Cleta Mitchell Is Training Thousands of Trump Loyalists to Monitor the Polls HEAD TOPICS
Cleta Mitchell Is Training Thousands of Trump Loyalists to Monitor the Polls
10/21/2022 8:01:00 PM What could go wrong
Source New York Magazine
Cleta Mitchell is harnessing the energy of the angry Trumpian faithful to embed themselves in the guts of the nation’s election machinery. What could go wrong freedlander reports What could go wrong to have illegally been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to its leader, has never produced credible evidence of fraud. (True the Vote denies illegally loaning money.)citing the specific Nevada statute that said it was a felony for a voter to be bribed for their vote and then attempting to raise $80,000 in contributions for Angle. “We don’t have the records that you have,” Mitchell said at one point. “And one of the things that we have been suggesting formally and informally for weeks now is for you to make available to us the records that would be necessary …”Except, they“We never got our day in court,” Mitchell told me. “And I will never get over that fact.” Read more:
New York Magazine » Bexar County Elections Office works to staff 302 polling locations, train workers ahead of Election Day Hobbs loses lead over GOP's Kari Lake amid repeated refusals to debate More than half say Trump should 'have to' testify before Jan. 6 committee: Poll Growing Your Business With Profit In Mind Wildfires Erupt in the Pacific Northwest
A series of recent wildfires ignited or spread this past week as warm, dry, and windy conditions—a rarity for the rainy Pacific Northwest. Read more >> Bexar County Elections Office works to staff 302 polling locations, train workers ahead of Election DayBexar County elections officials are racing to staff 302 polling locations and train workers ahead of Election Day after a judge ordered the county to increase the number of polling locations. Commmunist organization TOP sues to get more voting locations when county is still trying to get staff needed for ones already planned , not suspicious at all. Hobbs loses lead over GOP's Kari Lake amid repeated refusals to debateA new poll found that the Trump-endorsed Lake has an almost 3-point lead over the Democratic secretary of state in the Arizona gubernatorial race. She never had any lead.. Kari probably has close to a double digit lead now If someone is blatantly lying and denying FACTS, there's no point in debating them. They're detached from reality and a danger to the state and country. Just VoteBlueDownBallotLocalStateFederal Figures. Knows they have no plans More than half say Trump should 'have to' testify before Jan. 6 committee: PollNew polling data indicate that 60% believe former President Donald Trump should be forced to testify before the Jan. 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot. Half of the democrats? Half of who? That's not possible... because 99.78% of people don't give a shit. Charge and indict or put an end to the constant theatrics. Growing Your Business With Profit In MindAn excellent way to monitor if you are growing your business profitably is to monitor your profit margin. Raptors overcome Mitchell’s 31 points, beat Cavs 108-105Raptors overcome Mitchell’s 31 points, beat Cavs 108-105 Mid riddled with fraud.388 locations activists wanted .has adopted some of his rhetoric and style— has edged ahead of Hobbs by 2.The Wednesday Monmouth University poll included 808 adults aged 18 or older and has a 5. In 2000, when a brigade of briefcase-toting election lawyers descended on Florida to help in the legal fight amid the Bush-Gore recount, Mitchell made the then–Texas governor’s case on the airwaves. The experience, she has said, convinced her of “a very well-planned assault” by Democrats to change the rules on counting ballots after Election Day. 18. Mitchell became head of the Republican National Lawyers Association and chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indiana-based legal group best known for suing states and localities to purge voters from their rolls, and joined the board of the Bradley Foundation, a conservative behemoth with $1 billion in assets that has distributed grants to groups engaged in watching over elections, including True the Vote. Nearly 4. Mitchell also served as a lawyer for the latter group, which since 2010 had been pushing many of the myths about voter fraud that would lie dormant until 2020. “Election Day polling sites are not out there yet. True the Vote tried to register with the IRS as a tax-exempt not-for-profit, arguing that its investigations into alleged voter fraud were a form of social welfare; while the application remained pending for years, Mitchell raised holy hell.co/BZB7n2S9tc — MonmouthPoll (@MonmouthPoll) October 19, 2022 Majorities of both Democratic-identifying respondents (89%) and independents (61%) said that Trump should"have to" testify. The conservative media latched onto the idea that the IRS was biased against all sorts of conservative and tea-party groups, and a top leader of the agency was forced out in what was one of the bigger scandals of the Obama era. Callanen said school campuses are often used as polling locations. Arizona Secretary of State and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs (right) speaks at a press conference calling