CPI bak conserv partner Inst
bak 7 23 txt
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see cleta (ginni 3rd century) election integrit BS
meadows sinecure save am pac 1mill$?
see pjt 2025
see demint
see vought --> kash patel --> weaponization
nice symmetry it's a pension sinecure that acts as [pun?] incubator
American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is an American conservative opposition research group founded in 2020 that has opposed nominees to the Joe Biden administration
see buckham
see benghazi BS
see lie pwr any means
see pjt 2025
see jane m slime machine
conf w heritage on oppos benghazi BS; calls itself good gov't group (evil?)
explicit say retaliation for effective dem oversight (j6?)
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1 23 podcast kpfa? funder of some slime
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JUL 2025
Insurrectionist and voter suppression advocate Cleta Mitchell formed a new dark money group in 2023 to channel funds to organizations that promote the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and spread misinformation about the threat of widespread noncitizen voting.
Housed in the offices of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIR Elections Fund) brought in $3.9 million between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, and disclosed $2.1 million in expenses, more than three-quarters of which was disbursed in grants to other organizations.
The FAIR Elections Fund has no website as of publication. A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of the group’s first tax filing, recently made public, offers the first internal look into Mitchell’s group since she disclosed leading it in biographies and news reports.
The group’s IRS filing says that it made no payments for salaries or other compensation, while claiming Mitchell is working 50 hours per week for the group. This raises the question of who is paying Mitchell for her work.
Mitchell has worked to manufacture a crisis around noncitizens voting and partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to push for model bills and amendments to state constitutions banning it — despite the fact that evidence of noncitizen voting is scarce. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported in 2024.
A senior legal fellow at CPI, Mitchell launched her previous project, the Election Integrity Network (EIN), with the help of the right-wing group, which was founded and led by former U.S. senator and congressman Jim DeMint and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows (also an insurrectionist). In 2023, EIN moved out of the CPI constellation of nonprofits and is now “administered and managed by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy with Virginia Institute president Lynn Taylor also serving as EIN’s Chairman as Cleta Mitchell retains an active EIN role as its founder,” according to a 2023 booklet obtained by CMD.
EIN’s latest IRS filing shows that as of December 2023 it was still registered at CPI’s office address, with just $213 left in the bank.
Serving on the FAIR Elections Fund board of directors alongside Mitchell, its president, are Vice President Heather Honey, Vice President Daniel Bean, Secretary Don Workman, and Treasurer Pat Corrigan.
Honey, also an executive director at the Election Research Institute, is a close ally of Mitchell who worked with her to sow doubt about the efficacy and trustworthiness of the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which has resulted in many states opting out of this interstate effort to help ensure accurate voter rolls.
A 2024 analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that conclusions in Honey’s report on ERIC “are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and… are frequently not backed by the data she presents.”
The IRS filing shows that the FAIR Elections Fund paid $121,284 to Honey’s organization Verity Vote LLC for “consulting.”
Vice President Daniel Bean is an attorney who represented Trump advisor Andy Surabian when he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Secretary Don Workman is a partner at Baker & Hostetler and was a partner at Foley & Lardner, the Washington-based law firm that Mitchell was forced to resign from after she participated in the infamous post-2020 election phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to claim victory in that swing state.
Treasurer Pat Corrigan runs Compass Direct LLC, a fundraising company that works for CPI, where his brother Edward is president. Given Corrigan’s role as treasurer, he is likely the one tasked with raising funds for the organization.
$1.6 Million in Grants
The FAIR Elections Fund distributed $1.6 million in grants in 2023-24 to 10 allied groups.
The FDRLST Media Foundation, which publishes the right-wing web magazine The Federalist, received $400,000, the largest grant. In 2020, The Federalist falsely accused Democrats of trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania during extended vote counting in the days following the presidential election.
The pro-Trump outlet also published a column EIN’s Kerri Toloczko misinforming readers that noncitizen voting is a crisis that needs to be addressed through federal legislation. Since 2019 it has run nine pieces by Mitchell on noncitizen voting, purging voter rolls, and voting by mail.
EIN’s administrator, the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, received the next largest grant of $325,000. The Institute held its fifth Election Integrity Summit on May 16, and holds “infrastructure trainings” twice a month.
The FAIR Elections Fund funneled its third largest grant of $300,000 to the State Freedom Caucus Foundation, the sister organization of the State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN). CPI incubated SFCN, which Meadows launched in 2021. From the beginning, the group has touted “election integrity” as a priority.
The network has been deployed to ban noncitizens from voting at the federal level as well as at the state level in places like Missouri.
Mitchell also spoke at the 2024 State Freedom Caucus Network Summit, where Wyoming State Freedom Caucus Chair Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R) said she “shared some shocking statistics about American elections and illegal immigration.”
The Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) received $150,000 from the FAIR Elections Fund, the IRS filing shows. IAP President Chris Chmielenski collaborated with Mitchell and Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, to work a room of 150 attendees at ALEC’s 2024 Annual Meeting to approve an Only Citizens Vote Coalition model bill banning noncitizen voting, The Guardian reported.
The FAIR Elections Fund, Immigration Accountability Project, and Election Transparency Initiative are all members of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, with Mitchell serving as a “co-convener.”
Also receiving FAIR Elections Fund grants between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 were the Tea Party Patriots Foundation ($100,000); Citizen Outreach Foundation ($89,100); John K MacIver Institute for Public Policy ($75,000); Strong Communities Foundation of AZ ($75,000); Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty ($75,000); and Wisconsin Voter Alliance Corp ($25,000).
In November, Wisconsin voters passed a ballot measure to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state, or federal election. The right-wing MacIver Institute and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty were proponents of its passage.
Funding is Dark
Despite the new IRS filings, funding information about the FAIR Elections Fund is scarce. The organization is not required to disclose its donors, and a CMD search of the filings only identified a single contribution of $795,000 from CPI, which does not note the original source of the funds. A CMD analysis of CPI’s known funders is available here.
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NYT
Pro-Trump Nonprofit Paid Millions to Companies Tied to Its Own Leaders
The Conservative Partnership Institute’s three highest-paid contractors had connections to the group’s leaders or their relatives, raising concerns about self-dealing.
Two men in dark suits shaking hands across a table.
A job fair sponsored by the Conservative Partnership Institute on Capitol Hill in June 2018. The group was founded the year before and aims to help conservatives wield power.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
David A. Fahrenthold
Reporting from Washington
May 6, 2024
The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit whose funding skyrocketed after it became a nerve center for President Donald J. Trump’s allies in Washington, has paid at least $3.2 million since the start of 2021 to corporations led by its own leaders or their relatives, records show.
In its most recent tax filings, the nonprofit’s three highest-paid contractors were all connected to insiders.
One was led by the institute’s president, Edward Corrigan, and another by its chief operating officer. At a third contractor, the board members included the group’s senior legal fellow Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Last year, the Conservative Partnership Institute hired a fourth company connected to an insider: a fund-raising firm run by Mr. Corrigan’s brother, Patrick Corrigan. Public filings show the company received a contract three weeks before the firm was legally formed.
The Conservative Partnership Institute applied to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt nonprofit, and the agency approved. That means donations to the group are tax deductible, like gifts to a food bank or the American Red Cross. It also means that, by law, its money must serve the public good rather than private interests.
The nonprofit has pushed those limits by entwining itself with only one faction of American politics. It pays high salaries to some of Mr. Trump’s former officials, hosts retreats for Republican lawmakers at a rural compound and funds efforts to vet people and ideas for a second Trump term.
Legal experts say these insider transactions also raise concerns about self-dealing. While hiring insiders is permitted when certain safeguards are in place, the payments moved money out of daylight and into opaque entities that the nonprofit’s leaders helped control.
“There’s no checks and balances,” said Michael West, a lawyer at the New York Council of Nonprofits. Because there is no real third party to determine whether the insider-led companies were charging the nonprofit a fair price, Mr. West said, “the potential for overpayment here is epic.”
Mr. Corrigan, the institute’s president, did not respond to questions about what steps the group took to assure that it was not overpaying the insiders’ companies. The companies did not say what rates they charged.
Image
A close-up frame of Edward Corrigan. He is smiling.
Edward Corrigan, the president and chief executive of the Conservative Partnership Institute, at a panel discussion in National Harbor, Md., last year. His group applied to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt nonprofit and was approved.Credit...Leigh Vogel for The New York Times
Of the insiders who had dual roles at the nonprofit and its vendors, only one responded to questions from The New York Times. Wesley Denton, the institute’s chief operating officer and a former Trump administration official, said he also had been paid by Compass Professional, one of the vendors.
Mr. Denton’s annual compensation, with benefits, from the institute was $391,735. He declined to say how much he received from Compass Professional. He was on the board of both the vendor and the institute.
“We’re proud to have helped launch new, independent, nonprofit service providers that provide high-quality professional services,” Mr. Denton said in a written statement.
The institute’s donors include several Republican political campaigns, as well as conservative businesspeople. One major donor, the retired Texas aviation entrepreneur Robert Bruce, said the nonprofit’s leaders had not told him about their use of vendors with insider connections.
“I’ve never had a conversation like that,” Mr. Bruce said in a phone interview.
He estimated he had given “several hundred thousand” dollars to the institute. Mr. Bruce said he had no concerns that the nonprofit’s leaders were misusing money. “I’ve known them a long time,” he said. “They’re good people.”
The Times traced the relationships between the group’s leaders and their vendors by examining charity and corporate filings with the federal government, five states and the District of Columbia.
The records do not show what share of the $3.2 million went to the institute’s top leaders and their family members — only that the money flowed to companies where they served as an owner or a director. In at least one case, a company failed to flag that connection as required in a state filing.
Image
Two people wearing Trump 2024 hats and clothing.
The Conservative Partnership Institute pays high salaries to former Trump officials, hosts retreats for Republican lawmakers at a rural compound and funds efforts to vet people and ideas for a second Trump presidency.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
The Conservative Partnership Institute was founded in 2017 by former Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, after he was ousted as the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative nonprofit. The group’s aim was to help conservatives wield power, shepherding them “through the Washington swamps without being infected with Potomac Fever,” Mr. DeMint said in 2017.
The institute’s fund-raising actually improved when conservatives lost power.
In 2021, with Democrats in charge in Washington, the institute hired former Trump staff members, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. It began courting donors as the voice of Mr. Trump’s allies and ambitions.
Fund-raising jumped to $45 million in 2021 from $7 million in 2020. The nonprofit, newly flush, bought a 2,200-acre retreat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and a series of commercial buildings near the U.S. Capitol, with plans for a restaurant, a school and TV studios. The group also began convening workshops and seminars for conservative lawmakers and staff members as well as seeding new conservative nonprofits.
As the money flowed, the institute’s leaders began to found a series of companies in Delaware.
The first was Compass Professional. Its first annual report listed a slate of directors, including Edward Corrigan and Mr. Denton.
