On January 2, 2021, then-President Donald Trump made an infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the 2020 election results and subsequently give him the presidency. Present on the call with Trump was his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, multiple administration officials, and four personal lawyers for Trump; one of those lawyers was Cleta Mitchell. On the call, Mitchell repeatedly jumped in to help Trump and pressure Raffensperger to hand over election and voter data. That phone call catapulted Mitchell from a conservative activist and lawyer to one of the most influential and prominent election deniers in the country.
Over the next four years, Mitchell worked tirelessly to undermine confidence in elections and mobilize election deniers across the country. Trump’s victory in 2024 wasn’t enough for Mitchell. Since 2024, Mitchell and her long-time allies, many of whom now have important positions in the administration, are key pieces of a plan to sow distrust in the American election system and and reshape how elections are administered, almost always at the expense of voters. This effort includes relitigating the 2020 election, promoting the SAVE Act, and pursuing executive orders aimed at expanding federal control over state election administration. Mitchell has set out to prove that 2024 wasn’t the end of their efforts – it was just a new beginning.
Who is Cleta Mitchell?
Cleta Mitchell, 75, was first elected to public office in 1976 as a democrat to the Oklahoma House of Representatives, where she served until 1984. In 1990, her husband, Dale Mitchell, was convicted of felony bank fraud, which Mitchell said convinced her that big government was the problem and moved her politics to the right. By 1996, after a brief stint as an Independent, Mitchell had registered as a republican.
Following a few years in private practice in Oklahoma, Mitchell moved to DC to join the law firm Foley & Lardner in 2001. Over the next 20 or so years, Mitchell served as legal counsel for numerous Republican candidates and conservative political causes and organizations, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Rifle Association. In 2011, Mitchell represented Donald Trump for the first time against accusations that he violated federal campaign finance laws while he was exploring his first run for political office. Mitchell was also a leading voice calling for the Internal Revenue Service to be abolished over the claim that the organization was systematically targeting Tea Party-affiliated groups applying for non-profit status. While investigations by Congress and federal agencies did find that IRS officials had selected these groups’ applications for additional review, they also concluded there was no proof of political intent or a liberal conspiracy, as Mitchell repeatedly claimed.
2020 Election
In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Mitchell was a member of the board of governors of the Council for National Policy, a secret networking group for the far right, which GPAHE has reported on extensively. According to her testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Mitchell began working for the Trump campaign on November 4, 2020, when she received a call from Mark Meadows, a client of hers, asking her to fly to Atlanta and oversee the ballot counting and processing in Georgia.
On November 7, right after the election had been called by almost all major media outlets, Mitchell appeared on Fox News and insisted “Just because CNN says — or even Fox News says — that somebody’s president doesn’t make him president. Everybody wants to know that this was done properly and legally and we can trust the results. And I think we have to look into every one of these concerns.”
In the months that followed, Mitchell threw herself into discrediting the 2020 election by working with the Trump campaign to file a litany of lawsuits in different states, alleging everything from improper election procedures to mass amounts of fraudulent mail-in ballots. All of these cases were thrown out or dismissed. Having plenty of friends in high places, Mitchell also leveraged her large conservative network to push claims that the 2020 election was tainted with fraud and full of irregularities. In a text exchange with Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Mitchell attempted to convince Lee that challenging the vote on the January 6 certification was one of the last recourses available to their movement.
While much of her work was conducted in the background, Mitchell’s involvement with the January 2 call to Raffensperger would place her front and center in the efforts to overturn the election. This call also forced her resignation from Foley & Lander, with her telling friends and clients in a letter that her resignation came after “a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups.”
In 2022, when Georgia convened a special grand jury as part of their investigation into whether charges should be filed against Trump and his allies, Mitchell was among the 39 people recommended to prosecutors for charges. The recommended charges for Mitchell were soliciting election fraud, witness interference, making false statements, and a host of other offenses. Ultimately, prosecutors chose not to charge Mitchell, giving her the freedom to continue to her efforts to undermine democracy and elections.
After 2020
After the mainstream buzz over 2020 died down, Mitchell persisted in her election denial efforts through a variety of organizations and legislative efforts. In 2021, Mitchell joined the Conservative Partnership Institute as a senior legal fellow to “coordinate” conservative voting positions across the country. She quickly began to work on CPI’s newest initiative, the Election Integrity Network or EIN.