for abortion rights outside the Evo A. True the Vote, which earlier this year was reported to have illegally been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to its leader, has never produced credible evidence of fraud. (True the Vote denies illegally loaning money. However, other school districts are hesitant to let voters on campus.) In 2010, Mitchell served as a campaign lawyer for Sharron Angle, a far-right Nevada lawmaker running against then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Courthouse on October 7, 2022, in Tucson, Arizona. Angle had said that man-made global warming was a fraud and that there were cities across America living under Sharia, and in the closing days of her race, Mitchell sent out a fundraising letter — already an unusual practice for a lawyer — in which she claimed that Reid was attempting to “steal” the election.’ And they said no. Seventy-seven percent of Americans responded as such, including 65% of Republicans and more than 80% of both Democrats and independents. “Harry Reid has been offering free food and, according to other reports, some Democratic allies such as teachers unions are offering gift cards in return for a vote for Reid,” Mitchell wrote in the letter, by the Las Vegas Sun, citing the specific Nevada statute that said it was a felony for a voter to be bribed for their vote and then attempting to raise $80,000 in contributions for Angle. Mitchell remained at Foley & Lardner throughout Trump’s first term, representing Steve Bannon’s nonprofit that later came under investigation for defrauding donors who gave money to build a border wall. The elections office is working on staffing the 129 total added polling locations. Hobbs' campaign said"you can't debate conspiracy theorists" and cited that as a reason for the refusal to debate Lake. As the election got closer, Mitchell said, she got Trump’s go-ahead to start an “election-integrity working group.” Mitchell enlisted John Eastman, another longtime conservative lawyer in that effort; he later devised the scheme to send fake electors to the Electoral College count on January 6. “My fantastic trainer is almost exhausted because she’s having continual training classes,” Callanen said. On the day after Election Day 2020, Mitchell was in Montana, where she had been helping out a client, Senator Steve Daines, in his reelection race, when Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows asked her to get to Georgia as soon as she could. Hobbs also refused to debate Democrat Marco Lopez before the primary, AP reported. 13. A few weeks later, along with a staff of volunteers who called themselves “Team Deplorables,” Mitchell worked on a 64-page lawsuit that she says featured more than 1,500 pages of affidavits and sworn testimony about what she claimed were illegal votes cast in the election. She said Tuesday that the elections office had received an overwhelming number of aggressive calls and at least 500 open records requests. The lawsuit argued that there were many more questionable votes than Biden’s 11,779 vote margin, so there needed to be a redo election according to Georgia law. On January 2, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger got on a phone call with Trump, Meadows, and Mitchell, and the group pressed Raffensperger to, in Trump’s words, “find” 11,780 votes. Early voting begins Monday, Oct 24."I was right @katiehobbs – you are a coward. Mitchell tried to press Raffensperger for data, and the president hardly let her speak. “We don’t have the records that you have,” Mitchell said at one point.. “And one of the things that we have been suggesting formally and informally for weeks now is for you to make available to us the records that would be necessary …” “But Cleta, even before you do that,” Trump interjected, before talking about dead people voting, asking if Raffensperger knew what it means when something trends on the internet, how there were 56,000 suspicious votes, how he believed a video shows poll workers putting the same ballots in the machine at least three times, and how there was no way he lost Georgia. “ I think what the president is saying, and what we’ve been trying to do is to say, look, the court is not acting on our petition. They haven’t even assigned a judge,” Mitchell said in exasperation at the end of the tape. “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 nothing to see here. But we don’t know about that. All we know is what you tell us.” Except, they had been assigned a judge, and a trial was set for January 8, 2021. But the day before, Trump dropped the lawsuit. Raffensperger released a gleeful statement — “Trump’s Legal Team Folds” that noted that “even in capitulation, they continue to spread disinformation,” while Mitchell, who insists that the legal process was unfair, was left to stew. “We never got our day in court,” Mitchell told me. “And I will never get over that fact.” I never said the election was stolen,” Mitchell said when we spoke in September. “I have never been part of Stop the Steal, and I have never said ‘Stop the Steal. ’ I think the outcome was manipulated. There is a difference.” Mitchell’s biggest gripe was what she called “the Zuckerbucks,” that is, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million grant to nonprofits in 2020 to address pandemic-related shortfalls