Next was Compass Legal Services. Its initial filing listed directors, including Ms. Mitchell and Charlotte Davis, one of the institute’s board members.
By the end of 2021, the group had paid its companies a combined $639,259, according to an audit that it filed with state-level charity regulators.
Federal law allows nonprofits like this one to hire insiders as long as they properly disclose the payments and ensure the insiders do not overcharge. Legal experts still advise against it because of the temptation for insiders to abuse their power over charity funds.
“You have an obligation to behave in the interest of that organization,” said Linda Sugin, a professor of nonprofit law at Fordham University. “The problem is, when you’re on both sides of the transaction, then we’re skeptical that you’re going to put the organization’s interests before your own.”
Ms. Sugin said the institute could have reduced its risk by soliciting bids from competing firms to gauge whether the insiders were charging market rates. The institute could have asked its leaders to recuse themselves from the decision to hire their own companies, she said.
Mr. Corrigan and other leaders did not respond to questions about whether their group took those steps.
If a nonprofit is found to have given improper benefits to insiders, the insiders could face financial penalties from state or federal regulators. In extreme cases, the I.R.S. could revoke the group’s tax exemption.
In 2022, a third Delaware company was formed: Compass Property Management. Its corporate filings show Mr. Denton as president.
During that year, the nonprofit paid the three insider-connected companies a combined $2.6 million, according to the audit that it filed with states. The institute said those payments were “for the use of facilities, personnel, human resources and other professional services.”
How much of that flowed to the insiders on those vendors’ boards of directors?
Mr. Denton offered only a partial answer.
He said the vendors did not pay their board members solely because they were board members.
However, as in his case, Mr. Denton said the companies could pay their board members for other reasons, for “doing employment work for these organizations, outside of their board duties.” The president of Compass Legal issued a statement saying his company did not pay “outside directors” but did not specify which directors were counted as “outside.”
Compass Professional and Compass Legal have worked for other clients, including Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and Gun Owners of America, according to federal campaign and charity filings. The companies’ leaders did not respond to queries about how much of their business came from the Conservative Partnership Institute.
The most recent data on what the institute paid the three original insider-connected companies is from 2022. Since then, corporate filings show, the companies’ board members have shifted, but Conservative Partnership Institute leaders or their family members remained on the boards of each.
Last year, the institute also hired a company that was partly owned by Patrick Corrigan, Compass Direct LLC, to a fund-raising contract, paying $180,000 over the next year.
In a filing in North Carolina, the institute said that contract began on July 1, 2023. But Patrick Corrigan’s company was not founded until July 24, three weeks after it won the contract.
In its own filings with North Carolina, Patrick Corrigan’s company was asked if he was related “as parent, spouse, child or sibling to ANY officer, director, trustee or employee” as his client, which was his brother’s nonprofit.
In filings for 2023 and 2024, the company answered “no.” Patrick Corrigan signed the forms.
After The Times pointed this out, Patrick Corrigan responded with a one-line email: “The NC filing has been updated,” he wrote. He did not respond to other questions.
Robert Draper and Julie Tate contributed reporting.
David A. Fahrenthold is an investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades. More about David A. Fahrenthold
:{A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2024, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump-Allied Nonprofit Paid Millions to Firms With Ties to Insiders.
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an 5 24
although Democratic nominees have won the popular vote in seven of the United States' last eight presidential races, two-thirds of the U.S. Supreme Court consists of justices nominated by Republican presidents. One activist who can take a lot of credit for the High Court's shift to the far right is Leonard Leo, former executive vice president of the Federalist Society.
Leo helped select all three of former President Donald Trump's Supreme Court appointees: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. And he remains a prominent figure in the right-wing judicial movement, still co-chairing the Federalist Society while heading his consulting firm CRC Advisors.
In a report published by **:{Rolling Stone on April 29, journalists Andrew Perez and Adam Rawnsley describe the connection between CRC, billionaire Charles Koch's political network and a "dark-money group that is currently arguing a Supreme Court case designed to preempt a wealth tax."}:
READ MORE:Former Federalist Society VP tied to campaign to keep Trump on Colorado ballot
"Like many consulting firms," Perez and Rawnsley explain, "CRC does not publicly disclose its clients. However, several of the firm's clients were named in resumes that applicants submitted to an online jobs bank hosted by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which accidentally left the files exposed online. One CRC employee's 2024 resume says his clients include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a dark-money group arguing a case before the Supreme Court this term that is designed to slam the door shut on a federal wealth tax. Experts say the case could upend the nation's tax code."
The Rolling Stone journalists note that the CRC employee's resume shows the person has "also worked for the Koch network's political advocacy arm, Americans for Prosperity."
Leo's judicial activities led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in Jackson v. Women's Health Organization —ashe specifically recommended Supreme Court nominees he thought would favor that outcome.
Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, told Rolling Stone, "It's no surprise that Leonard Leo's for-profit consulting firm — which has pulled down a whopping $100 million from Leo's own nonprofit network — counts the Koch network and the group leading the Supreme Court billionaire bailout case as clients. We knew that Leo's fingerprints were all over these far-right causes, but now, it appears he's directly profiting off of them, too."
READ MORE:Trump's 'court whisperer' unleashes GOP assault on DC attorney general investigating him
Ciccone adds, "There's no cause Leo won't take up if it means he'll profit."
*Read Rolling Stone's full report at this link (subscription required).
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puts the cash in patel?
https://www.alternet.org/send/jim-jordan-trump/
march 3
a trio of witnesses being called as "whistleblowers" by the GOP committee investigating the "weaponization" of government were paid off by a Trump ally and spread conspiracy theories, reported The New York Times on Thursday.
"The first three witnesses to testify privately before the new Republican-led House committee investigating the 'weaponization' of the federal government have offered little firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing or violation of the law, according to Democrats on the panel who have listened to their accounts," reported Luke Broadwater and Adam Goldman. "Instead, the trio appears to be a group of aggrieved former F.B.I. officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, and received financial support from a top ally of former President Donald J. Trump."
"The roster of witnesses, whose interviews and statements are detailed in a 316-page report compiled by Democrats that was obtained by The New York Times, suggests that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the panel, has so far relied on people who do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower and who have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility," said the report. "And it raises questions about whether Republicans, who have said that investigating the Biden administration is a top goal, will be able to deliver on their ambitious plans to uncover misdeeds at the highest levels."
The three witnesses in question, per the report, are "George Hill, a retired F.B.I. supervisory intelligence analyst from the bureau’s Boston field office; Stephen Friend, a former special agent who worked in the Daytona Beach office; and Garret O’Boyle, a special agent from the field office in Wichita, Kan., who has been suspended."
They have promoted conspiracy theories; Hill wrote on Twitter that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a "set up." Meanwhile, O'Boyle and Friend have admitted to receiving financial aid from Kash Patel, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Trump associate who has testified in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
"The Democratic report includes excerpts from depositions and evidence of conspiratorial social media posts," noted the report. "It also details the ties between Mr. Trump’s inner circle and the witnesses. For instance, Mr. Patel found Mr. Friend his next job, working as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by Russ Vought. The center is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is run by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina."
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
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Manhattan DA schools Jim Jordan for demanding he testify in ongoing Trump investigation - Alternet.org ›
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https://documented.net/investigations/conservative-partnership-institute
update 12 22
Conservative Partnership Institute (“CPI”) is a $45 million “America First” institution boosted with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. Led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, CPI is creating the MAGA-oriented political infrastructure that the Trump administration lacked.
CPI is recruiting America First staffers and providing in-depth training for Hill offices, as well as creating legal institutions, opposition research firms, think tanks, and other groups helmed by former Trump officials and allies, including Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, and Cleta Mitchell. Formed in 2017, CPI's fundraising surged to $45 million in 2021.
The group’s ambitions are sprawling, from amplifying conspiracies around stolen elections and “critical race theory,” to tanking Democratic nominees and filing lawsuits against the Biden administration. CPI’s president, Ed Corrigan, helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team, and the group is positioned to staff and support far-right Congressional offices and the next MAGA administration.
CPI is located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and serves as a hub for the far-right "America First "movement. The House Freedom Caucus holds weekly meetings at CPI, and texts obtained by the January 6 committee show lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period following the 2020 election. Nearly two dozen individuals tied to the January 6 attempted coup are connected to CPI, according to Grid's analysis.
"CPI is helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights."
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
Nerve Center for the MAGA Movement
CPI’s Washington D.C. headquarters serve as a hub for the far-right conservative movement. According to CPI, in 2021 the “House Freedom Caucus, the Senate Steering Committee, Congressional Chiefs of Staff, Congressional Communicators, Congressional Legislative Directors, and numerous conservative organizations and activists coalesced regularly at [CPI’s headquarters] to plan their methods and means of attack against the Left to save this country.”
Former Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman described CPI as playing a "coordinating function" for the House Freedom Caucus, and said that it serves as "sort of like a bizarre Freedom Caucus HQ."
CPI boasted of holding 600 meetings or events in 2021, served as a "strategy center" to oppose President Biden’s vaccine requirements, and hosted multiple “war rooms” during Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination. CPI is also expanding, and says that it is “in the process of acquiring multiple properties adjacent to our D.C. headquarters in order to create a culture of collaboration and victory for the movement.”
According to CPI, members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Andy Biggs, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Byron Donalds have made the CPI headquarters “their home away from home.”
At least fifteen members of the House and Senate have disclosed paying membership dues to CPI or its "Conservative Partnership Center" using campaign or leadership PAC funds.
Ties to Trump’s 2020 Coup Attempt
CPI and its affiliate groups “employ or assist at least 20 key operatives reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election,” according to Grid, including Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the infamous call when the president urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes; Mark Meadows, Trump's former White House chief of staff who was in communication with alleged Jan. 6 plotters and at least tolerated Trump's attempted coup; and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s desire for DOJ to declare the result fraudulent, and whose home was raided by the FBI in June of 2022.
Texts obtained by the January 6 committee also show Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period after the 2020 election.
Mike Lee to Mark Meadows, Nov. 9 2020:
We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.
Marjorie Taylor Greene to Mark Meadows, Dec. 31, 2020:
Good morning Mark, I'm here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn't get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state. I'll be over at CPI this afternoon.
CPI hardly shies away from its affiliation with Trump’s failed coup.
Months after the Capitol insurrection, in summer of 2020, CPI hosted a “Hot Gulag Summer” event that served Jan. 6-themed cocktails, including the “Capitol Attaquiri,” “Insurrection on the Beach” and the “Mostly Peaceful Mojito.”
“We’re all going to be sent to the gulag eventually,” the invitation read. “We might as well party and get to know each other before we are all ‘reeducated.’”
"America First" Staffing
CPI boasts of recruiting, recommending, and training Congressional staffers who are committed to advancing an America First agenda. In 2021, CPI claims to have trained 49 members of Congress and 246 Congressional staffers, and to have made 200 Congressional staffing recommendations.
