George Will once described Cleta Mitchell as arguably “the most important Washington conservative not in public office.”
“She’s armed and zealous,” the conservative columnist told the Wall Street Journal in 2010.
Sixteen years on feels like a century ago, but Mitchell remains a central political figure, as “armed and zealous” as ever in the bare-knuckle, bruising battle to save the republic. Along the way, the legendary election law attorney has been harassed and threatened by a virulent radical left bent on silencing its political enemies by any means necessary. She’s been vilified by an accomplice media, the dutiful public relations agents for the Democratic Party. She’s been spied on by her government for the “crime” of advising and befriending the left’s bogeyman, President Donald Trump.
‘That’s What They Hate About Us’
Mitchell has long carried a huge target on her back for passionately advocating for secure and transparent elections. For that, she has been accused of leading a “voter suppression group,” branded an “election denier,” an “extremist,” and a “traitor.”
They hate her because she’s been so damn successful.
“That’s exactly why ProPublica and the others are attacking me, because were are so effective. That’s what they hate about us,” Mitchell said last week in an interview with The Federalist. ProPublica, a left-wing propaganda pusher richly funded by left-leaning groups and power brokers, is known for its hit pieces on conservative leaders. Mitchell has been a favorite target. She believes another one is coming any day.
She was eviscerated by the so-called legacy press for calling out the 2020 election for what it was: a rigged mess. Despite sweeping irregularities and violations of election law under the cover of Covid, accomplice media outlets stamped anyone who questioned the integrity of the 2020 election as “election deniers.”
Mitchell has been put on trial in the kangaroo court of public opinion ever since she was falsely accused of nefarious acts in what Pravda press outfits like The Guardian have defined as the “infamous call.” In the Jan. 2, 2021 conversation, Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s feckless Republican Secretary of State, to investigate suspected voter fraud in Georgia’s deep blue cities. Nearly six years later, the corrupt corporate media continue to willfully misrepresent the context of the call and aren’t all that interested in the fact that the conversation was illegally recorded by Raffensperger’s second-in-command.
Trump and 18 other allies were swept up in a weaponized prosecution by corrupt Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The racketeering charges in the political witch hunt were ultimately dropped after Willis was removed from the case for her “romantic involvement” with the investigator she hired. But the process itself was the punishment. Reputations were destroyed, careers were upended. Mitchell was raked over the coals despite the fact that she did nothing illegal and was, correspondingly, never indicted.
“Imagine yourself being a target for doing your job and representing your client, a client that people hate. That’s why they’re attacking her, not that she did anything wrong,” said Annette Olson, chief executive officer of the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank based in Madison, Wisconsin. Olson knows all too well about weaponization. She was a victim of Wisconsin’s unconstitutional John Doe investigations of the previous decade, driven by a corrupt and ultimately disbanded state election law regulator and a vengeful Democrat-led district attorney’s office to try to take out the left’s political enemies. In many ways, the star chamber John Doe probes proved to be a template for the left’s lawfare on Trump and his allies.
But as she has done over her distinguished career in law and public policy, Mitchell has risen above the noise, and she remains ever anxious for the fray.
Building a Network on Election Integrity
Mitchell’s interest in election integrity goes back to her days in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, where she served several terms between 1976 and 1984. After years in private practice specializing in litigation and administration law, Mitchell took the national stage in 1991 as director and general counsel of the Term Limits Legal Institute in Washington, D.C. She led litigation on congressional term limits in state and federal courts across the country, serving as co-counsel with former Carter administration Attorney General Griffin Bell in the defining 1995 Supreme Court term limits case.
Mitchell became the go-to campaign finance and election law attorney for Republicans, serving as legal counsel for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. Mitchell is the old E.F. Hutton of election law: When Cleta Mitchell talks, politicians listen.
She launched the Election Integrity Network in 2021, as the weaponized Biden administration and its leftist lawfare friends went after Trump and anyone who dared question the results of the 2020 election. EIN’s mission is to build “a permanent election integrity infrastructure of citizen volunteers across the nation who develop election laws, policies and procedures that ensure transparency, accuracy, integrity, and accountability in elections…”
The 501(c)(3)’s goal, according to its website, is to restore confidence in U.S. elections, which was battered and bruised in the 2020 presidential contest. Hundreds of volunteers from Maine to Alaska work to expose dirty voter rolls, advocate for election law reforms, and keep an eye on the polls in some of the worst election administration jurisdictions in America.
This year alone, the network has produced two significant election integrity resources — the EIN Model Election Laws Handbook and the Toolkit for Protecting Vulnerable Voters. The former lays out 10 principles of free and fair elections, from voter ID and citizen verification to making Election Day mean Election Day again in receiving and reporting ballots. The toolkit spells out the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ update clarifying that nursing home facilities that participate in the federal health insurance programs must ensure the right of residents to vote and the equal right to decline participation. Nursing home staff are prohibited from interfering with, coercing, or improperly influencing voting on behalf of a resident.
Election integrity deniers, right on cue, went ballistic, accusing the Trump administration of attempting to intimidate nursing home staff. That would be true if “intimidation” were defined as reminding CMS-funded care facility employees to follow the law.
‘They Want to Cheat’
But the left isn’t enamored with following laws it doesn’t like. Same goes with accomplice media reporters.
