"Threats to Elections Didn’t End on January 6 "Cleta the cheata, N Carolina - As 2024 Voting Battles Heat Up, North Carolina G.O.P. Presses Forward "Yep. Trump does still have much control within the GOP. See YouTube of the NBC News video in yours [...]Lawyer [insert Mar. 25, Cleta Mitchell] Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote Mar. 2, 2023 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171344479"""
Former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s bogus voter verification system is an attack on elections.
Let us introduce you to a victim of the lunacy of today’s politics: ERIC.
The Electronic Registration Information Center was a model of bipartisan cooperation for more than a decade. Founded jointly by Republican- and Democratic-dominated states, ERIC helped update voter rolls to make sure people were not registered in two states, for example. It contributed to the removal of millions of ineligible voters from the rolls and helped millions of eligible citizens to sign up. When Florida joined the collaborative in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis said the move would ensure “cleaner and more accurate voter registration rolls.” Iowa’s Republican secretary of state called the system a “godsend.” ERIC was blandly noncontroversial.
Until last year, that is, when the fringe website Gateway Pundit began to insist that ERIC was an incubator for misconduct. Evidence? None. Now nine Republican-run states have withdrawn from the system — Alabama, Iowa, Florida, Louisiana,Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Donald Trump piled on, claiming ERIC “pumps the rolls” for Democrats. The withdrawals were a major loss for safe and secure elections, because the information that was shared between states helped everyone. The departures weakened the entire system. Ironically, conspiracy theories about double voting are undermining one key institution that prevents fraud.
And the story just got worse. A group of prominent election deniers have announced an inferior replacement for ERIC: the EagleAI NETwork. It isn’t just an affront to proper capitalization — it’s an attack on voters.
At first glance, EagleAI roughly resembles ERIC. Both systems extract information from databases to identify inconsistencies, such as voters who may have moved or died. But, as my colleagues Andrew Garber and Alice Clapman explain .. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-antidemocracy-tool , the similarities end there. ERIC uses confidential data and sophisticated, AI-assisted matching technology to supply election officials with a list of voters to investigate. The professionals take it from there, reaching out to voters to confirm that they remain eligible.
EagleAI is worse in every way. It uses inferior technology to analyze less reliable data. It’s limited to purely public sources, such as the National Change of Address Database. (Your voter registration could be questioned because you went on vacation and forwarded your mail.) Once the system finds what it regards as an inconsistency, it flags that voter registration.
Here comes the worst part. Rather than delivering information to election officials, EagleAI invites ordinary citizens to scour its list of flagged voter registrations. The amateur sleuths can then hunt down any suggestion of ineligibility, such as a social media post, and challenge a voter’s registration with a couple of clicks. We know that they do little to verify information before crying “fraud.”
Local election administration offices, which are already stretched paper thin, will be inundated with baseless challenges. They simply don’t have the resources to deal with these waves of make-work. Individual voters are intimidated when they receive baseless warnings about their eligibility out of the blue. And news of these mass challenges undermines faith in the system, even if they are overwhelmingly without merit.
Georgia shows the problem with mass challenges of supposedly fishy voters. One activist group there has challenged tens of thousands of voter registrations based on little more than wishful thinking. County boards of elections rejected nearly all the challenges, but at a massive cost of time and energy. That time could be spent doing outreach to eligible voters.
Former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchellwas on the infamous call to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” extra votes, the call that is the subject of two indictments. Mitchell is one of the driving forces behind EagleAI. No surprise there. EagleAI isn’t about strengthening election integrity or maintaining clean voter rolls. It’s another attempt to make elections vulnerable to manipulation and voter suppression.
When a Georgia court unsealed the grand jury report on the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the first name on its recommended indictments was predictable: President Donald Trump.
It’s the second name on the list that jumped out: Cleta Mitchell.
The grand jury recommended charging Mitchell for soliciting election fraud, witness interference, making false statements, and a host of other offenses.
As a Trump adviser and election attorney, Mitchell played a central role in the effort to stop the certification of the election in Georgia and beyond. She was one of the principal players on the infamous call in which Trump implored Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find the 11,780 votes he needed to claim victory. And Mitchell brought lawyer John Eastman in to support the fringe legal theory that state legislatures could override the will of their voters. “A movement is stirring,” she wrote to Eastman. “But needs constitutional support.”
Yet, when Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis unveiled her sprawling RICO case against Trump last month, Mitchell wasn’t one of the 19 people facing charges.
The district attorney was under no obligation to follow the grand jury’s recommendations. Willis’s office declined to comment, and legal experts can only theorize why Willis didn’t charge Mitchell.
Mitchell is arguably the most central player in the attempt to steal the election who isn’t facing prison time.
Regardless, while much of the energy around the grand jury report has focused on the recommendation to indict three senators since its release Friday, Mitchell is arguably the most central player in the attempt to steal the election who isn’t facing prison time. Eastman hasn’t been as fortunate; neither has Mitchell’s colleague Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff who was charged for his role in the call with Raffensperger, despite being far less vocal.
Mitchell’s escape from prosecution has far larger implications than her personal freedom: Unencumbered by a fierce legal battle, Mitchell remains one of the most influential people in the movement that’s undermining American democracy.
“Cleta Mitchell played this key role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and is now working to shape the rules and practices in 2024 and beyond. To me, that’s the most concerning thing in all of this,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the investigative research group Documented, who has tracked Mitchell’s activities.
“She’s in a place where she’s connected with the election-denying grassroots,” Fischer said, “continues to have an open door with elected officials, and can move significant financial resources toward backing the latest election conspiracy projects.”