“We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5-week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “they armed conservative staffers with every tactic the House and Senate rules gave them: how to force amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”
“You may have seen that conservatives defeated Biden’s gun-grabbing pick to lead the ATF and stopped a communist- sympathizing economist from becoming comptroller of the currency. That didn’t happen by accident.”
According to CPI, “our trainings have become so respected that conservative congressional offices and grassroots advocacy organizations now come to us when they have job openings to fill. They know that we maintain a database of current and prospective congressional staffers who have been through our trainings and are up to the task of putting America first.”
In 2021, CPI purchased a $7.25 million collection of waterfront farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hold Congressional staff retreats and trainings. CPI has since held several all-expenses-paid retreats at the property for Congressional staff. Staffers who attend retreats at the CPI-owned property only disclose receiving an estimated $99/night gift of lodging, which helps obscure reveal the actual benefit received.
CPI-Launched Projects, Many Led by former Trump Officials
In 2021, CPI launched eight new projects, as well as entities to provide legal compliance and administrative support for those groups:
Election Integrity Network: Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, joined CPI and launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) in early 2021, after resigning as a partner with the international law firm Foley and Lardner. Documented obtained leaked audio describing how CPI’s EIN is working with groups like Tea Party Patriots to create “permanent election integrity coalitions in eight target states,” and hosted Trump coup plotter John Eastman at an October 2022 event.
Center for Renewing America: Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought leads the culture war-oriented Center for Renewing America (CRA). “CRA’s strategy is to initiate planned confrontations on major national cultural issues, win those confrontations, and let the resulting political momentum fuel legislative activity at the federal, state, and local levels,” CPI says. CRA has created anti-CRT model legislation, opposed making women eligible for the draft, and opposed Afghan refugee migration. Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as Attorney General after the 2020 election and who supported Trump’s desire for the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, joined CRA as Senior Fellow in June 2022, shortly before federal authorities searched Clark's home as part of the criminal inquiry into Trump's attempted coup. CRA senior fellows also include former Trump advisor Kash Patel, who appeared before a grand jury in the Mar al Lago documents case.
America First Legal Foundation: Trump’s hardline immigration advisor Stephen Miller co-created the America First Legal Foundation (AFL) with Mark Meadows, which claims to give “the 234 new federal judges appointed by Donald Trump the chance to finally hold Washington accountable to the rule of law.” According to the Washington Post, the group "has weaponized the grievance politics embodied by Trump’s 'Make America Great Again' movement through dozens of federal lawsuits, challenging efforts to remedy racial disparities, support LGBTQ students and expand the pool of early voters." In the final weeks of the 2022 elections, AFL spent $4 million on inflammatory anti-transgender radio ads. Casino magnate Steve Wynn, who resigned as RNC finance chair amid allegations of sexual misconduct in 2018, is among AFL's donors, according to the Post.
American Accountability Foundation: Tom Jones, Ted Cruz’s 2016 oppo research director, leads the group described as the “Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees” by the New Yorker. AAF has taken credit for knocking out President Biden's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms nominee David Chipman, comptroller nominee Saule Omarova, and Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin.
American Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carson hosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke "Little Patriots" platform "to teach children about our founding principles."
American Moment: “American Moment’s mission is to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” according to CPI's annual report. In 2021, American Moment claims to have placed ten fellows at aligned organizations and congressional offices and, according to CPI, paid them “a living wage of $3,000 a month.” CPI plans to quadruple the program to 40 fellows in 2022.
State Freedom Caucus Network: In late 2021, CPI launched the "State Freedom Caucus Network" to replicate the far-right Congressional House Freedom Caucus in statehouses. CPI plans to create state freedom caucuses in every state legislature, according to its annual report, with caucuses already assembled in states including Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Illinois, Nevada, South Dakota, and South Carolina. Each state caucus will have an executive director, and CPI boasts that "the State Freedom Caucus Network will identify, place, and pay for legislative staffers year-round," and also create a PAC to "defend current and future state freedom caucus members facing tough reelections." Following the 2022 midterm elections in Arizona, for example, that state's freedom caucus promoted false claims of voter fraud and issued a statement calling Maricopa County election officials "incompetent, alleged criminals" who should "resign in shame."
CPI also helped launch two organizations to support these projects. Compass Professional Services, which is housed within CPI, provides payroll and administrative services to these entities. Compass Legal Services, also located at CPI headquarters, provides legal, campaign finance, and tax compliance services; according to campaign finance records, CPI members like Marjorie Taylor Greene also pay Compass Legal for legal compliance services, as does Trump's Save America PAC.
CPI Pushing Boundaries of Tax-Exempt Charitable Status
As a 501(c)(3) charity, CPI is exempt from taxation, and its donors get a lucrative tax deduction. But in exchange for those tax benefits, CPI is prohibited from supporting candidates or engaging in partisan political activity.
However, as NPR has reported, CPI is putting its tax-exempt status at risk by closely coordinating its activities with Republican political organizations and selectively offering its facilities and services to Republican candidates. In November 2022, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter to CPI inquiring into whether CPI has violated its tax-exempt charitable status.
The NPR report and Sen. Whitehouse's letter detailed several CPI activities that may violate tax law. For example, in the 2022 election cycle, CPI's Election Integrity Network worked closely with the Republican National Committee (RNC) as it worked to recruit and train poll workers and watchers in key swing states, as reported by POLITICO based on audio obtained by Documented. RNC officials have been speakers at several CPI summits, and RNC state election integrity directors are taking part in state-wide election integrity efforts spearheaded by CPI. A 501(c)(3) organization may provide an impermissible private benefit to a political party if it provides programs to recruit and train poll watchers and workers in a partisan manner.
In addition to working closely with the RNC on training and recruiting election observers and poll workers, CPI has hosted political candidates at its events. For example, Governor Ron DeSantis gave the keynote address at CPI’s Florida summit in March of 2022, which amounted to a campaign speech where DeSantis urged people to vote in the election, and stressed that “We need everybody to come out and really, really have a huge, huge November in the state of Florida.”
A 501(c)(3) organization engages in prohibited political campaign intervention by inviting just one candidate to speak at its event, and where that candidate urged support on election day.
[aud]
Moreover, since late 2020, dozens of GOP candidates have used campaign funds to rent CPI’s facility and services, including for “campaign events” and "fundraising event fees," according to FEC records. Seventeen Congressional candidates and four senators reported $4,000 payments to CPI or CPC from their campaign committees or leadership PACs, with the majority of those disbursements described as “membership” payments or dues.
A 501(c)(3) charity engages in prohibited political campaign intervention by selectively offering its facilities to political candidates or committees. There is no record of Democratic candidates renting CPI facilities, and CPI's facilities do not appear available to the general public.
CPI's Fundraising
Since forming in 2017, CPI's fundraising has increased dramatically—most recently, jumping from $7.3 million in 2020 to $45 million in 2021, according to CPI's 2021 tax filing. (CPI's 2021 Annual Report, released in early 2022, reported $19.7 million in revenue plus $25 million in "Capital Fund Revenue").
Trump's Save America PAC gave $1 million to CPI in July 2021. CPI also held a fundraiser at Mar al Lago in April 2021, with former President Trump as the keynote speaker.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI does not publicly disclose its donors.
However, an analysis by Grid identified more than 40 foundations, charities and other organizations that have funded CPI, including $1.25 million from GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein’s foundation in 2020, $500,000 from the late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation, and $200,000 from the Chicago Community Trust.
Donors Trust, the “dark money” funding hub, donated a total of $1.3 million to CPI in 2021, with $200,000 earmarked for American Moment and $10,000 in support of Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network.
CPI has also identified some financial supporters in its 2021 annual report.
David and Brenda Frecka: CPI thanked the pair for their financial support in its 2021 annual report, and named a "David and Brenda Frecka Boardroom" at CPC. In 2021, David Frecka gave $1M to Jim Jordan's House Freedom Action, and Brenda Frecka gave $1.15M to Debbi Meadows's Right on Women PAC
Mike Rydin: According to CPI’s annual report, Ryden “made a generous gift” so that CPI could purchase a townhouse next door to its headquarters “for additional meeting and event space as well as space to host out-of-town guests.” The property sold for $1.5M in 2020.
Dr. William Amos Jr.: The son of the AFLAC founder “has generously supported the Conservative Partnership Institute. For his incredible contributions to CPI’s growth and mission, in 2021, CPI honored Dr. Amos with CPI’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Foster Friess "supported many groups in the movement, including CPI. Foster will always be an important part of the CPI story. With love and purpose, Lynn carries on her late husband’s legacy of helping those in need."
Doug and Charlotte Waikart "made the ultimate commitment to sending American values into the future by supporting CPI in their estate plans."
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...This instance of a CPI- and GOP-linked Fairfax County group sending material from QAnon influencers to the county board of elections further demonstrates the connections between the QAnon and election denial movements. Media Matters has previously documented True the Vote’s collaboration with QAnon figures, major election denial funder Patrick Byrne’s significant connections to the QAnon community, and a QAnon influencer’s involvement with a coalition recruiting and aiming to elect election-denialist secretary of state candidates. And according to Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, the leader of that coalition, he had been “working very close” with Mitchell and CPI.
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DIRTY TRICKS
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/democratic-strategists-launch-war-room-00065498
group of top Democratic strategists are launching a multi-million-dollar hub to counter an expected investigative onslaught by the likely incoming House GOP majority — digging into President Joe Biden, his administration and his son, on top of potential Cabinet impeachments.
The newly relaunched Congressional Integrity Project initiative, details of which were shared first with POLITICO, will include rapid response teams, investigative researchers, pollsters and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” founder Kyle Herrig said in an interview.
It’s designed to serve as the party’s “leading war room” to push back on House Republican investigations, Herrig said in an interview. He added that the project would “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans." [vid]
a team of researchers has already begun scouring public records, press clippings and other documents in a bid to immediately undercut House GOP leaders, from Minority Leader — now speakership hopeful — Kevin McCarthy to the likely committee chairs expected to manage probes of Biden and his network.
The House GOP views investigations as a key piece of its agenda for the next Congress once it takes the narrow majority that’s now expected, particularly as much of its legislative wish list is on track to stall thanks to the Senate filibuster and Democratic president. McCarthy has privately talked with committee chairs-in-waiting to coordinate plans, making the swift launch of the outside-group pushback plan a potential godsend to Democrats.
Democratic leadership on the Hill has been briefed about the project’s relaunch, according to a person familiar with its plans.
Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist who is part of the project’s new leadership team, called the House GOP’s looming investigations a “vendetta” after two impeachments of and investigations into former President Donald Trump while Democrats controlled Congress, including the bipartisan select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The project “will exploit every tactic available,” Woodhouse said, adding: “It’s not enough to wait and see what they’re going to do and how far they’re going to go.”
Republicans wouldn’t formally take the House until January, but its leaders are already vowing to cut a broad investigative swath. As McCarthy put it during his conference’s recent agenda rollout: “Every committee has responsibilities for oversight.”