in funding used for, for example, . That Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arms included a couple of people who had worked in the Obama administration, including David Plouffe, who wrote a book titled The Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump, make it all the more suspicious. “They used that Zuckerberg money to exponentially drive up the turnout in Democratic areas in key states to overcome the Trump margin they knew he was going to get,” she said. “Joe Biden won the presidency and the Democrats lost seats in the House and lost seats in state legislatures. I don’t know why it is so hard for the media to put all of this together.” (Plouffe wasn’t involved with the grant program, according to Zuckerberg’s organization.) But her explanation isn’t persuasive. Trump lost the election while Republicans gained seats because he was uniquely unpopular, and many voters voted straight Republican except at the top of the ticket. “Cleta keeps making this insinuation, but she won’t take it to court because she appears to know that it is completely without merit,” said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which helped administer some of the Zuckerberg grants. The election deniers, he said “are constantly moving the goalposts — ‘The election machines were hacked.’ ‘Well, okay, if the election machines weren’t hacked, then dead people voted.’ ‘Oh, we can’t find any dead people that voted, then it must be the Zuckerbucks.’ It appears that their goal is not to show that the election lacked integrity because they can’t show that. Their goal is delegitimize American democracy in the minds of tens of millions of people, and they have been remarkably successful at it.” (Mitchell responded by saying, “If we have an honest judiciary, and the time and the resources, I’d be happy to litigate any of these cases.”) The meetings that Mitchell and her group hosts to train poll workers are, unlike ones by other good-government outfits, invariably closed to the press, but what has leaked out has been alarming. In one meeting this spring, Mitchell warned attendees that Democrats were trying to create a “new American majority” of young voters, people of color, and unmarried women. “And we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Mitchell said, according to an audio obtained by the investigative organization Documented and published by Politico . Mitchell also warned that Democrats have been “talking about [how] changing demographics in America was going to render conservatives obsolete.” She noted that Democratic-aligned groups like the American Civil Liberties Union registered voters — targeting, she said, “the most vulnerable people of our society” — by promising them that by voting, and voting Democratic especially, they will have their problems alleviated. “They bring democracy to your doorstep,” she said on the recordings, referring to Democrats’ warnings about the erosion of democracy. “I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy … We live in a constitutional republic. ” Longtime colleagues and clients say that the Mitchell who was on the Trump tape is not one they know. “It really makes me sad to see what happened to Cleta Mitchell,” said Rick Hasen, a legal scholar at UCLA who served on an election-law committee with Mitchell through the American Law Institute that was dedicated to the proper resolution of disputed election results. “Trump wasn’t able to get top-tier conservative election lawyers to represent him and for good reason: because he has no serious argument. I don’t know whether Cleta really believes this stuff or she doesn’t, and I don’t know which is worse, but there are no other lawyers of her caliber that are doing this.” Some people who know Mitchell think she is playing a kind of double game. “We can’t have this situation where all of our voters think that who the next president is gets decided by George Soros and the head of the World Economic Forum,” said Dustin Stockton, a former Mitchell client and someone who later became one of the organizers of the Ellipse rally before the January 6 riot. “She is too smart for this. She knows that the election wasn’t stolen. I think she is just trying to get all the MAGA people to volunteer as poll watchers so they don’t think the election was stolen either and they come back and start voting again.” (“Yeah, that’s true,” Mitchell said when I put this theory to her. “If you think that there were problems in the 2020 election, come over here, I’ll put you to work. I’ll tell you what you can do to make a difference, so that what happened in 2020 doesn’t happen again.”) At one point, Mitchell said she would not speak with me anymore until I read her Georgia lawsuit and watched the countless hours of testimony before the Arizona legislature on the vote there and watched a Citizens United documentary on how 2020 was rigged and read a book on it by the conservative author Mollie Hemingway. I did so, and what was surprising was how thin all of the claims were, most the results of shoddy research, coming apart upon even a cursory investigation. For example, the lawsuit Mitchell helped file in Georgia in 2020 claims that there were thousands of underage people who voted illegally; in fact, Georgia allows some 17-year-olds to register to vote so long as they are 18 