“We believe that at the end of this process, Sen. Nelson is going to be declared the winner,” Elias said.

Marc Elias, the attorney who infamously retained Fusion GPS to produce the largely discredited anti-Trump dossier on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been retained to represent Sen. Bill Nelson’s recount efforts in Florida…

Marc Elias, the attorney who infamously retained Fusion GPS to produce the largely discredited anti-Trump dossier on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been retained to represent Sen. Bill Nelson’s recount efforts in Florida…

Holy hanging chads, Batman! As we await Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and 2016 election meddling by Moscow, incumbent and election night lame duck Florida Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson is trying to save his Senate seat by bringing in attorney Marc Elias, one of the key players in the collusion with Russia by Fusion GPS and the DNC to derail the Trump candidacy and presidency:

Elias added: “We’re doing this not just because it’s automatic, but we’re doing it to win…”

Of course you are, just as you and your firm colluded with British agent Christopher Steele and Russian sources to produce a fake dossier designed to trigger an investigation into Hilary Clinton’s 2016 rival, Donald Trump. "Win at all costs" is your mantra as you attempt to do in 2018 what you tried to do in 2018 -- overturn the results of a free and fair election:

Elias is widely considered one of the most powerful attorneys associated with the Democratic Party. He is chair of the Political Law Group at the Perkins Coie law firm. Elias represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as well as the Democratic National Committee. He was brought in by Nelson’s campaign to oversee official recount efforts.

Last year, the Washington Post reported that in April 2016, Elias and his law firm Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS to conduct the firm’s anti-Trump work on behalf of both Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the DNC. The work resulted in the publication of the dossier authored by former British spy Christopher Steele. Through Perkins Coie, Clinton’s campaign and the DNC continued to fund Fusion GPS until October 2016, days before Election Day, the Post reported. While it is not clear how much the Clinton campaign or the DNC paid Fusion GPS, the UK Independent, citing campaign finance records, reported that the Clinton campaign doled out $5.6 million to Perkins Coie from June 2015 to December 2016.

This is real election meddling, not the mere purchase of a few Facebook ads by a Russian troll farm. Just as Team Hillary and the DNC funneled money through Perkins-Coie to buy Russian dirt from a British agent, Marc Elias and his law firm are trying to steal another election and Florida’s other senator, Marco Rubio, is justifiably not amused by this continuation of the ongoing deep state coup against President Trump and his agenda:

Florida Senator Marco Rubio charged in a series of tweets Thursday afternoon that liberal lawyers are "descending on" the state in a calculated effort to "change the results" and "steal" races for Senate, governor, and agriculture commissioner. Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney who retained the services of Fusion GPS in 2016 to produce the discredited anti-Trump dossier at the behest of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, is one of those lawyers… Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired former British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on then-candidate Trump. Steele went on to share his dubious findings with the FBI, which used the information to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page… "Florida law requires counties report early voting & vote-by-mail within 30 minutes after polls close," Rubio complained on Twitter. "43 hours after polls closed 2 Democrat strongholds #BrowardCounty & #PalmBeachCounty are still counting & refusing to disclose how many ballots they have left to count." "Broward election supervisor's ongoing violation of Florida law requiring timely reporting isn’t just annoying incompetence. It has opened the door for lawyers to come here & try to steal a seat in the U.S. Senate & Florida Cabinet," Rubio tweeted.

The biggest threat to the integrity of our elections is not Russian interference, it’s organized vote fraud and election theft by candidates like Hillary Clinton in cooperation with foreign agents and their lawyers like Marc Elias in league with partisan officials like Brenda Snipes in Florida. This isn’t the first time Brenda Snipes has been involved in election shenanigans.

The Florida official put in charge of counting votes in Broward County -- the most liberal county in the state -- for the gubernatorial and Senate race previously destroyed voter ballots, a judge ruled, and was most recently accused of not removing dead voters from the voter rolls. Broward County Board of Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes is in charge of vote counting in the area and has yet to disclose how many ballots are still not counted despite the election for governor and Senate occurring two days ago… In May, a judge ruled that Snipes had violated state and federal law after she destroyed voter ballots in the state’s 2016 congressional election. In the race, former Democratic National Convention (DNC) Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz won re-election by less than 7,000 votes against Democrat primary challenger Tim Canova. The next year, when Canova asked to review the paper ballots in the race, it was revealed that Snipes destroyed the ballots only 12 months after the primary. Federal and state law mandates that ballots not be destroyed until 22 months after an election.

So a key Florida governor’s race and Senate seat are going to be decided by a Clinton lawyer who aided and abetted the Hillary/DNC/Fusion GPS collusion with, dare we say it, the Russians and a British agent as well as a corrupt Florida election official already found guilty of federal and state election laws? You can’t make this stuff up.

This is typical Democratic strategy. Losing an election is only the beginning. Bring in the lawyers and keep counting ballots until you get the results you want, ballots which sometimes appear out of nowhere, such as in a Florida school storage room:

A Florida teacher found and reported a box containing potentially uncounted ballots on Thursday -- two full days after extremely close midterm elections in the Sunshine State. Schoolteacher Lakeisha Williams of Miramar Elementary School told the New York Post, “I went into the area that we use for storage and saw it in there.”… Williams did not open or look inside the box -- and instead told the principal about it. The principal then contacted a local state representative. One big problem: The provisional ballots needed to be received by county officials before 5 p.m. on Thursday.

One is reminded of the games played in Minnesota’s 2008 Senate race, and ballots that were thrown out or added in until GOP candidate Norm Coleman’s 725-vote election night victory was undone and the seat given to election night loser Al Franken:

As the Wall Street Journal's John Fund reports, Minnesota Democrat Al Franken’s narrow, 312-vote victory in 2008 over incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman may have come as the result of people being allowed to vote who, under existing law, shouldn’t have been. The certification of Franken as the victor came only after a series of recounts dragging out for almost half a year. It also sparked an investigation by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group that compared the list of those recorded as having voted in the election against what Fund calls “criminal rap sheets.” The group found, in what appears to clearly warrant further and official inquiry, that …At least 341 convicted felons voted in Minneapolis's Hennepin County, the state's largest, and another 52 voted illegally in St. Paul's Ramsey County, the state's second largest. Dan McGrath, head of Minnesota Majority, says that only conclusive matches were included in the group's totals. The number of felons voting in those two counties alone exceeds Mr. Franken's victory margin.

In 25 Minnesota precincts there were more ballots counted than voters who voted. Election officials had made copies of damaged ballots but then didn’t mark them as copies or sequester them from the originals There was also the issue of the 133 missing ballots from a heavily Democratic Minneapolis precinct that were nevertheless included in the recount. The state canvassing board ultimately allowed in 933 previously rejected absentee ballots. All in all, once Franken had been given the lead, suddenly the recounting stopped. Nothing more to see here. Take your stolen seat, Sen. Franken.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is reputed to have observed: “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” Marc Elias might agree with that.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.