“They’ve virtually outlined no substantive agenda for governing,” Herrig said of House Republicans. “This is what they’re going to do ... so you really need a concentrated effort that’s doing this every day.”
In addition to Herrig and Woodhouse, the project’s leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades, served in the Obama administration and advised the Biden administration’s pandemic response.
In a sign of the important role the initiative will play over the next two years — and its proximity to the White House — other senior advisers include Jeff Peck, a former Biden aide during the president’s time in the Senate who served as treasurer and vice chair of the Biden Foundation as well as a senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition.
For the final two years of Biden’s term, Republicans will be aided in their oversight push by a coalition of outside conservative research groups that have already mapped out potential targets and started digging into issues ranging from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to immigration policy.
And GOP lawmakers have left their own investigative breadcrumbs that make it clear where they intend to go. Likely Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the Hunter Biden investigation, with Republicans already preparing to elevate the probe to Joe Biden although no evidence has publicly emerged that his decisions were affected by his son’s business dealings. Comer recently told POLITICO that he and likely Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would provide a public update this week.
Jordan, meanwhile, is preparing to use the gavel he’s poised to take for conduct a sweeping investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, two frequent targets of Trump’s ire. That probe is likely to touch on everything from the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to tracking threats against local school officials, which the GOP slams as an effort to target parents despite denials from the bureau. [vid]
other GOP areas of interest include the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine aid and a coronavirus probe that is likely to sweep up longtime public health adviser Anthony Fauci.
McCarthy and his allies are under pressure from their base and some members of their own conference to pair their investigations with impeachment articles; some in the party are clearly itching for payback after then-President Trump was impeached twice. Though impeaching Biden is likely a heavy lift — and a step that McCarthy isn’t endorsing for now — Republicans see Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a more likely target for attempted removal from office.
congressional Democrats and others close to the administration view Republicans’ vows to investigate Mayorkas’ department and the border as the latest sign that they aren’t serious about trying to pass immigration legislation. And they slam Republican investigative plans writ large as thinly veiled attempts to help Trump, pointing to Jordan’s public remarks earlier this year that characterized GOP probes as helping “frame up the 2024 race.”
The Congressional Integrity Project is also aiming to raise funds for a paid media campaign, including dedicated websites, digital ads, mobile billboards, newspaper ads and, occasionally, TV ad buys. Its public opinion research will be shared with like-minded organizations and congressional allies to contrast GOP investigations with issues the American public cares most about, project leaders said.
Their goal is to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential campaign when Republicans also controlled the House and created a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. That GOP select panel ended up zeroing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to ascend to the Democratic nomination, culminating in an 11-hour grilling of Clinton.
Republicans’ two-year Benghazi investigation spent $7 million in taxpayer money and dogged Clinton on the campaign trail before finally producing an 800-page report that didn’t focus on the former secretary of state.
Then-Majority Leader McCarthy quipped in 2015 to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Benghazi committee had successfully driven down Clinton’s poll numbers. “He took a lot of crap for it, but in the end, it was true” that the investigation hurt Clinton politically, recalled Woodhouse.
Rather, Democrats hope the flood of investigations will lead to a repeat of the 1998 midterm elections, held amid the GOP push to impeach then-President Bill Clinton. Voter backlash against that move helped Democrats defy historical trends in House races that favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House gaining seats.
FILED UNDER: KEVIN MCCARTHY, JIM JORDAN, OPPOSITION RESEARCH, OPPO, BENGHAZI, ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS
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gop Republican congressional aides huddled this month with conservative think-tank leaders on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hone tactics and messaging for Biden administration probes, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.
Details: The retreat was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the American Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work.
In attendance were aides to the top Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure, Ways and Means and Oversight committees, as well as a senior aide to Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is considered a leadership contender.
Aides to Senate Banking Committee ranking member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) also attended.
The big picture: With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers around high-profile issues such as a southern border immigration surge, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and economic shocks that threaten a U.S. recession.
If they win congressional majorities, Republicans plan to use that power in retrospective fashion to dig into Biden administration conduct going back to his inauguration.
That will mean a congressional microscope on Biden administration policies and spending. It will also bring stepped-up GOP scrutiny of private sector actors such as tech companies that Republicans see as politically adversarial.
Behind the scenes: Over two days, congressional aides at the retreat got briefings from prominent conservative activists and organizations on a host of investigative tactics.
Gene Hamilton, a former senior aide in Trump's Justice Department and a board member of the America First Legal Foundation, briefed staffers on how to use legal experts and the federal court system to conduct research and "advance conservative priorities in the courts."
Alexa Walker, the Banks aide and the Republican Study Committee's coalitions director, and Scott Gast, a former senior aide in the Trump White House counsel's office, discussed strategies for coordinating congressional oversight with outside research and investigative groups.
Mike Howell and Roman Jankowski of the Heritage Foundation led a training on the Freedom of Information Act.
AAF chief Tom Jones briefed attendees on tactics for investigating presidential nominees and appointees.
Phil Reboli of CPI trained staffers on effective communications strategies to sell oversight efforts to outside groups and the press.
What they're saying: "We are pleased we brought together senior staff and leading outside researchers to focus on enhancing oversight skills, particularly since we're expecting increased oversight opportunities in the future," Jones said in an emailed statement.
"The American people are deeply frustrated by the failed policies and lack of leadership of the Biden Administration. They expect good government groups like ours and Congressional leaders to work together to hold this administration accountable."
Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project, t0ld Axios the goal of the event was to ensure congressional staff members are equipped to kick-start investigations as soon as the new Congress is gaveled in.
"What's going to happen next Congress is, you've got to do four years of oversight in two years. That's going to be an immense lift, and it means that they cannot wait to get these committees situated," he said in an interview.
"There are thousands of people who served in the Trump administration, myself included, who experienced what was probably the most intense congressional oversight to date," Howell said. They "are now chomping at the bit to deploy these skills that they've learned back at the Biden administration."
Between the lines: The event provides a glimpse of where Republicans see potentially fruitful oversight avenues.
Senate Banking has been at the center of Biden nomination fights, with committee Republicans successfully sinking two high-profile nominees.
The Oversight Committee, whose chief counsel for oversight attended, has a broad mandate. Its ranking Republican, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), has recently signaled scrutiny of Biden's immigration policies, his son Hunter’s business dealings abroad and tech companies' ostensible political bias.
The Transportation Committee's Republican general counsel wrote in a disclosure filing that the training would help the committee ensure "fiscal stewardship and effective oversight of the recently passed infrastructure bill and other items within T&I's jurisdiction."
The Ways and Means Committee, which sent two Republican aides to the retreat, is a powerful panel with oversight jurisdiction over tax and financial policies at the center of a national furor over inflation.
Republican oversight won't be confined to federal agencies or the White House, Howell said.
"Big Tech is in the crosshairs," he said. "They're going to be subject to document requests and subpoenas and depositions."
Howell pointed to the subpoena power wielded heavily by the Jan. 6 select committee, which has sought private phone and bank records, among other documents.
"It's really a whole new frontier that has been opened with a whole bevy of new tactics and techniques, which were once thought out of bounds. They're now going to be a tool in the hands of the other side."
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cleta, what exactly her role in legal coup? how does her work relate to Ginni's actions? one place says she wrote coup memo, another says she commissioned (eastman?) to do it?
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she just popped up in something i did not put here? 3 22
thot it might be eastman search terms but no
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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/08/30/charles-kochs-shape-shifting-influence-machine/
david a
Backed by Trump money and led by insurrectionists under investigation for trying to overturn the 2020 election, the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) has held at least four training sessions for dozens of GOP members of Congress and their staffers so far this year, sometimes paying for their travel and accommodations, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned.
The sessions have covered a broad range of topics, from “election integrity” and building an “American First movement” and state “Freedom Caucuses” to trainings on “effective oversight” and “Senate Procedure & Strategy.” Some are led by controversial MAGA leaders, including former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell, both of whom have been subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee and the Georgia grand jury investigating attempts to overturn the election results there.
Most of the sessions are held at a previously undisclosed facility CPI owns and operates in Cambridge, Maryland, but its Winter Leadership Conference was held at the Ritz Carlton’s luxury beach resort on Amelia Island in Florida, documents reviewed by CMD reveal.
The only congresspeople invited to the conference were members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, which was chaired by Meadows until he left to serve as Trump’s chief of staff in March 2020. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a 2024 presidential hopeful and a founding member of the Freedom Caucus in 2015, delivered the keynote address.[doc
Opening Remarks: Mark Meadows, Senior Fellow, CPL Ieo& Prayers Rep. Mary Milix Moderator: Rep, Soot Pery Panel Rep. Ralph Norman Rep. Lauren Boehert Rep. Warren Divison 1-125 PM Break 25-290PM Session.#1=CPlUpdate2022Outlook 2021year in review an insight nto upcoming programs and movement efforts Speaker: A Comigan, President& CEO, CPI Mark Meadows, Senor Follow, CPI Wesley Denton, COO, CPT 2g0-g30eM Session £2. Winning CommunicationsStrategy Messagingcurrentconservativepolicygoalsfor2022 andbeyond Moderator: Wesley Denton, C00, CPI Pane Dan Scavino, Former WH DeputyCOS Dir.ofSocial Media lex Waltonis, Compass Media 330600 Break 600-700 PM Reception Fa ager Topic:ConsevatisPolePrioritiesin2022Remarks: MackMeadows,Senior Partner, CPL Rep. BobGood, Rep. Sot Pry Hau roon Tomli Pasa Ballroom Topic: BikingtheAmericanMovement Remarks on wht i takes to bd an AmericaFirst movement Ine: Rachel Bovard Speaker Intro Rep. Lauren Bocbert Speaker: Sch Dion, CBO, Babylon Bec Keynote nro: MarkMeadows,SeniorPartner,CPI Keynots: Governor Ron DeSantis Closing: Mark Meadows, Senior Patoer CPI]
Opening Remarks: Mark Meadows, Senior Fellow, CPL Ieo& Prayers Rep. Mary Milix Moderator: Rep, Soot Pery Panel Rep. Ralph Norman Rep. Lauren Boebert Rep. Warren Divison 1-125 PM Break 25-290PM Session.#1=CPlUpdate2022Outlook 2021year in review an insight nto upcoming programs and movement efforts Speaker: A Corrigan, President& CEO, CPI Mark Meadows, Senor Follow, CPI Wesley Denton, COO, CPT 2g0-g30eM Session £2. WinningCommunicationsStrategy Messagingcurrentconservativepolicygoalsfor2022 andbeyond Moderator: Wesley Denton, C00, CPI Pane Dan Scavino, Former WH DeputyCOSDir.ofSocial Media lex Waltonis, Compass Media 330600 Break 600-700 PM Reception Fa ager Topic:ConsevatisPolePrioritiesin2022Remarks:MackMeadows,Senior Partner, CPL Rep. BobGood, Rep. Scott Perry Hau roon Tomli Pasa Ballroom Topic: BikingtheAmericanMovement Remarks on wht i takes to bd an AmericaFirst movement Ine: Rachel Bovard Speaker Intro Rep. Lauren Bocbert Speaker: Sch Dion, CBO, Babylon Bec Keynote nro: MarkMeadows,SeniorPartner,CPI Keynots: Governor Ron DeSantis Closing: Mark Meadows, Senior Patoer CPI
... Breakfast ‘Remarks on what CPI-incubatedgroupsaredoing oprotect American liberties through the courts, education,andshaping policy 8:20 AM Morning Devotion: JeffTrimbath, M.Div Panel Introduction: Bret Bernhardt, CPI Board Trustee 835AM Moderator: EACorrigan, CEO, CPI Pan: ‘Gene Hamilton, Ameria Fist Legal Foundation “Tom Jones, AmericanAccountability Foundation RussVought, President, Center for Renewing America
‘Sesion3—CPI' ElectionIntegrityNetwork:WhatWe'veDoneandHowWeAveMaking ‘2022theYear for Fletion Integrity. ‘Heara discussion on whatittakes to ensure honestelections Intro: Ed Corrigan, President & CEO Remarks: Rep. Bob Good, VA Moderator: Cleta Mitchell, Senior Legal Fellow, CPI Panel: Rep. Yvette Herrell Lynn Taylor, President, Virginia Institute for Public Policy 1500-12:15 PM Sesion#4 -BuildingStateFreedomCaucuses Lua about CPsupported fort 0 budaeedom Caves in cache eilature nationwide: Moderator; Mark Meadows,SeniorPartner,CPI Speakers: Rep. Andy Biggs ‘Andy Roth, President, SFCN wi15-1:35 PM LunchTopic:CombatingBigTech Censorship How conservatives caneffectivelypushback against big tech censorship 12:30PM Intro & Prayer: Rep. Barry Moore Moderator: Rachel Bovard, Senior Policy Director, CPI Panel: Rep. Dan Bishop Brent Bozell, Founder& President, Media Research Center
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no lnx docs twt
Jim DeMint, a former congressman and senator from South Carolina, founded CPI in 2017 “to be a bulwark against the Swamp and a support system for conservatives looking to do the right thing.”
