Trump Coup Lawyer Cleta Mitchell Caught On Tape!
That's gonna be a ... fascinating transition.
There’s sure lots of disinformation about noncitizens voting and voter fraud around! Even though in reality it is so rare as to be statistically non-existent. Did it come organically out of nowhere? Why no! And The New York Times’ Alexandra Berzon, Nick Corasaniti, Dylan Freedman, and Duy Nguyen have gotten their hands on more than 400 hours of tapes of one of the main sewer lines from whence these lies have been bubbling up: the Election Integrity Network, headed by Cleta Mitchell, remember her?
REMEMBER HER?
A-Hole Trump Coup Lawyer Sick Of Gross Youngs Voting, What If We Just Made That Totally Impossible?
So these group members from 30 states have been getting together for weekly video chats since 2020, brainstorming new ways to suppress voting and help Republicans win. Because when your policies like tax cuts for the rich, polluted air and water, and no healthcare are less popular than crotch rot, the only way to win is to keep people from voting.
On the Zooms, Mitchell claimed to be called by God to kick people with funny names off of voter rolls: “I think God put this on my heart. So I really needed to pay attention to this situation and to learn as much as I could about what actually is happening with regard to citizen and noncitizens getting on the voter rolls and voting.”
Weird how God has a mysterious way of speaking through conservative mega-donors’ fat checkbooks! Backers of Mitchell’s efforts include Rebecca Dunn, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and Project 2025 author Russell T. Vought, billionaire ULine CEO and gay-hating election denier Richard Uihlein, and the Bradley Impact Foundation, where Mitchell is on the board. Bradley foundations also give millions to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), where Mitchell is also the chairperson.
SO LONG AGO.
It appears PILF does the legal dirty work of filing lawsuits, and the Election Integrity Network seems to exist to get election fraud conspiracy theories out into the world. Mitchell also leads the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group of more than 70 organizations that has aligned itself with nativist, anti-immigrant groups to promote “citizen voting.” She is everywhere!
Her donor Vought, by the way, is the guy who just got outed by ProPublica for some more YEEEK speeches he made, slobbering about wanting to “trauma” (traumatize? or trauma ward? no way to know!) civil servants so that they’re scared to do their jobs, and talking about how his Center for Renewing America “think tank” is preparing a shadow Office of Legal Counsel for Trump, so if Trump wants to have the military shoot American citizens for protesting, Trump won’t be hassled by having “the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” Because what a downer that would be. He really can’t shut up about this big secret.
Anyway, in spite of its heavy bench of fatcat backers, the Election Integrity Network group is a non-profit, and claims to be nonpartisan. And surprise, the tapes show it being not that. Mitchell sneers about “stop this hijacking of our elections by illegals, which is one of the ways the Left is thinking they’re going to control the outcome of the 2024 election.”
She talks about chatting with “Mister Speaker,” Mike Johnson, demanding to know what he’s going to do about “noncitizen voting.” (Which, it can’t be said often enough, is ALREADY ILLEGAL.) His solution was a voting bill that would have disenfranchised every old widow and most married women you ever met. Call-joiners also included representatives from the Gateway Pundit, the Federalist, Turning Point Action, and Representative Chip Roy of Texas. But sure, very nonpartisan nonprofit, very cool!
In a call from July, a local party chair from Georgia opined that the group should examine school enrollment figures to find neighborhoods with large numbers of migrants, and an activist from Detroit commented, “sometimes the only way you can find out is to look for ethnic names.” Just charming.
Mitchell’s group is also behind the three pro-Trump election-denying MAGAs on the Georgia elections board who came up with some ultra-cool ways to refuse to certify the coming election, as well as rules like each ballot had to be counted by three different people’s hands. Other EIN chapters have been fucking around in Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Virginia, doing your usual “trying to mass-purge voters off of state rolls,” an oldie but goodie. They would like states to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center that currently monitors potential illegal voting across states, and instead use Cleta Mitchell’s special voter-tracking AI software. Just come inside her gingerbread house and use it, what could go wrong?
Mitchell’s groups have been mostly losing their fuckery attempts. As it turns out, most states won’t just purge people off of the voting rolls because their last name is Sanchez or Rodriguez, even if Mitchell has stomped her little foot and demanded it. Nor are judges game to give their state boards of elections permission to “investigate” elections that Republicans don’t like indefinitely, or force Byzantine vote counting procedures. But, this election ain’t over yet!
Anyway, this piece could be 20,000 words long, so before it gets any longer, let’s recount Cleta Mitchell’s fascinating backstory! She was a lawyer for Trump on that January 2, 2021, call to Georgia officials, where he begged them to “find” him votes. That forced Mitchell to leave her job at her law firm, and she got recommended for indictment by a Georgia grand jury, though for some reason nothing came of it. And a few days later she was one of the people that Trump spoke with at 7:53 p.m., the evening of the attack on the Capitol.
She was once a liberal feminist! From 1976 to 1984, Mitchell, nee Cleta Deatherage, served as a representative and Democrat in the Oklahoma state House, and became the first woman in the US to chair a state appropriations and budget committee. She pushed Oklahoma to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and for stuff like universal pre-K.
Who knows what the hell happened to her in the interim, but it’s fascinating that she was married to a gay man, Duane Draper. The two divorced in 1982, and Draper went on to live as an openly gay guy in Massachusetts, becoming head of the Massachusetts AIDS policy office. He died of AIDS in 1991. And shortly after that, at some point in the ’90s, Mitchell had a total eclipse of the heart.
She returned to the University of Oklahoma campus to speak in the ’90s, and, according to Cal Hobson, who served with her in the Lege, “just gleefully told all these ladies that had supported her and the Equal Rights amendment how happy she was that it had failed and that she was wrong back then.” And yet she kept working, which seems un-anti-feminist of her, make it make sense! In 2001 she joined the law firm Foley & Lardner, working for conservative causes, eventually becoming president of the Republican National Lawyers Association. In 2009, months after Citizens United made dark money awesome, Mitchell filed papers for Ginni Thomas to start her business, Liberty Consulting. Sisters are doing it for themselves! (With some help from rich old men, of course.)
She tackled hating gays with a convert’s zeal, and in 2011 she was a lawyer for the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM), whose board chair was John Eastman, and kept a gay-Republican group, GOProud, from presenting at CPAC, and they have been banned ever since.
It’s been a long, strange trip for her, that’s for sure.
Looking forward to her particularly weird brand of hate losing some more!
[New York Times archive link/ The Atlantic (gift link)]
>> Trump Coup Lawyer Cleta Mitchell Caught On Tape!
That's gonna be a ... fascinating transition. <<
OMG NO! We don't want her! Trans people don't want her! WHERE IS THE GODDAMN RETURN ADDRESS FOR THIS WOMAN?
I’m still amazed at even people on our side who don’t see what’s coming if he wins. What he wants to do is horrifying even if he goes through normal channels like Congress and the courts, but his people have made it more than clear that they have no intention of going through normal channels.