"Conservative attorney and activist Cleta Mitchell will host a fundraiser on Aug. 15 for Rep. Ted Budd, staunch Donald Trump ally and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is scheduled to appear at the fundraiser as a special guest.
Mitchell is one of several lawyers who aided Trump in his scheme to overturn the 2020 election. She is perhaps best known for joining Trump on a January 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump demanded Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” to sway the outcome of the election in his favor.
Mitchell also peddled false conspiracies about election fraud and “irregularities,” including absurd claims of voting by dead people and non-citizens, in the days following the election. She spoke directly with Trump on Jan. 6 and has been subpoenaed in an ongoing criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia."
Meet Cleta Mitchell. Trump's election fixer. Mitchell is heading a real-time Putinesque, Orbanespue, whichever strongman election-fixer you want to use, American effort to fix American elections.
"Republicans Paddle Faster to Try to Keep their U.S. Senate Hopes from Sinking"
Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote
--- "Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] “The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.” P - For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters. P - By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response. " ---
A central figure in the scheme to reverse the 2020 election is mobilizing grass-roots activists into an “army of citizens” trained to aggressively monitor elections.
[...]
In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Republican lawyers who frantically compiled unsubstantiated accusations, debunked claims and an array of confusing and inconclusive eyewitness reports to build the case that the election was marred by fraud. Courts rejected the cases and election officials were unconvinced, thwarting a stunning assault on the transfer of power.
[...]
In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.
One concern is the group’s intent to research the backgrounds of local and state officials to determine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the movement. Many officials already feel under attack by those who falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen.
An extensive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, including documents and social media posts, interviews and attendance at the Harrisburg seminar, reveals a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures. They include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation.
Ms. Mitchell says she is creating “a volunteer army of citizens” who can counter what she describes as Democratic bias in election offices.
As per Trump-GOP form Cleta Mitchell blames government overreach for her husband's fraud
"Republicans Paddle Faster to Try to Keep their U.S. Senate Hopes from Sinking You'd think airheads like these would float on their own."
THE OUTSIDER By Jane Mayer October 13, 1996
ANNALS OF ACTIVISM about Cleta Deatherage Mitchell, former Democratic state legislator in Oklahoma. In 1984, approaching her fifth term in office, Mitchell walked away from politics, feeling that her personal happiness supplanted her interest in political life. However, she has re-entered it in a new incarnation -- an antipolitical activist. She has become a crusader for term limits on members of Congress, an idea that reflects populist anger and has captured the support of nearly three-quarters of the American electorate. Unsurprisingly, it is less popular in Congress, where it was the only major measure in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America not to make it through the House. As director of and general counsel to an organization called the Term Limits Legal Institute, Mitchell has moved to Washington to make her case against full-time politicians full-time. In 1985, after leaving politics, Mitchell went to work in her husband's bank, Citizens National Bank and Trust. However, in 1986, she ran an unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor. Losing to Robert Kerr III, Mitchell felt she had clashed with the state's dynastic governing class, and decided again to leave politics, pursuing a private law practice in Oklahoma City. Mitchell began to realize that the contact with constituents that characterized her own career was lacking in the lives of national congressmen and senators, against the intentions of the Founding Fathers. She also saw a financial gap between the governing class and the governed. Mitchell realized she wanted the kind of self-sufficiency she applauds in her personal life to translate into government policy. Her ideal is a "citizen legislator." She likes the idea that people could "take turns in office, like jury duty." Following the collapse of his bank in 1986, her husband was investigated and, in 1992, convicted of bank fraud, fined and sentenced to five years' probation. The incident convinced Mitchell that "overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times."
-- [INSERT: In 1984, Cleta Deatherage married Dale Mitchell, who was the son of 1940s and 1950s All-Star Cleveland Indians and Brooklyn Dodgers left-fielder (Loren) Dale Mitchell.[10] They have a daughter.[5] In 1986, the FBI began investigating Dale Mitchell for banking malpractice, and in 1992 he was convicted of five felony counts of conspiracy to defraud, misapplying bank funds and making false statements to banks.[10] He was ordered to pay $3 million in restitution, given a suspended sentence of five years, and ordered to perform community service.[42][43] Her husband's conviction on one count was reversed on appeal and the amount of restitution was reduced.[44 .. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/15/953/535832/ ] As a consequence of findings of the prosecutors' investigation, he had agreed in 1988 to self-removal from banking.[43] According to Cleta Mitchell, his conviction convinced her that "overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times".[45]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Personal_life --
In 1989, Mitchell was recruited by Eddie Mahe for the national term-limits movement. Today, twenty-one states have passed laws limiting the terms of state legislators, but attempts to establish national term limits have been frustrated by the courts. Mitchell has played a major role in this legal fight, recruiting Griffin Bell to (unsuccessfully) fight the challenge by Speaker Tom Foley of a term-limits statute in Washington state, in 1993, and personally litigating a second major test case in Arkansas, which went to the Supreme Court. In May 1995 the Court held congressional term limits unconstitutional. The movement's only recourse now is to amend the Constitution. Mitchell, frustrated by the process, says, "How can you argue for term limits in front of people with lifetime tenure?" In Congress, though Gingrich has promised to take it up first thing, the issue is overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats, and is losing support among Republicans as well (Mitchell has switched her own party affiliation to Independent).
-- [Do political chameleons have a higher level of self-interest than others. Or not. Guess it depends.. Anyway it look like she is Mitchell returned to politics and ran unsuccessfully for Oklahoma lieutenant governor in 1986.[10] In 1996, Mitchell switched her political affiliation from Democratic to independent, and then to Republican.[10][2][12]] .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Legal_work_and_conservative_activism .. a political chameleon. --
President Clinton opposes term limits; Bob Dole, a thirty-five-year veteran of Congress, seems reluctant in his support. It is disconcerting that Mitchell's antigovernment crusade has brought her under the support of the power structure; the umbrella organization for which she has worked, Americans Back in Charge, has been backed financially by powerful conservative foundations. Mitchell says, "I'm here -- but I'm not of here." However, she may have stumbled on the lesson that appealing to the discontent of those outside the system may be the surest path to becoming an important player inside it.
[THINK TRUMP.]
Published in the print edition of the October 21, 1996, issue. Jane Mayer, The New Yorker’s chief Washington correspondent, is the author of “Dark Money” and the recipient of a 2021 Freedom of the Press Award.
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