President Donald Trump’s revolving door of legal advisers has turned faster than ever in recent weeks as his efforts to reverse the 2020 election have become more desperate. And in a recording released on Sunday, a now infamous conference call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger revealed that conservative star attorney Cleta Mitchell had apparently joined the fold as the president’s newest free attorney.
In the course of the phone call, first published by The Washington Post, Mitchell could be heard fighting for Team Trump’s anti-democratic interests.
“I think what the president is saying and what we’ve been trying to say is, look, the court isn’t acting on our petition. They haven’t even appointed a judge, ”Mitchell Raffensperger said after a blistering tirade from Trump about the Secretary of State’s reluctance to change the results of the election. “But the people of Georgia and the people of America have the right to know the answers, and you have data and records that we cannot access. And you keep telling us and making public statements that you’ve investigated this and, you know, there’s nothing to see here. “
Until her name in the Post story, Mitchell had carried out her legal work for Trump and his team almost completely out of the public eye, opting instead to appear on Trump-friendly media sporadically, usually without revealing her own role. In an unremarkable podcast appearance, she described herself as a ‘volunteer’ with the long, long, long shot legal battle. While the extent of her current role in Trump’s case was not widely known before this week – even at her own law firm, expert sources say it was underway before Thanksgiving.
In addition, Mitchell had previously represented Trump in a 2011 case, according to official documents and contemporaneous reports.
She was not a major media presence officially representing the president’s legal team after the election, unlike Trump attorneys like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis or the on-again-off-again Trump adviser Sidney Powell, and her name is absent in the past two months from legal paperwork or court documents submitted by Trump’s team during the president’s waving attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election, according to a report by the Daily Beast .
But Mitchell’s involvement with Trump, his senior staff and his legal team to challenge Biden’s victory unfounded dates back to about two months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of her presence on the team, as well as text messages reviewed by The Daily Beast. In the behind-the-scenes work and legal paperwork, she has become the Team Trump point person for an attempt to reverse the voting results in Georgia and has been in contact with Trump and the White House multiple times since November about these efforts. She is seen by others on Trump’s legal team and staff as an ally of Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff.
It’s unclear why Mitchell’s role was largely kept silent for so long, though she wouldn’t be the only attorney who has worked with Trump’s legal team, who has also been largely silent about it. In late November, The Daily Beast reported that Christina Bobb, an on-air host on Trump-approved channel One America News Network, had been quietly doing legal work for the president’s so-called “ elite assault force ” and showing at headquarters. the campaign. She did so without revealing exactly the same legal endeavors in her TV coverage.
Mitchell, the White House, a Trump campaign spokesman, and Giuliani did not respond to messages or phone calls requesting comment on this story. But on Monday, Mitchell’s own law firm issued a statement in response to Sunday’s news of her role in President Trump’s anti-democratic mission leading up to Biden’s inauguration in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20.
The firm did not sound satisfied.
Foley & Lardner LLP does not represent parties wishing to contest the results of the presidential election, the statement read. In November, the firm made a policy decision not to represent any party in connection with matters related to the results of the presidential election. Our policy allowed our attorneys to participate on a voluntary basis in observing election recounts and similar actions in their individual capacity as private citizens, so long as they did not act as legal counsel. We are aware of and concerned about Ms. Mitchell’s participation in the January 2 conference call and are working to better understand her involvement. “
Company spokesman Dan Farrell, reached Monday afternoon, said they had no more “more to share than” that official statement at this point.
Before Sunday’s call, Mitchell’s public involvement was mostly as an advocate in Trump-friendly media. She appeared twice on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo to complain about (unsubstantiated) voter fraud allegations after the election, on November 10. “I’ve been in Georgia since the middle of the night,” she said casually, saying, “I hope to talk 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 with a hot microphone rolling her eyes at Mitchell’s fraud allegations and muttering, “What is happening?“
In a Nov. 30 podcast interview with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, Mitchell said, “I volunteered for the Trump campaign and the Georgia legal team.”
A week later, in a separate interview to Perkins, she told Perkins, “I am a volunteer. We have a number of other volunteers who are helping because it took so much to be included. The goal was to make a public record of the scope. of the violations and the illegality. “
In her podcast interviews, Mitchell claimed that thousands of ineligible voters voted in the election and placed the blame on the feet of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. ‘This election was not valid. Those results are not valid. Whatever someone says, they are not valid. The Secretary of State has a lot to answer for, ”she claimed unfounded.
Over the years, Mitchell has earned a reputation as a leading campaign finance attorney for conservative candidates and activist groups with legal troubles for the IRS and the Federal Election Commission.
During Obama’s presidency, Mitchell was a go-to attorney for the Tea Party movement and the candidates that emerged from it. When Nevada state legislator Sharron Angle fought against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on a Tea Party platform, she hired Mitchell, who accused the senior Senate Democrat in a fundraising letter for allegedly trying to “ward this election.” steal if he can’t quite win it ”. through the alleged use of free food during campaign meetings.
In recent years, Mitchell has represented a who’s who of prominent Trumpworld people, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Steve Bannon, and prominent conservative activist groups such as the NRA and the Rebuilding America Now Super PAC, founded by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2016 .
When the IRS investigated and delayed granting tax-exempt status to a range of conservative nonprofits in the wake of the Citizens United decision, Mitchell represented True the Vote, a conservative activist group focused on suffrage, in a lawsuit that claimed claimed the group based on its ideological beliefs.
Mitchell’s relationship with Trump dates back to at least 2011, when she represented him against a federal election commission complaint, which was subsequently dismissed, alleging that Trump and his attorney Michael Cohen violated campaign finance laws with illegal contributions in kind when Trump ran 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 plane to go to Iowa in 2011,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, told The Daily Beast on Monday. Cohen said he sought Mitchell to fight the complaint based on her reputation as an experienced campaign finance attorney.
At the time, she didn’t have a close working relationship with Trump, Cohen said, but her victory by dismissing the complaint did make an impression. By the time the 2016 campaign began, “Donald Trump already saw her as a winner,” Cohen said.
The two seem to be growing towards each other in recent years. Trump invited Mitchell to a ceremony at the White House to commemorate the centenary of women’s suffrage in August 2020, citing her praise as “ a great lawyer … more than a lawyer. ”
—With additional reporting by Justin Baragona