Its two largest known financial backers are Richard Uihlein, a GOP megadonor and cofounder of Uline shipping and packaging company, and Donald Trump. Uihlein’s family foundation contributed $2.25 million (2018–20) to CPI and Trump’s Save America PACs gave $1 million (2021). The next largest identifiable CPI donor is the family foundation of the late casino mogul Stanley E. Fulton, which contributed $500,000 (2019).
A federal grand jury is investigating the formation of Trump’s Save America PAC and its post-election spending, The New York Times reported last week.
Since the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, CPI has become a hub for insurrectionists and election deniers. The group made Meadows a senior partner and brought in Mitchell to lead its lead its “Election Integrity Network” network, organizing local GOP activists to engage in the election process based on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
So far, Mitchell has led partisan voter suppression and election subversion events in nine states with fellow Big Lie proponents and election fraud conspiracists like Meadows, DeSantis, Mike Gableman, Arizona Senate President and ALEC National Chair Karen Fann (R), and many others with the goal of subverting the electoral system.
CPI has also launched a number of spin-offs to further right-wing causes, including the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), America First Legal, Center for Renewing America, American Cornerstone Institute, American Moment, and the State Freedom Caucus Network.
Staffers Coached in Conservative Oversight
From May 5–6, seven House Republican staffers and three Senate Republican staffers attended an Effective Oversight Training Retreat paid for by AAF and led by CPI, AAF, and the Heritage Foundation—all ostensibly nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organizations.
Attendees participated in six training sessions, according to an agenda obtained by CMD, including on “how to work with legal experts to leverage research and advance conservative priorities in the courts,” “working with outside groups involved in oversight,” and “how to conduct effect research into Presidential appointees and nominees” to “help congressional staff perform proper oversight.”
The latter session was led by AAF’s founder Tom Jones, who is credited with leading GOP opposition to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation and for sinking the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin for vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, among others.
AAF runs the website bidennoms.com, which currently features opposition campaigns against Phillip Washington for administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); Gigi B. Sohn to be a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Kalpana Kotagal to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); and Dilawar Syed for deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Kotagal appears to be a top target of AAF, prompting it to create the separate website kalpanakotagal.com, where she is labeled a “radical leftist” who is “poised to weaponize the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with an anti-American agenda.”
SCREENSHOT FROM WWW.KALPANAKOTAGAL.COM
Kotagal is actually an accomplished employment and civil rights plaintiffs’ litigator, perhaps best known for co-authoring the “Inclusion Rider,” a contract provision in Hollywood designed to increase diversity in casting and production staff.
In addition to staffers from CPI, AAF, and Heritage, others from the right-wing Capital Research Center, the Republican Study Committee, and Compass Legal also led training sessions. CPI launched Compass Legal to take “care of things like legal filings” and help nonprofits “to comply with federal tax law so they can keep their nonprofit status,” according to its 2021 Annual Report.
Another version of the training agenda obtained by CMD shows that Judicial Watch‘s Tom Fitton was “invited” to discuss the “Oversight Agenda for the 118th Congress.” Fitton is also the 2022 president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive Christian Right group, CMD reported.
Like the organizations involved in the oversight training, CNP is fully aligned with the Republican Party and was deeply tied to the Trump administration and the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Scrutinizing Senate Procedures and Strategy
From June 22–24, staffers and lawyers for GOP Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) attended a Senate Procedure & Strategy Symposium organized and paid for by CPI, according to materials obtained by CMD.
CPI’s president and CEO Ed Corrigan led all but two of the training sessions, an agenda for the event shows. Corrigan served as a Senate staffer for over 10 years and was vice president for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation before moving to CPI in 2017. Corrigan informed attendees on Senate rules, amendments, and procedures. Brian Darling, president at Liberty Government Affairs, and Kelly Johnston, former secretary of the Senate, also addressed those in attendance.
Staff Assistant Training
On August 10-11, 2022, CPI held a training session for House staffers led by staff at CPI, Heritage Action for America, Center for Renewing America, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, and current House staffers, an agenda obtained by CMD details.
CPI paid for nine congressional staffers to attend, documents reviewed by CMD show.
Attendees were taught how to be an “effective” staffer, how to write, and “how to optimize the rules to maximize your boss’ effectiveness.”
How to Win the Messaging War
Another CPI spinoff known as the Revere Project has scheduled communication trainings for “Capitol Hill communicators” this month and next, and in January 2023.
The four-week digital communications training in September and October aims to “give participants the strategy and tactics to level up their member’s social media presence.” The January communications training for congressional staffers will cover “crisis comms” and “how to proactively win the messaging war,” among other topics.
Congressional staffers can also schedule a TV Studio Training Bootcamp to learn “best practices” for preparing members of Congress “to visually look good on camera.”
In its 2021 annual review, CPI touts that it trained “49 members of Congress and 246 congressional staff from 132 congressional offices” last year. This year it appears to be on track to influence several hundred more conservative acolytes.
CPI will hold its annual donor conference next week. “The stage is set. Washington is ready for a conservative comeback,” CPI writes. And “CPI Partners are making it happen.”
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MMA 8 22
BANNON (HOST): [Steve] Cortes, and he and I didn’t talk, we talked about his segments and how we’re going to go through the economic data. We always talk beforehand about what's the best way to lay that out. But we didn’t talk about what he brought up, which was the Politico piece. I saw it I think at zero six hundred or seven, whenever it popped, and it was their lead story and they meant it as a hit piece. And I’m reading this thing, the RNC is working with these new groups, and it’s Cleta Mitchell, she’s been on the show many times talking about it, but the RNC, and they meant it as a hit piece and Cortes said, hey this thing was like a paid advertisement cause it shows you the quality of training they’re getting and now the RNC is getting involved. I said hey, I think they’re sending it out to the - to make sure the RNC donors see it, that they’re now working with the crazies.
Cleta Mitchell, tell us about the piece and particularly what you guys are doing now in conjunction with the RNC cause every time you have these summits, we send people, I get tremendous feedback of people that now are going to get engaged now and be part of it, it’s changed their lives. The comradery. But most importantly is the technical details, not war stories, you teach them technical details about how to be election officials, how to be poll workers, right? Not just poll watchers. So walk us through why did Politico try to take you out this morning ma’am?
CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): Well, thank you for having me Steve, you’re always so great to help us tell our story. Politico got a tape, an audio tape, from our Arizona summit in which I was presenting to the group there about how the Biden administration is using our tax dollars to turn every federal agency into a Democratic political operation. And I used the language that they use, which is their new Democratic majority, that this is language of the left and I just traced their language showing that that’s what they're doing with our tax dollars.
Biden issued an executive order based on a plan that was put to him by a left-wing organization, Demos, if you want to find out about it just go to Demos dot org and you can look it up. They’re the ones who sold this to him. They’ve got Susan Rice in the White House running the program. And it’s an executive order that orders every federal agency to develop a voter registration and turnout program and then they’re going to give grants to approved groups. Guess who’s going to approve those groups? Susan Rice. Excuse me. And so I talked about this at the Arizona summit, I went through the language and so we’ve decided to put that out there. We’re putting it on our website today, the entire audio.[tucker perm dem maj?]
…
MITCHELL: So, they're going to do with our tax dollars what they did with Zuckerbucks in 2020. And that's what I was teaching. I was giving the presentation in Arizona –[how to gerry?]
BANNON: Yes.
MITCHELL: – showing what they were doing. And they are saying, the Politico article says that I was complaining and I was engaged in voter suppression because I didn’t want these groups to be registered and mobilized. No! If those people are going to be registered and mobilized, let the Democratic Party pay for it. Let the candidates pay for it. Don’t use my tax money to register and turn out people to vote because they’re the most vulnerable in our society.[acorn-y?]
BANNON: K. We're going to have you on to go through actually the presentation.
...
We need the army of the awakened to get this information that Cleta and her team puts out all over the country.
...
BANNON: Democrats, if they can't steal, they can't win. Let me just be blunt.
MITCHELL: That's right.
BANNON: They can't steal, they can't win. They know it. That's why they're so upset about MAGA getting to the bottom of this.
...
MITCHELL: Let me tell you what, Steve. It is a real serious problem what's going on with this vote by mail. This avalanche of mail voting. I call it unsupervised voting.
It's happening in Florida, where in Florida they have sent the wrong ballots, they sent out tens of thousands of ballots that have been voted and come back into Broward county, Palm Beach county, Orange county – which is Orlando. And they have the wrong races or they don't have the school board races. And it's happening right now and it's all because of this bad voting.
---
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/02/rnc-stop-the-steal-advocates-poll-workers-00049109
heidi p
no lnx
Republican National Committee has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping “election integrity” operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states, according to new recordings of organizing summits held this spring in Florida and Pennsylvania obtained by POLITICO.
