Cleta Mitchell

Cleta B. Deatherage Mitchell (born September 16, 1950) is an American lawyer, politician and conservative activist.Elizabeth Williamson
Riding Shotgun on Campaign Trail
''The Wall Street Journal'', October 30, 2010 Elected in 1976, Mitchell served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives until 1984, representing District 44 as a member of the Democratic Party. In 1996, she registered as a Republican. Since then, she has worked as a Republican lawyer and conservative activist.

After Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Mitchell aided Donald Trump in his efforts to overturn the election results and pressure election officials to "find" sufficient votes for him to win. After participating in a telephone call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to alter the election results in Georgia (which was won by Biden), Mitchell resigned as a partner at Foley & Lardner. In 2021, she set up an escrow fund to funnel money to companies conducting a pro-Trump "audit" into Arizona's 2020 election.

Early life and education

Cleta Mitchell was born as Cleta B. Deatherage on September 16, 1950, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She attended Classen High School her junior and senior year. In 1971, Mitchell was one of the five original conveners of the Oklahoma Women's Political Caucus. She received a B.A. in 1973 and a J.D. in 1975, both from the University of Oklahoma.

Political career

As a student she was a proponent of the women's rights movement and campaigned for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and for legal recognition–then denied in Oklahoma–of a homemaker's contribution to the value of a married couple's estate. She considered US Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine her role model.

Oklahoma House of Representatives

Mitchell served as a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976 to 1984, as member of the Democratic Party. In her second term, Mitchell chaired the Oklahoma House Appropriations and Budget Committee. She served on the executive committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures. She was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics in 1981.

Legal work and conservative activism

Mitchell returned to politics and ran unsuccessfully for Oklahoma lieutenant governor in 1986. In 1996, Mitchell switched her political affiliation from Democratic to independent, and then to Republican.

In 1991 she moved to Washington, D.C., to become a pro- term limits activist; that year, she was named executive director of the Term Limits Legal Institute. She was co-counsel for the petitioners in the U.S. Supreme Court case ''U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton'', in which the Court held that the federal Constitution precluded state governments from imposing term limits for federal office.

Until January 2021, Mitchell was a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Foley & Lardner, resigning due to legal concerns about her involvement in the call Trump made to attempt reversal of the Georgia certified votes in the 2020 election. She has served as legal counsel for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Rifle Association. She has represented Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK). She has also represented Tea Party Republican candidates Sharron Angle of Nevada and Alaska's Joe Miller.

She is on the boards of numerous conservative organizations, including the Bradley Foundation, the National Rifle Association (NRA) (where she has also been a lawyer), the American Conservative Union Foundation, and the Republican National Lawyers Association, of which she is a former president. As a board member of the American Conservative Union (ACU), Mitchell played a major role in efforts to expel GOProud (a pro-gay rights Republican group) from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a major annual right-wing convention organized by the ACU.

Mitchell has been a leading critic of the IRS, accusing the agency of targeting Tea Party groups. She testified before Congress in 2014, asserting that "the commissioner of the IRS lied to congress". She called for the IRS to be abolished. Investigations by Congress and federal agencies later concluded that there was no evidence that the IRS targeted conservative groups.

Mitchell represented Donald Trump in 2011, defending him against accusations that he had violated federal election laws in an exploratory campaign for president.

Mitchell was the trustee of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt's legal defense fund. As trustee of that fund, she sought donations to the fund by individuals who had interests before the EPA. In 2019, she represented Stephen Bannon's nonprofit, Citizens of the American Republic.

In 2018, McClatchyDC reported that Mitchell, as a longtime lawyer for the NRA, had previously expressed concerns about the NRA's close ties to Russia and the possibility that Russia had been funneling cash through the NRA into Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Mitchell denied ever having expressed such concerns. Mitchell's name was included in a list of people that Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee sought to interview in connection with the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mitchell was a staunch opponent of public health measures implemented at the state and local levels to halt the spread of COVID-19. In late September 2020, she attended a White House event celebrating Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Mitchell did not wear a mask and did not socially distance. The event became a COVID-19 superspreading event, with numerous attendees and participants testing positive for COVID-19 shortly afterward. Despite having been exposed to COVID-19, Mitchell attended another event days later in which she again did not wear a mask nor did she socially distance, in contravention of U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that recommend anyone exposed to COVID-19 should self-isolate for 14 days to avoid infecting others.

Attempt to overturn the 2020 election

Mitchell is chair of the conservative activist group Public Interest Legal Foundation, which is known for making claims of voter fraud. She has claimed that Democrats engage in a "very well-planned-out assault" on election systems. Prior to the 2020 election, she organized legal efforts to challenge mail-in ballots cast in the election. Mitchell has worked closely with Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, in the Council for National Policy to organize efforts to keep Trump in power, and ''The New York Times'' reported that it was Mitchell who "enlisted John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted specious