According to CPI’s annual report, the EIN’s first target was Virginia. Throughout 2021, Mitchell worked with individuals there to train election skeptics as poll watchers and vote challengers, as well as supporting efforts and legislation within the state to “clean” voter rolls. This method became known as “The Virginia Model” and was put in place by the Election Integrity Network across the country.
Mitchell aggressively replicated these efforts in other states, sponsoring groups and training election skeptics. In 2022, Mitchell and CPI sponsored “election integrity summits” in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Activists from Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots attended some of these summits. EIN is also the parent organization for multiple state-based election denial groups, including Michigan Fair Elections, North Carolina Election Integrity Team, PA Fair Elections, Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, Virginia Fair Elections, Ohio Election Integrity Network, among others.
Mitchell is connected to a variety of other conservative groups that have challenged elections and sought to disrupt voting rights across the country. She is involved with the Public Legal Interest Foundation, a group that sued the District of Columbia challenging their voter rolls. She serves as the Secretary for The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a far-right organization that has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to push election denial claims. Mitchell also leads the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group of more than 70 organizations that spreads the false claim that there are non-citizens voting in mass quantities, her primary focus in the lead up to the 2024 elections.
Most notably, EIN and its affiliates urged states to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a system that allowed states to share information in order to clean voter rolls of individuals who had moved and established residences in other states. ERIC became a target for groups like EIN in 2022 after a series of articles from the right-wing Gateway Pundit alleged ERIC “is essentially a left wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up,” raised unsubstantiated concerns about unauthorized and partisan access to ERIC data, accused ERIC of being influenced by philanthropist George Soros, and criticized states for removing an insufficient number of voters from the rolls. In total, nine states, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia, left ERIC between 2022 and 2023. In ERIC’s place, Mitchell’s organization promoted the use of EagleAI NETwork, a project created by known election conspiracy theorist Jason Frazier, who has repeatedly challenged Georgia’s voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice described the data sorting criteria EagleAI uses as “at best unreliable and at worst irrelevant.”
Trump’s Win Wasn’t the End – It Was a New Beginning
Since Trump’s 2024 victory, many of the formerly fringe election deniers have become mainstream, either by taking positions in the administration or working closely with administration officials to change election laws and act on their previous grievances. Mitchell’s protégé and fellow 2020-denier, Heather Honey, was appointed deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the DHS Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, a position that leads DHS’ efforts to support state election officials on tasks that are beyond their capabilities.
Mitchell wasted no time leveraging these relationships, reportedly getting officials to brief her Election Integrity Network members on a variety of “election integrity efforts” by the administration. In June 2025, David Jennings, DHS’s associate chief of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, spoke on an EIN Zoom call about DHS’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, a federal database that allows local officials to verify the citizenship status of individuals. In a September 2026 email exchange, Honey was listed on an agenda for an EIN call, where she was set to discuss “her work for election integrity inside DHS.”
Mitchell can also be connected to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek revenge over the 2020 election. In February, an unsealed federal affidavit regarding Fulton County, Georgia, included claims which were eerily similar to those Mitchell made when she was working for the Trump campaign in Georgia immediately following the election. Mitchell also publicly voiced support for these efforts, posting on X “[DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon] has served notice she is coming for the Fulton County ballots. Praying it happens today. DOJ must act to protect the voters of GA.” This affidavit was the basis for a warrant which was executed in late January 2026, where FBI agents seized election material, including physical ballots, from the 2020 election.
Mitchell has also been heavily involved with the promotion of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, called the SAVE Act, and was present on the Capitol steps when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson announced the bill’s introduction in the U.S .House of Representatives. It is estimated the SAVE Act could make voting harder for tens of millions of Americans because they don’t have ready access to the citizenship documents required. The bill, which claims to be aimed at ensuring only citizens vote, is likely to make voting harder on military families, individuals impacted by natural disasters that have lost important documentation, married women and other individuals who have had their names changed, and people of color, who are three times more likely to the lack the documents the bill requires.
On February 19, around 30 people, including Mitchell, attended The Gold Institute for International Security’s Election Integrity Summit. The summit was a who’s-who of the election denial elite, including officials from the Trump administration and popular online election denial influencers like former Trump administration official General Michael Flynn and Seth Keshel. The meeting was a preview of plans for the coming year, including an effort to organize election deniers nationwide and encourage the president to declare a “state of emergency” and nationalize U.S. elections. Mitchell stated on a podcast that the “porous [election] system” in the United States would justify the president nationalizing election powers to “protect” the 2026 midterms.