On the tapes, RNC National Election Integrity Director Josh Findlay repeatedly characterizes the committee’s role as supporting in-state coalitions — delivering staff, organization and “muscle” in key states to the person they identify as the quarterback of the effort to create a permanent workforce: Conservative elections attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a central figure in former President Donald Trump’s legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election.
“Cleta Mitchell, she’s like the best election and election law expert out there. We’re not going to tell her what to do,” Findlay told a March 31 Pennsylvania session organized by Mitchell.
Publicly, the RNC has insisted its goal is to ensure there are enough trained poll workers to protect the electoral process and ensure partisan parity at polling centers. The recordings, however, indicated that the RNC is relying heavily on people who have spread false or unproven claims of irregularities and conspiracies. The recordings feature Findlay speaking at a number of Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” summits, which her group has hosted in battleground states including Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The RNC is just “part of the team,” he told a Florida summit the same month.
While Republicans have said the aim of their “election integrity” effort is to ensure there are well-trained poll workers during the next election, the recordings also feature Mitchell speaking openly about the need to challenge efforts by nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats to create a “new American majority” of young voters, people of color and unmarried women.
“It’s a place the left sees as a great target of opportunity, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” she said, referring to Democratic efforts to register voters from traditionally underrepresented voting blocs.
Mitchell was on Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state, and is she among those currently under subpoena in a criminal investigation by the Fulton County district attorney. Days after the 2020 election, she was exploring ways to keep Trump in power via a slate of fake electors from several battleground states. White House call logs show she is also among a handful of individuals with whom Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, the day the Capitol was attacked, and she is suing to block the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining her full phone records.
Mitchell, in a response to POLITICO, said her comments about the “new American majority” were referring to an executive order by the Biden administration directing federal agencies to help citizens register to vote and to educate them on how to do so. The effort amounts to turning “every federal agency into a Democratic turnout machine — using our tax dollars in the process,” said Mitchell.
[Cleta Mitchell testifies.
Cleta Mitchell was on former President Donald Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo]
The RNC says its poll watching and working program has been in place for recent primary elections in Georgia and Texas, where “turnout has risen, reported issues have been resolved and elections have run smoothly,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick.
“The RNC works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity, but the party’s efforts are independent from any outside organization,” said McGavick. “Fearmongering stories like this undermine confidence in elections and unfairly smear Americans who are simply getting involved in the civic process,” he said.
The RNC, in its email response, said Democrats also have a major Election Day operation through their national party and noted that the Democratic National Committee’s website features a webinar on how to become a poll worker. The RNC also disputes that it trains poll workers. It calls sessions in which statewide “election integrity” directors coach recruits on how to challenge votes and voting processes “workshops,” and all poll workers must attend separate trainings by county clerks.
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Yet the DNC’s “voter protection” program is different because it focuses on expanding voting access, including through more locations and through mail-in voting. The webinar does not train poll workers, rather informs them how to apply, and the DNC says it does not have a national initiative to train poll workers. [so projection]
‘Number one goal’
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel has walked a fine line in calling for robust election security measures in response to Trump’s unproven claims of voting irregularities in the 2020 election, while avoiding fully embracing more sensational allegations there was widespread fraud and the election was “stolen” from him.
The approach around placing partisan poll workers is similar: steering clear of any public statements expressly supporting the “Stop the Steal” wing of the party while collaborating with some of its leading advocates around what the RNC considers, according to minutes of a spring training meeting in Memphis provided by Documented, its “number one goal” of building a permanent army of 15,000 GOP poll workers.
In workshops hosted by the RNC, GOP activists behind the party’s “election integrity” drive have primarily emphasized rooting out voting fraud — including “ballot stuffing” through the mail for which no evidence exists — as their key goal.
The recordings suggest the goals are broader. At an April 5 Arizona summit, Mitchell spoke mostly about an emerging “new American majority” of people of color, young people and unmarried women that could make conservatives “obsolete.” Her private comments are significant because Democrats have long insisted it is these fears of displacement — and not legitimate election administration concerns — behind the GOP drive to tighten access to voting for certain groups, including through mail.
POLITICO obtained the recordings from Documented, a non-partisan investigative watchdog that says it believes “corporations and wealthy donors have far too much power and influence” and that “democracy itself is under attack.” Documented got the tapes from attendees.
Other major summit partners include conservative grassroots organizations Heritage Action for America and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, who became part of Trump’s legal team in Georgia, where there is a criminal investigation into Trump and his top legal advisers. Toni Shuppe, who led a far-right effort to “audit the vote” in search of fraud in Pennsylvania, is leading that state’s coalition. In Arizona, Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official who runs the Voter Reference Foundation, is heading the effort. Her group has continued to spread claims about voting discrepancies and published millions of voters’ names, birthdates and addresses.
None of these coalition partners responded to requests for comment.
The recordings feature keynote speakers continuing to push Trump’s false election claims.
“They [Democrats] know they can’t win unless they cheat,” Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator who chairs the Conservative Partnership Institute, the activist group that houses Mitchell’s initiative, said at the Florida gathering.
POLITICO previously documented the RNC’s efforts to build “an army” of poll workers prepared to challenge elections clerks in primarily Democrat-dominated precincts in Michigan and keep them in constant contact with roving party attorneys. In its email response, the RNC also said its staff training and recruitment of volunteers focuses on the “need to comply with federal and state laws protecting voting rights” and any individual who “does not follow the law will be promptly dismissed.”
‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
BY HEIDI PRZYBYLA
Shipping volunteers
Findlay, in his summit appearances, repeatedly makes clear Mitchell and in-state coalition leaders are the braintrust of that effort. “When we started this (election integrity) department, we said, ‘Well, what can we do? Cleta knows more about election integrity than anybody in the country … What can we do to participate,’” he said in Florida on March 25.
Findlay was referencing Mitchell’s activities around the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, which saw thousands of Trump loyalists enlist as poll watchers and which the RNC considers a model for upcoming elections. He’s made similar remarks in Pennsylvania and other states about the RNC taking its lead from Mitchell.
“We can recruit. We can train, we can ship volunteers,” he said in Florida.
In Pennsylvania, the statewide coalition director is Shuppe, who has also promoted QAnon conspiracies that the online furniture retailer Wayfair was selling trafficked children on its website and Pizzagate, an unfounded theory that prominent Democrats were running a pedophile ring.
Another speaker at a March 31 Pennsylvania summit was CPI’s Ned Jones, who during his remarks floated conspiracies about “rogue” postal service workers tampering with mail-in ballots. Kerri Toloczko, who is atop the Florida coalition, suggested during the same gathering that Wisconsin service union workers may have been involved in casting votes for nursing home residents with dementia.
Toloczko did not respond to a request for comment.
A growing force
The summits, organized by Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network,” are largely kick-off events. They are followed by regular calls, meetings, and other organizing efforts involving several grassroots conservative groups.
CPI is a conservative think tank funded in part by Trump’s political action committee and run by DeMint and Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. In its annual report, CPI states that it is aiming to create “permanent election integrity coalitions” in eight target states. “Cleta, her full time job at CPI is to do nothing but this,” Meadows told a Georgia summit in February.
A former associate general counsel for the Trump campaign, Findlay has also been caught up in investigations around the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In late July, the Washington Post reported Findlay is among those for whom the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas seeking any communications regarding a scheme for GOP state lawmakers to overturn the will of the voters by submitting slates of alternate electors.
“They bring democracy to your doorstep. I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy. ... We live in a constitutional republic.”
Cleta Mitchell, conservative elections attorney
Texts the Jan. 6 committee obtained from Meadows show lawmakers referencing meetings at CPI in the post-2020 election period. Two days after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, it was Mitchell who contacted Trump lawyer John Eastman, the legal mastermind of Trump’s failed strategy, and encouraged him to engineer a legal argument to challenge electoral vote certification in Congress.
A transcript shows Mitchell played a major role in a conversation in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him additional votes. Amid the controversy, Mitchell resigned from her position as a partner with the law firm Foley & Lardner and landed at CPI shortly thereafter.
CPI is a growing force: According to its annual report, the group raised $19.7 million in 2021, which includes a $1 million grant from Trump’s Save America PAC, which raised millions by fanning Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Not ‘a democracy’
While training sessions previously published by POLITICO show Republican recruits overwhelmingly concerned about election fraud, Mitchell’s remarks in Arizona focused primarily on what many Democrats have long insisted is the real motive behind the entire GOP effort: targeting certain groups.
She made extended remarks about Democrats’ goal, since former Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Push” coalition of the 1980s, to register more people in minority communities to vote and create a new American majority of young people, people of color and unmarried women. “There was a book ‘Brown Is the New White’ talking about changing demographics in America was going to render conservatives obsolete,” she said.
“That is their goal,” she said of Democrats and outside groups aligned with them like unions. “They believe you can expand access to democracy by underrepresented populations.” Mitchell said they “target the most vulnerable people of our society,” citing the story of an allegedly elderly woman with dementia who allegedly obtained a voter registration form at a health clinic.
“You see it all over,” she said, as she decried the availability of information on voter registration at public venues like health clinics and universities. “We see people who are in need, who are hurting, who need help,” she said, referring to elderly, disabled, low-income Americans and students in need of financial aid receiving “education” on how to vote from outside groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the availability of voter registration information on government websites or venues serving the needy.
In her response to POLITICO, Mitchell said: “I showed the attendees the language taken from left-wing sources,” adding that President Joe Biden and “left-wing” groups are conspiring to use federal resources to “register and turn out the vote of the most vulnerable people in our society and pressure them to vote for Democrats.”
“That sort of enterprise should be paid for by candidates or political parties,” Mitchell said, without offering evidence any agency is pressuring individuals to vote for a particular party by providing them with registration materials.
In the tapes, Mitchell also disparaged the Democrats’ recent warnings about threats to democracy.
“They bring democracy to your doorstep. I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy,” Mitchell said, to a round of applause from the crowd. “But to the left, everything is about democracy, the democracy fund, the democracy this, the democracy that.”
“We live in a constitutional republic,” she said. [real am = wht xian?]
FILED UNDER: GOP, ELECTIONS, RNC, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
---
https://documented.net/investigations/recordings-reveal-whats-really-going-on-cleta-mitchell-election-integrity-network
a $19.7 million DC-based organization led by former Trump officials who worked to overturn the 2020 election is "recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections," according to the New York Times.
Documented has obtained hours of audio and other materials outlining this effort.
The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is working to build what it calls a “permanent election infrastructure” in eight swing states staffed with people fully committed to election conspiracies. The project is led by Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who played a key role in plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The goal is to build in-state coalitions focused on recruiting election conspiracy theorists to interrogate local election offices and to become poll workers and watchers. Ultimately, if CPI and its allies are successful, then those who falsely believe that the 2020 election was stolen could be in a position of real power and authority over future elections. The risk is that conspiracy theorists who see fraud around every corner are going to disrupt voting and the administration of elections.
