort
The Palestinian Authority and the French government have been pressuring the Obama administration to submit a plan to the United Nations that would impose guidelines for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, a PA official told Breitbart Jerusalem.
The plan would seek to usurp United States’s Middle East policy after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
“In addition, our goal is to organize an international peace summit in France in December. We expect Israel to boycott it, but we want the U.S. to rally the entire community of nations around it,” the official said.
The source said that the Obama State Department supports the French-Palestinian initiative, “but the president’s position is still unclear. They tend to be against, but there’s still a chance.”
He said that the participation of an American delegation would be enough to satisfy the Palestinians.
“The summit would send a strong international message instead of the exclusively American one that has been heard recently,” he said. “The Quartet hasn’t really been active, and Israel takes advantage of it to step up settlement activity. That’s why a new initiative or at least reiterating a strong international stance would be enough to pave the way for future negotiations between us and the Israelis.”
While the PA has been keen to support unilateral action targeting Israel at UN, Abbas and the PA have refused to come to the bargaining table despite numerous Israeli offers to jump start talks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the unprecedented steps of freezing Jewish West Bank construction and releasing Palestinian terrorists from prisons as “gestures” to bring the PA to the bargaining table but to no avail.
Arson Terrorism: Who’s To Blame?
The so-called wave of terror sweeping Israel since last year has clearly morphed into the dangerous phenomenon we are currently witnessing in Israel – arson terrorism aimed at causing maximum casualties and damage across the Jewish state
Like much of the “wave of terror” – the series of seemingly lone-wolf attacks targeting Israelis this past year – the arson terrorists don’t seem to be directed by any jihadist organization or extremist group.
However, blame must be assigned where it is deserved. The Palestinian Authority’s murderous campaign of nonstop anti-Israel incitement in PA media and institutions clearly has had a significant impact. The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, an Arab-Israeli extremist organization led by hate preacher Raed Salah, has been inciting Arab-Israelis against Israel for far too long.
Arsonists may have been encouraged by the hate posts trending on Arab social media in which users have been cheering on the fires while demanding that Israel be burned down. Breitbart Jerusalem has been a leader in exposing these armchair anti-Semites as their incitement continues to ignite the Internet.
Like the killers in the Islamic State and scores of other jihadist organizations, it is notable that the arson terrorists here in Israel couldn’t care less whether they target Jews, Muslims or Christians, as indeed many of the Israeli towns and cities being devastated house residents from across Israel’s diverse population.