Mitchell recalled the chaos in the 2022 midterm elections in Democrat-run Harris County, Texas, home to Houston. The clerk there decided to ignore state law, and a district court disregarded the law’s enforcement in extending voting hours long past what is legally allowed amid another ballot mess in Texas’ largest county. A reporter told Mitchell that following the law would “disenfranchise” someone who wanted to vote at 2 a.m. Mitchell was reminded of what her mother used to say, that not many good things happen between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.
“I said to the reporter, did you miss the part about the statute?”
Yes. That’s because the complicit media clowns and Democrats believe that laws that prevent them from winning — i.e. stop them from cheating — are “voter suppression laws,” Mitchell said.
“They want to cheat. There’s no other excuse. There’s no other reason,” she said.
And so the usual suspects in the leftist “legacy” press have been hammering Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network for fighting back against untenable narratives such as noncitizens voting in elections is a “nonissue,” and that counting ballots long after Election Day doesn’t open the door to fraud.
One only needs to look at New Jersey, home to thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls, and California, where a registration jockey has been charged with paying the homeless on Skid Row Los Angeles to register to vote. In another recent California case, a Costa Mesa woman who registered her dog to vote and cast ballots in her mutt’s name was ordered to pay for four anti-voter fraud billboards “featuring the photo of her dog she posted to social media bragging about her crimes.” The dog’s vote was counted in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election but was rejected in the 2022 primary. Los Angeles, as we have learned, has “no independent way to verify citizenship beyond what voters attest.”
‘She’s Getting Even’
Election law expert Hans von Spakovsky said Mitchell and the election integrity movement have been relentlessly attacked in large part because they have repeatedly embarrassed election integrity deniers.
“That’s the reason they are so upset, because all of the claims they’ve made for years we are showing are false,” von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission who serves as senior fellow at Advancing America Freedom, said in an interview with The Federalist.
Among the biggest lies, Leftist “voter rights” groups claim voter ID laws suppress voter turnout. That is patently false. A 2021 study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that strict voter ID laws “have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”
Democrats have voted against or outright blocked every attempt in the House and Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which includes a voter ID provision and another that requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register and vote in U.S. elections. The measure is supported by the vast majority of Americans.
Mitchell and the network have been instrumental in moving the legislation forward, including taking the fight to spinally challenged RINO senators who have been weak on the extremely popular bill. The EIN also has vehemently argued for accountability for fraudsters and other election law violators. The Trump Department of Justice has been doing just that.
In one of the more absurdly biased stories to come out of CBS News’ absurdly biased 60 Minutes, Democrat Party stooge Leslie Stahl accuses the Trump administration of breeding “an erosion of faith in the integrity of our elections.” Von Spakovsky said Stahl’s assertion is that investigating election fraud is a “bad thing.” He said the opposite is true.
“When folks actually see successful prosecutions and see that election officials, law enforcement and others are actually investigating and prosecuting when crimes are committed, that actually increases confidence.”
Some of the Election Integrity Network’s most successful efforts have been in battleground states. Patrice Johnson and her Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) have been a thorn in the side of arguably the worst Secretary of State in the country, Jocelyn Benson. The Democrat elections chief wants to be Michigan’s next governor despite an egregious resume of election law violations and overreach.
“What’s happening here is like the canary in the coal mine. We can tell that it’s a well-organized effort by the left nationwide,” Johnson, founder of PIME, said last week in an interview with The Federalist.
She described Mitchell as a “remarkable patriot who sees things with a clear-eyed vision.”
Olson, of EIN member the MacIver Institute, said after all of the lies and attacks, Mitchell is still standing.
“She’s getting even by having this Election Integrity Network talking to people across the nation, talking about how important election integrity is, and that’s rightfully ours, the voters,” she said.
‘They Want to Lock Us Up’
These election integrity warriors all know what’s at stake in next week’s elections. If the Democrats take back the House as many pundits predict (Kalshi traders are giving Democrats a 90% chance of winning the majority), they won’t simply stop Trump’s agenda; they will turn their newfound power on their political enemies. All of their political enemies.
We know that because they’ve told us so.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., at the University of Chicago earlier this month said she intends to pursue “signature cases” against those who “enabled” Trump. The far-left senator said she wants to send a “deterrence message” to young people considering working for the administration.
“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that,'” she said. “I want that deterrence message sent,” Slotkin said.
Last week, University of Chicago student Michael Bicksel, who first reported on Slotkin’s threats in The Chicago Thinker, a student-run, conservative newspaper, filed an ethics complaint against the senator.
As The Federalist reported in May, the left-wing legal apparatus is laying the groundwork to go to war on election-integrity soldiers the minute they have a friendlier Congress to work with. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has been tracking the left’s playbook as Democrats line up their targets for the next session of Congress.
“You are going to see a nationwide campaign,” Logan Churchwell, the foundation’s research director, told The Federalist. “Liberals are preparing for payback, assuming the political winds shift in their favor.”
Just last week, Mitchell said she advised members of her network to get their insurance policies out and make sure they have enough coverage for the expected legal battles ahead. And you can be sure that ProPublica and the rest of the accomplice media will be cheering on the Democrats’ bloodlust and stoking the fires of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Mitchell and her impactful Election Integrity Network will be among the first targets.
“They want to lock us all up,” she said, pausing at the next thought. “What they really want to do is kill us.”
