President Donald Trump’s legal advisory revolving door has spun faster than ever in recent weeks, as his attempts to overturn the 2020 elections have become more desperate. And in a recording published on Sunday, a now infamous conference call between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, revealed that famous conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell apparently joined the group as the president’s latest free lawyer.
During the call, first published by The Washington Post, Mitchell could be heard battling for Team Trump’s undemocratic interests.
“I think what the president is saying and what we’re trying to do is say, look, the court is not acting on our petition. They didn’t even appoint a judge, ”Mitchell told Raffensperger after Trump’s violent speech about the Secretary of State’s reluctance to change the election results. “But the people of Georgia and the people of America have a right to know the answers and you have data and records that we don’t have access to. And you keep telling us and making public statements that you investigated this and, you know, nothing to see here. “
Until her name appears on the Post story, Mitchell conducted his legal work for Trump and his team almost entirely out of the public eye, instead of choosing to appear sporadically in Trump-friendly media, mostly without revealing his own role. In a little noticed podcast appearance, she described herself as a “volunteer” with the long, long, big ones cool battle shot. Although the extent of his current role in the Trump cause was not widely known before this week – not even for his own law firm, apparently – well-informed sources say it was underway before Thanksgiving.
In addition, Mitchell had previously represented Trump in a 2011 issue, according to official documents and contemporary reports.
She was not a major media presence that officially represented the president’s post-election legal team, unlike Trump’s lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis or Trump’s adviser, Sidney Powell, and her name has been absent in recent two months of legal paperwork or lawsuits that the Trump team filed during the president’s effort to undo Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of the Daily Beast records.
But Mitchell’s involvement with Trump, his senior team and his legal team in unfoundly contesting Biden’s victory goes back about two months, according to two sources with knowledge of his presence on the team, as well as text messages reviewed by The Daily Beast. In backstage work and legal paperwork, she became the nominee for the Trump Team for trying to overturn the voting results in Georgia and has been in contact with Trump and the White House several times about these efforts since November. She is seen by other members of the legal team and the Trump team as an ally of Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff at the White House.
It is not clear why Mitchell’s role has been kept silent for so long, although she was not the only lawyer who worked with Trump’s legal team who also remained silent about it. In late November, The Daily Beast reported that Christina Bobb, a host of the One America News Network endorsed by Trump, was quietly doing legal work for the president’s so-called “elite strike force” and was showing at the headquarters of campaign. She did so without revealing in her TV coverage of the same legal efforts.
Mitchell, the White House, spokesman for the Trump campaign, and Giuliani did not respond to messages or phone calls asking for comment on this story. But on Monday, Mitchell’s own law firm issued a statement reacting to Sunday’s news of his role in President Trump’s undemocratic mission in preparation for Biden’s inauguration in Washington, DC, on January 20.
The company did not seem satisfied.
“Foley & Lardner LLP is not representing any party that wants to challenge the results of the presidential election,” says the statement. “In November, the company made a political decision not to take any representation from any party on matters related to the results of the presidential elections. Our policy allowed our lawyers to participate in the observation of electoral recounts and similar actions on a voluntary basis, in their individual capacity as private citizens, as long as they did not act as legal advisers. We are aware of and concerned about Ms. Mitchell’s participation in the January 2 conference call and are working to understand her involvement more deeply. “
Reached on Monday afternoon, company spokesman Dan Farrell said he had “no more to share besides” that official statement at the moment.
Prior to Sunday’s call, Mitchell’s public involvement was primarily as a media advocate in favor of Trump. She made two appearances at Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo to complain about (unproven) allegations of electoral fraud after the election on November 10. “I’ve been in Georgia since the middle of the night,” she mentioned offhand and said, “I hope to be talking to Mayor Giuliani today about what we’re seeing in Georgia. “
In a separate appearance on Fox News with host Sandra Smith, Smith was caught in a microphone rolling his eyes at Mitchell’s allegations of fraud and murmuring, “What is happening?“
In a podcast interview on November 30 with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Mitchell said, “I have been volunteering with the Trump campaign and the legal team in Georgia.”
In a separate interview a week later, she said to Perkins: “I am a volunteer. We have a few other volunteers helping out because there are so many things that need to be included. The goal was to create a public record that would demonstrate the extent of the violations and the illegality. . ”
In his podcast interviews, Mitchell said thousands of ineligible voters voted in the election and blamed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for the blame. “This election was not valid. These results are not valid. Whatever someone says, this is not valid. The Secretary of State has a lot to answer for, ”she said, without foundation.
Over the years, Mitchell has earned a reputation as a top advocate in campaign finance for conservative candidates and activist groups with legal problems before the IRS and the Federal Election Commission.
During Obama’s presidency, Mitchell was an advocate for the Tea Party movement and the candidates it generated. When Nevada state legislator Sharron Angle ran against Senate majority leader Harry Reid on a Tea Party platform, she hired Mitchell, who criticized the top Democratic senator in a fundraising letter for allegedly trying to “steal this election if he can’t win it right away” through the alleged use of free food at campaign rallies.
In recent years, Mitchell has represented who’s who of prominent people at Trumpworld, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Steve Bannon, and prominent conservative activist groups like the NRA and the Rebuilding America Now Super PAC founded by former Trump campaign president , Paul Manafort in 2016.
When the IRS investigated and postponed the granting of tax exemptions to a number of conservative nonprofits following the Citizens United decision, Mitchell represented True the Vote, a conservative activist group focused on electoral law, in a lawsuit claiming that the IRS targeted the group based on their ideological affiliation.
Mitchell’s relationship with Trump dates back at least to 2011, when she represented him against a later rejected Federal Election Commission complaint that alleged that Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen violated campaign finance laws with illegal contributions in kind when Trump considered a run for president in 2012.
Shawn Thompson, a former campaign advisor to then Rep. Ron Paul, “filed an FEC complaint against me for using Trump’s 727 aircraft to go to Iowa in 2011,” said Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer and broker Trump to The Daily Beast on Monday. Cohen said he sought out Mitchell to fight the claim because of his reputation as a campaign finance attorney.
At the time, she did not have a close working relationship with Trump, Cohen said, but her victory in getting the claim dismissed created an impression. When the 2016 campaign started, “Donald Trump already saw her as a winner,” according to Cohen’s account.
The two seem to have been close in recent years. Trump invited Mitchell to a ceremony at the White House celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage in August 2020 and singled her out as “a great lawyer … as well as a lawyer”.
—With additional reports by Justin Baragona