CPI is working closely with the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the effort. As described by POLITICO, the collaboration means that the RNC "has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping 'election integrity' operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states."
As Mark Meadows recently said of the project, "this fight is not just about what happened in 2020. This fight is about every future election, whether it is at a state level or a federal level or the highest office in the land."[aud]
no lnx aud
cPI’s Election Integrity Network
CPI, which raised $19.7 million in 2021, is led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and was seeded with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. CPI has launched a number of projects led by former Trump administration officials and allies, including Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation and Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America, and is staffed with individuals who played a key role in laying the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection.
CPI’s “Election Integrity Network” project is led by Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including joining the infamous call when the then-President urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes. Mitchell was also responsible for contacting John Eastman and asking him to engineer a legal argument to challenge electoral certification in Congress. Amidst the controversy, in January 2021 Mitchell abruptly resigned from her longtime role as a partner with the law firm Foley and Lardner and joined CPI.
Mitchell played a key role in promoting false claims of election fraud, and is now channeling that misplaced anger into mobilizing conspiracy-minded MAGA activists to enter the election administration infrastructure.
“The vision I have for everyone is thousands of little brush fires all over the state. They can't put them all out, folks.”
CAROL DAVIS, FREEDOMWORKS
“Permanent Election Integrity Coalitions”
In 2022, CPI held summits in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. These are not one-day summits to simply rile up the base and build email lists—these are kick-off events to launch in-state election integrity coalitions, and are followed by regular calls, meetings, and other organizing efforts. The summits and in-state coalitions include the participation of other election denialist groups like Tea Party Patriots, Heritage Action, and Turning Point USA.
“The goal of what we're trying to do at this meeting today is to build a permanent election integrity infrastructure here in the state of Pennsylvania, and that infrastructure includes a statewide coalition,” said Tea Party Patriots’ Jenny Beth Martin at the Pennsylvania summit.
“The vision I have for everyone is thousands of little brush fires all over the state,” said Carol Davis of FreedomWorks during the Pennsylvania summit. “They can't put them all out, folks.”
“Become a Presence in the Local Election Office"
Members of the CPI-led coalitions are encouraged “to become a presence in the local election office.” Activists are directed to regularly show up to elections offices in groups of two to ask questions, to attend election board meetings, to get involved with cleaning voter rolls, to file searching FOIA requests, and to scrutinize vote-by-mail procedures.
These activities can contribute to an atmosphere of hostility that drives dedicated election workers out of public service.
A test drive of CPI’s strategy in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021 highlighted how these activities—carried out by people who believe in the myth of widespread fraud—led clerks to feel as if they were being accused of malfeasance simply for doing their job.
The CPI-led coalition in Virginia claims to have trained 4,500 poll watchers and election workers and organized 18 local task forces, and to have covered 85% of polling locations on Election Day 2021 and in the 45 days of early voting that led up to it.
At CPI summits, Mitchell holds up Virginia, and Fairfax County in particular, as a model for coalitions in other states. But as the New York Times reported:
"In Fairfax, a Democratic bastion outside Washington, about three dozen activists associated with the coalition and the local Republican Party rotated through election offices, combing through voter registration applications, undeliverable mail and other materials. Christine Brim, the task force’s leader, appeared in person or emailed staff nearly every day, according to Scott Konopasek, the registrar at the time. The operation ate up county workers’ time with dozens of information requests, as well as informal interrogations, Mr. Konopasek said.
'Everything they saw that they didn’t understand was fraud in their minds and that’s how they would frame the questions,' he said. 'It was always accusatory.'"
The Fairfax County election registrar resigned in large part because coalition members were making his job so difficult. In states like Arizona, where CPI has more recently created a coalition, accusations and harassment are also causing election professionals to leave their jobs.
Recruiting Poll Workers and Poll Watchers
A primary goal of the CPI-led coalitions is to recruit poll workers and watchers—with an emphasis on poll workers, because they have more authority. As a Heritage Action representative said at CPI’s Florida summit, poll workers can act as the “referee on the field” policing voters:
"We really do need poll workers. We need watchers, we need both. But the way I like to look at it is if you're a poll worker and you're the one handling, you know, the situation. I like to think of it as you know, you're the referee on the field rather than being someone sitting on the stands watching conservatives cry 'foul, foul.'"
A former Trump campaign lawyer, Linda Kerns, similarly emphasized at a CPI summit in Pennsylvania that “we do have to put poll watchers in, but election board workers are the most important and high value person that we can have in the polling place”:
"I’m going to repeat because its so important: election board workers they are, they're actually employees of the county for the day. They are more important, or they're higher value than poll watchers because election board workers actually sit at the election table. They're part of the process. And the poll watchers are in there, but they can only observe. So in Philadelphia, sometimes what most of the time, we can't find election board workers because we can't find Republicans in a lot of the precincts. We do have to put poll watchers in, but election board workers are the most important and high value person that we can have in the polling place."
Kerns also described how poll workers and poll watchers could support litigation:
"OK, so all we really have to say about poll watchers and election board workers is, and as a lawyer, I cannot do anything unless I have poll watchers and election workers in the polling place. If I'm an election court in Philadelphia and there are no Republicans in polling places or people in polling places telling me what's going on, I have nothing to bring to the judge."
FOIAs for Phantom Voters
CPI sessions have been a clearinghouse for conspiracy theories about “leftwing entities” allegedly colluding with election officials to facilitate fraud. In addition to conspiracies about “Zuckerbucks”—the theory that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg somehow corrupted the 2020 election by supporting groups that supported local election authorities during the pandemic—CPI officials have floated wild theories about a range of established nonpartisan groups that allegedly are involved with election fraud.
For example, CPI’s Ned Jones has posited that so-called “phantom voters” were somehow inserted into Pennsylvania’s voter record by a nonpartisan voter registration organization, the Center for Voter Information. At CPI’s Pennsylvania summit, he said:
“Number one is the Center for Voter Information. What they do is they do mass mailings to what they claim are commercially available lists in the spring, trying to sign up new voters. And in the fall, during election time, they sent out absentee ballot applications that are partially filled out. Now we've learned they had a special arrangement with the Postal Service. And I'll talk more about them in the next panel. But when their mailings are undeliverable, that is no one's at the address address that it's sent to. They don't get that mail back. What they get is a list from the Postal Service of undeliverable mail, and that's mailed to a voter who is no longer at their address. And we believe that somehow they use that information to create the phantom voters that we're all very familiar with right now.”
Coalition members are encouraged to investigate these conspiracy theories in their state and local election offices. One CPI document obtained by Documented
instructs state coalition members to “Document the relationship between the state and local election offices and the leftwing entities that are intent upon skewing and manipulating the 2022 elections....from the INSIDE.... by obtaining and documenting where these leftist entities are, and what they are doing with local and state election offices and officials.”
CPI instructs coalition member to question elections officials, file open records requests, attend public meetings, and review meeting minutes in order “to learn if election offices in your state have had contact with and/or applied for participation with the leftist groups” identified by CPI, and to then share research findings with Jones and CPI.
“We need citizen eyes on every election office!,” the CPI document states.
RNC Election Integrity Program and CPI
CPI is working closely with the RNC in these efforts. RNC officials have been speakers at several CPI summits, and RNC state election integrity directors are taking part in state-wide election integrity efforts spearheaded by CPI.
The RNC created a permanent election integrity program in early 2021, following Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The RNC's national election integrity director is Josh Findlay, who was associate general counsel for the 2020 Trump campaign, and claims to have "run the President's national war room out of the White House." The RNC has hired state election integrity directors in 16 key states.
Findlay has addressed multiple CPI summits, where he characterizes the RNC's election integrity efforts as focused on supporting CPI, helping with organization and staffing, and deferring to Cleta Mitchell—which is notable, given Mitchell’s role in pushing the big lie and in seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
At CPI’s Florida summit, Findlay described how the RNC engaged in the 2021 Virginia elections by taking its lead from Cleta Mitchell and others in the CPI-led coalition:
"When we got on the ground in Virginia, we said "Cleta, Lynn [Taylor, of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy], what can we do?" They were already doing trainings, they'd hit the ground running. Our state director's first day was the day of the summit in Virginia and they said, Well, look, we got a lot of materials done, but we've got to shift massive amounts of people for 45 days of early voting. We said, "well, your poll workers and poll watchers have gotta get credentials through the party. We're good at providing muscle. Let's contribute we'll help out with that." And we saw the great things that happened in Virginia, and we're just really excited to be part of that."
At CPI’s Pennsylvania summit, Findlay similarly described how the RNC supported the CPI-led Virginia coalition by helping to organize poll watcher shifts: “Cleta Mitchell, she's like the best election and election law expert out here. We're not going to tell her what to do.”
The RNC’s election integrity program is also playing a formal role in these CPI-led coalitions. In Pennsylvania, for example, the RNC election integrity state director, Andrea Raffel, worked directly with Cleta Mitchell to plan the summit, presented at the event, and is helping to lead the statewide coalition.
“Lying Is Their Native Language”
CPI president Jim DeMint presented the goals of the organization’s election effort in stark terms. “Everything we love and care about this country goes down the drain if the election system continues the way it is,” he said at a CPI election integrity summit in Arizona.
DeMint also brushed off accusations that CPI was helping to promote the “big lie” about the 2020 election being stolen, declaring instead that "climate change was a lie" and that "much of what they told us about covid was a lie:”
“And what we're doing today is what the left says is ‘the big lie.’ You're involved with the big lie. We know who lies. We know that Hunter's laptop was a lie. We know that climate change was a lie. We know much of what they told us about covid was a lie. We know telling us the borders are secure is a lie . . . Lying is their native language."
DeMint also declared that Democrats “want to cheat” and that “they know that they can’t win unless they cheat:”
"So we can't run a country, a free country, if people don't have any confidence in their elections, and that's where we are right now. And the only reason that they don't want you to ask questions is because they know they're lying. And they know that they can't win unless they cheat. I guarantee you. Anybody who doesn't want a photo I.D. is not worried about voter suppression. They want to cheat. We need to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
More recordings from the CPI-organized events are on file with Documented. If you are a reporter and would like to discuss, get in touch.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/fallout-how-trumps-big-lie-is-threatening-the-future-of-elections/
...This strategy to attack and replace local election officials with Trump loyalists is one we’re seeing play out from Fulton County, Georgia, to Yavapai County, Arizona, with the full weight of the Republican Party behind it.
The Republican National Committee—which aided Trump in his plot to stay in power—has spent millions on 17 states to recruit more than 14,000 poll workers and 10,000 poll watchers already, according to the Washington Post.
