Lawyer on Trump election call quits firm after uproar
A lawyer advising President Donald Trump in recent weeks has resigned from her law firm after it was revealed she participated in the call where Trump pressured Georgia officials to help him reverse the state’s election results, the firm said in a statement Tuesday.
The lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, has been advising Trump despite a policy at her firm, Foley & Lardner, that none of its lawyers should represent clients involved in relitigating the presidential election.
“Cleta Mitchell has informed firm management of her decision to resign from Foley & Lardner effective immediately,” the firm said in its statement. “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.”
Mitchell’s resignation was the latest evidence of the problems Trump has created for law firms throughout his time in office, as their employees and clients object to ties with the president.
In an email to her clients and friends, Mitchell blamed her departure on “a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups via social media and other means against me, my law firm and clients of the law firm.” She vowed to “redouble” her efforts on what she called “election integrity.”
The firm had begun to distance itself from her shortly after the call was first reported by the Washington Post on Sunday. As Trump has made increasingly specious claims about the election, he has been unable to attract high-profile, establishment lawyers to back his cause.
Mitchell was among several Trump aides who joined him on the call Saturday, in which Trump vaguely threatened Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with “a criminal offense” as he pressured him to “find” enough votes to change the state’s presidential results.
Mitchell has represented farright groups and conservatives for many years. She served on the board of the National Rifle Association and represented tea party groups that claimed they were illegally targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.
On Sunday, hours after Mitchell’s participation on the call, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project questioned on Twitter why clients like Major League Baseball would be associated with a firm that employed someone seeking to overturn the election.
In Mitchell’s email to her clients and friends, she thanked Foley & Lardner for supporting her political practice “all these years despite ongoing assaults through the years against me, my clients and my work.”