by Election Day. The actual number of fraudulent votes by teenagers was found by state investigators to be zero. To me, she claimed that Pennsylvania had received more votes than it had ballots, a belief that requires practically making up numbers out of whole cloth. Central to Mitchell’s understanding of American politics is that it is full of people who are bad actors and covert partisan operators. Nobody, truly, can care just about participation and seeing that an election was run cleanly. The League of Women Voters, which has for years been recruiting election observers and poll watchers, is just “the Plague of Women Voters,” she said. “Because they are a plague upon our elections. They are a partisan, hard-left group masquerading as people only concerned about ‘good government.’” The League of Women Voters has a long tradition of recruiting nonpartisan poll workers and election observers; in response to Mitchell’s claims, the group says it “never endorses or opposes political candidates or parties.” Of course, in a way, it is an ideological outfit, in that it believes that voting should be encouraged and should be easy. And if there is one party that agrees with that, and one party that doesn’t, then even something as fundamental as the right to vote can no longer be thought of as nonpartisan. When we spoke, Mitchell cited a study of nonvoters that revealed, she claimed, how little they knew about the issues and the candidates. “I am glad those people didn’t vote. They had no clue about anything,” she said. “The left sees them as people who are capable of being manipulated so that they vote as a Democrat. That’s what the left cares about. They don’t give a rat’s ass about increasing participation and turnout.” Well, I said, at least we can agree that voting should be easy and hassle free? “No!” Mitchell screamed. “I wouldn’t say that. I would not say hassle free. I don’t think you should be able to register to vote within two or three weeks of an election. You should pay attention. Voting is a right, but it is also a responsibility. Accept the responsibility and find out what the rules are. The left will tell you that it is some kind of voter suppression if people can’t vote at three in the morning. Well, you know what? I think people voting at three in the morning are up to something. ” And while it is a long tradition to volunteer as an election observer, those who do so usually have the understanding that they are there to help the election run smoothly, not to stand watch over those working it, surreptitiously taking notes, as a GOP county chairwoman recently told volunteers at a training session in Michigan. While Mitchell has been leading training on how to volunteer as an election worker, she has also been pushing against rules that would govern the behavior of election workers. In North Carolina, Mitchell successfully fought proposed guidelines that would have banned poll workers from providing “inaccurate information about the conduct of elections” and would have kept election observers further away from the voting booths, which backers said was necessary to protect poll workers from harassment and aggressive behavior. Mitchell insisted to me that there was no plan afoot to disrupt anything, that all of the stories of election officials under threat are overblown, a product of the FBI — “the muscle of the Democratic Party,” she said — setting up a hotline so people could conjure up threats, and that now the media is running with it. If a plot is afoot to disrupt an election by causing chaos at polling places and sending it back to state legislatures that then decide the winner, it would be an awfully audacious one that would require thousands of people working in concert and without regard to federal law. Believing that such a conspiracy is in the works sounds like the same kind of thinking that led some to believe the 2020 election was stolen. It’s possible that all those who volunteer in one of Mitchell’s brigades will get bored and go home, maybe even with a little more faith in the electoral system then they came in with. And yet Mitchell doesn’t think voting should be made easier. For three decades, she has been a warrior for whatever the GOP political class has rallied around as its latest cause — the Florida recount, virtually unlimited spending in elections, donor disclosure — and has likewise, long before anyone else, insisted that elections were rife with fraud. Now, the Republican Party’s biggest concern is the one Mitchell has been talking about for years. Her moment has arrived. She can slough off the concerns of the life of a corporate lawyer and be free, she told me, to do what she has always wanted. Mitchell told me she doesn’t think the loser of an election needs to concede — “What difference does it make? It’s a courtesy, it’s a tradition. It’s not fundamental to anything. It’s not part of the law. It’s not part of the certification process.” — and she thinks the country is crawling with political operators determined to undermine the vote. And there are now thousands and thousands of people who believe this too and who are showing up at polling sites on Election Day in a few weeks. They are there to work. One Great Story: A Nightly Newsletter for the Best of New York The one story you shouldn’t miss today, selected by New York .