ExTrump adviser takes lead role in ballot battles
A GOP lawyer who advised former President Donald Trump on his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results is now playing a central part in coordinating the Republican effort to tighten voting laws around the country.
Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican lawyer and advocate for conservative causes, was among the Trump advisers on a January phone call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to declare him, and not Democrat Joe Biden, the winner of the battleground state.
Now Mitchell has taken the helm of two separate efforts to push for tighter state voting laws and to fight Democratic efforts to expand access to the ballot at the federal level. She is also advising state lawmakers crafting the voting restriction proposals. And, she says, she is in regular contact with Trump.
“People are actually interested in getting involved and we have to harness all this energy,” Mitchell said in an interview. “There are a lot of groups that have projects on election integrity that never did before.”
Mitchell’s new prominence tightens the ties between the former president, who has falsely insisted he lost the election due to fraud, and the GOPled state voting overhaul that has helped turn a foundational principle of democracy into a partisan battleground.
Trump’s false claims of fraud have fueled a wave of new voting restrictions. More than 250 proposed voting restrictions have been proposed this year by mostly Republican lawmakers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. On Thursday, Georgia’s GOP governor signed into law a measure requiring voters to present ID to vote by mail, gives the GOPcontrolled state legislature new powers over local elections boards and outlaws providing food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Biden on Friday condemned it as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
Mitchell has two new roles in an emerging conservative voting operation. She’s running a $10 million initiative at the limited government group FreedomWorks to both push for new restrictions in voting and help train conservatives to get involved in the nuts and bolts of local elections. She’s also a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization run by former Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. She says she’ll use that role to “coordinate” conservative voting positions, particularly in opposition to the Democrats’ election overhaul bill in Congress.
A onetime Oklahoma state legislator, Mitchell, 70, has links to other influential players in the conservative movement. Mitchell said she’s been talking regularly with Republican state lawmakers about the need for new election laws. She would not identify whom she speaks with but said it’s been a longtime passion.
“I’ve been working with state legislatures for several years to get them to pay attention to what I call the political process,” Mitchell said. “I love legislatures and working with legislators.”
She similarly would not detail her conversations with Trump. “I’m in touch with the president fairly frequently,” she said of Trump.