A baseless effort to tie attorney to ‘collusion’
SINCE the election of Donald Trump as president, Democrats and their allies have clung to the belief that Russian collusion swung the race. Yet that story line has rapidly unraveled for one reason: There’s no evidence of any collusion.
Recent coverage regarding Oklahoma native Cleta Mitchell again highlights this fact. Mitchell, a onetime member of the state House of Representatives, is a prominent campaign finance lawyer in Washington, D.C. House Democrats recently listed her as one of the “key witnesses” they wanted to interview because she was “involved in or may have knowledge of third-party political outreach from the Kremlin to the Trump campaign, including persons linked to the National Rifle Association.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee sent Mitchell a letter asking her to provide copies of any communication with Maria Butina, Alexander Torshin, Dmitry Rogozin, Bridges LLC, the Russian Shooting Federation, or the Russian organization known as the “Right to Bear Arms.”
In response, Mitchell bluntly wrote, “Apparently, you and your staff have been told that I have some knowledge regarding the individuals and entities identified in your letter. However, you have been misinformed. I do not.”
Mitchell said she has “no documents to furnish” and “no information about any of the individuals referenced in your letter.”
The Wall Street Journal recently noted Mitchell hasn’t done legal work for the NRA in at least a decade and had no contact with the NRA in 2016. But other than that …
Why would members of Congress act as though Mitchell is at the center of a supposed conspiracy? The Journal notes recent documents provided to Congress from the Justice Department suggest Mitchell was targeted by Glenn Simpson, an official with Fusion GPS, which was hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to compile dirt on Trump. The resulting “dossier” Fusion generated was long on wild claims and absent independent validation. As the New York Post noted, Fusion’s dossier was “the stuff of clickbait headlines, nothing more.”
In her letter to the Senate committee, Mitchell pointed to Fusion officials as the source of the baseless allegations.
“Whatever stories Glenn Simpson, Dan Jones, and other operatives associated with FusionGPS, have told your staff about me, they are lying,” Mitchell wrote. “They have made false statements regarding my knowledge, or role, or information in my possession related to the persons listed in your letter — none of whom had I ever heard of before reading their names in the erroneous news reports falsely accusing me of having some information that you now think I have. The story is false and you are wrong. I have nothing whatsoever to say on this topic other than it is a lie, completely fabricated and concocted by Glenn Simpson & Co. You should be pursuing them for perjury and for making false statements to congressional investigators.”
While a snipe hunt that sends summer campers searching for a nonexistent creature may be a source of amusement, there’s nothing funny about a congressional snipe hunt that wastes taxpayer resources and smears innocent people. Mitchell is right to demand that those responsible for these abuses be prosecuted.