Attorney resigns after Trump’s Georgia call
Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell is out at Milwaukee-based Foley & Lardner law firm just days after it came out that she joined President Donald Trump on a phone call aimed at overturning the results of the Georgia presidential election.
“Cleta Mitchell has informed firm management of her decision to resign from Foley & Lardner effective immediately,” said a statement from Dan Farrell, spokesman for the firm. “Ms. Mitchell concluded that her departure was in the firm’s best interests, as well as in her own personal best interests.
“We thank her for her contributions to the firm and wish her well.”
Her biography had already been scrubbed from Foley’s website by Tuesday afternoon. She had been a senior partner at the firm, which has more than 1,000 lawyers.
Mitchell is exiting as it becomes increasingly apparent she has been working for the president’s campaign on a lawsuit intended to upend the Georgia presidential election results — in apparent violation of her firm’s policies.
Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said Foley officials should disclose how much they knew of Mitchell’s role in the Georgia case. The Lincoln Project, made up of anti-Trump Republicans, led the social media uproar over Mitchell and the Georgia call.
“The firm knew, and they didn’t say anything,” Galen said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel. “Or they didn’t know, and then the question becomes, how the heck did they not know?”
The Washington Post was the first to report that Mitchell participated in the Saturday call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to help Trump win that state’s election.
“You have data and records that we don’t have access to and you keep telling us and making public statements that you’ve investigated this and, you know, nothing to see here,” Mitchell said, according to a transcript of the call. “But we don’t know about that. All we know is what you tell us.” Raffensperger pushed back. “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions,” the secretary of state said. “We don’t agree that you have won.”
Early indications of work for Trump
But that was not the first public mention that Mitchell, a conservative activist and Trump loyalist, has been working for perhaps a month on the Georgia case on behalf of the Republican president’s campaign.
In a Dec. 11 interview with NTD Television, she is described by the host, Jan Jekielek, as being “on the ground in Georgia working on the Trump campaign Georgia lawsuit.” NTD Television, short for the New Tang Dynasty, is owned by the Epoch Times, a Falun Gong newspaper that has become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.
“The situation is that we believe that the election outcome is not accurate, and that all of these illegal votes should be thrown out, and that this election cannot be certified as having been awarded to (President-elect) Joe Biden,” Mitchell told Jekielek. “And there are extraordinary remedies available and those should be followed.”
The Daily Beast reported on Monday that Mitchell also discussed the case with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins in a Nov. 30 podcast, describing herself as “a volunteer with the Trump campaign and the legal team in Georgia.”
“I’m a volunteer,” Mitchell told Perkins in a second podcast in December, according to the Daily Beast. “We have some other volunteers helping because there’s just so much that needed to be included. The goal was to create a public record that demonstrated the extent of the violations and the illegality.”
Even if she was not paid to work on the Georgia case, she appears to have violated her firm’s policies.
On Monday, Foley officials put out a statement saying they were “concerned” about Mitchell’s participation in the controversial call.
“We are aware of, and are concerned by, Ms. Mitchell’s participation in the Jan. 2 conference call and are working to understand her involvement more thoroughly,” Farrell said.
The firm made a decision in November not to take on any clients involved in any matters related to the November presidential election. Biden, a Democrat, defeated Trump with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
Members of Congress will meet on Wednesday to certify the results of the election. A minority group of Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, are expected to object to Biden’s victory.
According to the statement, Foley did allow for its attorneys to participate in recounts and related matters as long as they were acting as private citizens and not serving as legal advisers.
Mitchell has not returned calls or emails.
But she initially defended her participation in the call over the weekend. She said in a statement that the Georgia secretary of state “has made many statements over the past two months that are simply not correct and everyone involved with the efforts on behalf of the President’s election challenge has said the same thing: show us your records on which you rely to make these statements that our numbers are wrong.”
Mitchell, who is based in D.C., has represented a number of right-wing and GOP groups, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Rifle Association and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
She is also a longtime board member and the current board secretary for the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building the national conservative political infrastructure.
Bradley officials said they could not comment on Mitchell’s activities because the foundation is a nonprofit and can’t engage in partisan politics.