Donald Trump, left, in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. Trump said he will pardon Susan B. Anthony, the campaigner for giving American women the right to vote who was arrested for casting a ballot in 1872. Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Cleta Mitchell, partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, speaks during an event marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment ratification with President Donald Trump in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18, 2020. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
And she’s doing all this with the backing of two institutions that have quickly risen from relative obscurity to support and finance the anti-democratic movement in the United States.
Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Initiative, which has established itself as a sort of headquarters for the insurrection, employing people like Meadows, indictee and former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, and immigration hawk Stephen Miller. CPI’s growth has been breathtaking, jumping from $1.7 million in revenues in 2017 to $45 million in 2021, the last year for which there are tax filings.
Related Secret Donors to Nonprofit Pushing Trump’s “Big Lie” Election Conspiracy Revealed [The largest donor to Bradley Impact listed in the fiscal year 2018 filing was the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. A much larger, linked nonprofit, the Bradley Foundation was identified by a recent New Yorker article as “an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules.” The report described the foundation as a key promoter of the idea that election outcomes unfavorable to Trump are the result of fraud, doling out millions in grants to projects in the United States aimed at disqualifying purportedly illegitimate voters from participating in elections, according to the New Yorker, while using the issue of election integrity as a way of both undermining faith in the democratic process and manipulating election outcomes in a manner more favorable to candidates aligned with Trumpism. According to the 2018 filing, the Bradley Foundation gave $2.5 million to the Bradley Impact Fund.] https://theintercept.com/2021/08/07/election-fraud-bradley-impact-fund-donors/
“They were definitely going to recommend indicting basically all the Trump allies — it was a completely political situation — nothing to do with the law. NOTHING,” she said.
Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in Georgia’s DeKalb and Cobb counties who has worked with the type of grand jury overseeing the Trump case, said he assumed Mitchell had cut a deal for immunity with prosecutors because the grand jury was so clear that she should be charged and she appeared so central to the conspiracy. But Mitchell’s comment to The Federalist changed his mind.
“I’m kind of surprised,” he said. “I would’ve thought she had a deal in place. But if she’s out there saying this is a witch hunt, either she’s not very bright or doesn’t have a deal — or used to have a deal.” Timmons said he now believes Mitchell either didn’t fit into Willis’s RICO case or wasn’t charged for some other reason “that I haven’t even thought of yet.”
Mitchell appeared before what is known as a special purpose grand jury, a type of proceeding for long, complex investigations. The grand jurors ultimately recommended indictments against 40 people in the scheme, and Willis brought charges against 19. Among those targeted by the grand jury who escaped indictment are Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
All told, the group recommended charging Mitchell for her involvement in three different aspects of the plot: the phone call with Raffensperger, the fake electors scheme in Georgia, and the broad effort to overturn the election in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.
The January 2, 2021, call came as the Trump campaign raced to stop the certification of the election on a number of fronts. Much of the talking on the call was done by four people: Trump, Mitchell, Raffensperger, and his general counsel, Ryan Germany. While Trump relentlessly pressured the officials to swing the election, even issuing a threat of criminal repercussions at one point, Mitchell was more careful and focused.
She zeroed in on three claims at the heart of Trump’s argument: That close to 5,000 dead people voted in the election, thousands more had voted illegitimately, and an election worker at State Farm Arena awarded Joe Biden 18,000 votes. Mitchell requested records and investigations related to those claims, with Trump frequently interrupting her.
Raffensperger and Germany repeatedly told Trump and Mitchell their claims were just wrong — that their office, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI had investigated those claims and found they didn’t have any merit.
“You have data and records that we don’t have access to. And you keep telling us and making public statements that you investigated this and nothing to see here. But we don’t know about that,” Mitchell said at one point. “All we know is what you tell us.”
In the end, secretary of state officials volunteered to share some information but said that they were legally barred from sharing other records the campaign sought.
The grand jury unanimously recommended four charges against Mitchell for the call: influencing a witness, making false statements or concealing facts when interacting with state government agencies, soliciting election fraud, and intentionally interfering with the performance of election duties.
The panel recommended the same four charges for Trump, with one of the jurors voting against. Trump ultimately was charged by the district attorney for willfully making a baker’s dozen of false statements on the call — including some of the claims Mitchell pursued. Meadows, too, was charged for the call: for soliciting a public officer to violate their oath.
The grand jurors wanted to indict Mitchell for two additional charges related to the call — for soliciting false statements and certificates from officials — but were more split on those charges, with 12 voting yes, five voting no, and one abstaining. Only one juror voted against those charges for Trump.
Additionally, the grand jury recommended charging Mitchell and others in connection with the fake electors scheme .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/05/trump-fake-electors-georgia .. and for commissioning a crime in their attempts to overturn the election in Georgia and other states across the country.
Mitchell addressed the phone call and grand jury investigation in a June speech .. https://www.c-span.org/video/?528639-1/cleta-mitchell-election-policy .. to a conservative women’s group. Mitchell came across as genteel and lawyerly, but she went on to line her speech with sarcastic remarks about “crazy socialist leftists” and the media.
“I debated about whether I should talk about this because it’s the subject of a grand jury — supposedly — a grand jury investigation,” she said.
“Now, I will tell you that I did not think that phone call was a good idea, and I expressed that view,” she said. Mitchell said at that point she’d already been frustrated by state officials after trying to work with them for six weeks.
In the face of all the scrutiny around her actions around the 2020 election, Mitchell maintained to the crowd that she did have the evidence to prove the results in Georgia were illegitimate. She emphasized to the crowd that she didn’t ask Raffensperger to find the votes. “We had already found those votes,” she said.
But before she did that, she turned to a line she’s relied on for years. She introduced herself as “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
She was joking, but a Georgia jury will likely soon decide whether her one-liner is a statement of fact — whether her boss was indeed the head of an organized crime racket.
Update: September 14, 2023 This article was updated to note that Willis’s office declined to comment.
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