Working with the RNC is Cleta Mitchell, a Trump lawyer who was on the infamous call on which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 more votes. Mitchell is leading the so-called “election integrity” effort by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which seeks to bring together local right-wing groups with established conservative behemoths like the Heritage Foundation. The Brennan Center describes CPI as such: “The network has published materials and hosted summits across the country with the aim of coordinating a nationwide effort to staff election offices, recruit poll watchers and poll workers, and build teams of local citizens to challenge voter rolls, question postal workers, be ‘ever-present’ in local election offices, and inundate election officials with document requests.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, CPI became home to other Trump allies who had a role in the months-long effort to overturn the election, including Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows (who sat scrolling through his phone when he heard about threats of violence on Jan. 6), Trump’s former social media director Dan Scavino (who spread voter fraud conspiracies on behalf of the tweet-happy president), and Ed Corrigan (who appeared to be busy behind the scenes encouraging Vice President Mike Pence to buck his constitutional duty and overturn the election). CPI enjoyed a $1 million boost from Trump’s Save America PAC.
CPI and organizations like it are finding success. One in 5 local election administrators say they are likely to leave their jobs before the 2024 presidential election, according to a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice. These public servants cite politicians attacking “a system that they know is fair and honest” and the stress of the job as the top two reasons for their planned departures.
Meanwhile, other politicians are running for secretary of state to gain control of their states’ elections. Arizona’s Mark Finchem stood outside the U.S. Capitol’s east steps as the anti-government extremist Oath Keepers—of which Finchem claims to be a member—stormed the building. Three months later, he announced his bid for Arizona’s secretary of state and earned Trump’s endorsement. In Michigan, Kristina Karamano, also blessed with a Trump endorsement for her voter-fraud conspiracy theories, became the Republican nominee in the race for secretary of state. And in Georgia, Rep. Jody Hice tried to best Trump nemesis Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger out of the Republican nomination to no avail. ...
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/
the Family Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020 falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.
FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”
Blackwell and Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.
Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”
It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.
At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”
“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.
Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute, which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.” It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair, whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle, Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PAC shortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.
Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”
Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.
As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”
In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.
Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the first Blackwell-Klukowski collaboration. They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.
At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.
The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.
Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council
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https://newrepublic.com/article/166778/cleta-mitchell-trump-lawyer-2022-midterm-elections
no lnx many
Peter Stone/June 29, 2022
Ballot Boxer
This Former Trump Lawyer Wants You to Disrupt the 2022 Midterms
Cleta Mitchell desperately tried to undo Trump's loss in Georgia in 2020. Now she's using the Big Lie to recruit conservatives as poll workers for the November elections.
A spacious ballroom at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix was packed the weekend of March 11 with scores of Donald Trump loyalists still fuming about widely debunked claims that Joe Biden won the 2020 election thanks to rampant fraud. Dubbed an “election integrity summit,” the gathering was the handiwork of Trump’s former legal adviser, the veteran conservative activist Cleta Mitchell. And while Mitchell has garnered national attention for riling up Trumpists with false claims of election fraud in Georgia after the state was called for Biden, she’s now quietly channeling that anger into mobilizing activists to aggressively combat the specter of voting fraud in the next battle: the 2022 midterm elections.
Mitchell organized the Arizona summit on behalf of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit that raked in $1 million from Trump’s leadership PAC last year. Founded in 2017 by former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, CPI has become a hub for the Big Lie in exile, with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows signing up as senior partner shortly after leaving the White House last year, and Mitchell joining in March 2021 as senior legal fellow. CPI boasted revenue of $5.3 million in fiscal 2019, has arranged D.C. internships for young conservatives, and has worked with other right-wing groups to push conservative goals.
But central to the institute’s current mission is Mitchell, who leads its self-styled “election integrity network.” She has engineered a roaming series of summits this year in states Republicans hope to swing back in 2024: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, and Nevada—along with the perennial battleground Florida, which Trump won. Mitchell has sold the network as a way to create state and local election “infrastructure,” which includes advocating unorthodox surveillance tactics of election officials and operations to ferret out any hints of fraud—real, or more often hypothetical.
One notable speaker at the summit, whom Mitchell interviewed on a stage, was Karen Fann, the Arizona state Senate president and 2022 national chairwoman of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that promotes model laws for states to adopt, and that Mitchell has previously advised. Arizona has already passed one anti-voting law this year, imposing onerous restrictions to prove citizenship before registering to vote, and the state legislature is currently considering a raft of other measures that would empower state officials to conduct further reviews of elections.
One attendee of the Phoenix summit, who asked for anonymity, told me that “the event definitely used the false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” to spur more robust monitoring of polling sites. The attendee added: “There was a large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all of the other processes associated with elections.”
To voting rights advocates, the campaign looks like a recipe for voter suppression and intimidation, especially of minorities, and could incite harassment against election officials. At these summits, the 71-year-old Mitchell, members of conservative groups such as Tea Party Patriots, GOP elected officials, and Republican National Committee staffers have delivered a blunt message: Conservatives ought to expand poll watching and “clean up” voter rolls—often by working as precinct and poll officials—in order to curb any voting fraud and bolster their electoral chances in 2022.
Mitchell hails from Oklahoma, where she began her career as a Democratic member of the state legislature before moving to D.C. and switching parties in the 1990s. Since then, she has amassed an extensive résumé of conservative clients: Mitchell has done legal stints advising the National Rifle Association (where she was once a board member), numerous GOP campaigns, and several dark-money nonprofit groups.
Some veteran conservatives who know Mitchell’s work say that her advice often pushed the legal envelope. “You tell Cleta where you want to end up, and she will come up with a way to get you there, whether it’s legal or not,” one former senior NRA official told me, quipping that she’s the “fringe of the fringe.” And a GOP election lawyer who has known Mitchell for years, and requested anonymity, added: “Cleta was sort of a classic lawyer for Donald Trump because she told Trump what he wanted to hear, as opposed to what he ought to hear from his lawyer.”
Mitchell started as a volunteer legal adviser to bolster Trump’s fraud claims in Georgia. She was recruited by Meadows the day after the 2020 election and eventually emerged as part of the core group of Trump lackeys attempting to subvert the results. She participated in Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, wherein the president attempted to coerce the state official to “find” the extra 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is currently conducting a wide-ranging probe into that call, examining whether Trump and the other participants broke state laws. A special grand jury was impaneled in early May.
Mitchell has also been subpoenaed by the House panel probing the January 6 insurrection, as she was in contact with Trump that day. In response, Mitchell filed a lawsuit to block the subpoena. When reports of her role on Trump’s call with Raffensperger quickly surfaced in 2021, Mitchell resigned from her two-decade career with the law firm Foley & Lardner—as it was conducting an internal review—and joined CPI two months later. (Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
“Cleta Mitchell allied herself with Trump’s election conspiracy theories on the infamous Trump-Raffensperger call,” Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, said, adding acidly: “If that makes one an advocate for election integrity, Charles Ponzi was a champion of investment integrity.”
In loose alliance with other conservative groups such as Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks—where she was tapped in March 2021 to lead a “National Election Protection Initiative” with a multimillion-dollar budget—Mitchell and CPI have worked with gusto to tighten voting laws: That campaign helped spur at least 19 states in 2021 to pass more stringent voting measures, including voter identification mandates and curbs on absentee ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mitchell’s cachet among the right’s big donors is considerable: She sits on the board of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to conservative election integrity and legal groups, including the Public Interest Legal Foundation, where Mitchell chairs the board. To help Trump overturn his loss in Arizona, Mitchell raised about $1 million in funds for a partisan audit of the state’s largest county—which wound up backfiring when the audit confirmed Trump’s loss there.
The programming at the CPI summits this year has partly overlapped, and included participants from an RNC election integrity drive that has recruited directors in 18 states and thousands of poll watchers, as The New York Times revealed in late May. To tutor activists at the summits about how to create local and state task forces, Mitchell and CPI have distributed a 19-page manual dubbed “The Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure.” The manual suggests some traditional poll monitor methods, but takes an ominous tone, urging activists to follow “every step” of vote-by-mail operations and advising them to “be ever-present” inside election offices.
AMAC Action, a conservative grassroots arm of the Association of Mature American Citizens that boasts over two million members, has co-sponsored several CPI summits. “We don’t want to see the kinds of shenanigans in 2020” again, Bob Carlstrom, AMAC Action’s president, told me. Carlstrom, a veteran D.C. lobbyist who expected to attend his first summit in North Carolina in June, added that AMAC Action has encouraged its volunteers to be poll workers, election officials, and poll watchers. His group also has “been quite active in working on legislation” in Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, and other states where CPI and allied groups have spent millions promoting new laws that have curbed voting rights.
Such multifaceted conservative efforts by Mitchell and CPI have prompted concern from election watchdogs worried about the false narrative of major fraud leading to voter suppression and intimidation targeting Black and other minority voters. “These lies are then used to justify restrictive policies that make it harder for people to vote, particularly in communities of color,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He added, “It is also important to remind voters that there are laws prohibiting the intimidation of voters and election officials. We cannot let the threat of intimidation alone prevent anyone from participating in our democracy.”
According to Mitchell’s blog and radio interviews she’s done this year—including an April one with Trump uber loyalist Steve Bannon—the CPI summits are building a state-based “movement.” Mitchell now hosts a podcast, dubbed Who’s Counting, where she speaks with like-minded conservative activists in states such as Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The podcasts tend to hype allegations of improper voting and election practices. Mitchell bluntly told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker last year that the goal of her post-2020 work has been “to make it harder to cheat,” without a nod to former Attorney General William Barr’s acknowledgment in late 2020 that there was no significant fraud in Biden’s win by over seven million votes nationally.
Since the first meeting in 2021, the summits have drawn several conservative and political bigwigs, including Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin and CPI chair DeMint. Meadows was a keynote speaker at a CPI summit in Georgia, but his public role has diminished following the disclosure in March that North Carolina was investigating whether he committed voter fraud. The inquiry was prompted by a New Yorker report that in 2020 Meadows registered to vote using an address where he’d never lived—a potential rare instance of actual voter fraud. Shortly before the probe became public, Meadows quietly dropped out of CPI’s Phoenix summit, where he was supposed to be a keynote speaker, and he does not appear to have been at any other public CPI events.
The “election integrity” agenda advanced by CPI and Mitchell has set off alarm bells for Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “From Cleta Mitchell’s dark-money group to Heritage Action, we see dark money crawling everywhere behind voter suppression and election subversion,” Whitehouse told me.
Looking ahead, the Brennan Center’s Morales-Doyle is worried that the summits could “increase the risk that vigilante actors will engage in intimidation and harassment of voters and election workers. In short, the people promoting these lies about so-called election integrity are doing serious harm to our democracy.”
Peter Stone is a Washington-based investigative journalist who has covered a wide array of lobbying, legal, and campaign finance issues, working for National Journal, McClatchy newspapers, and Legal Times, among other publications. As a freelancer, his work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books Daily, Mother Jones, The Intercept, and many other news outlets. He is the author of Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and the Buying of Washington.
Read More: Magazine, July-August 2022, State Of The Nation, Politics, The Soapbox, Midterm Elections, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Arizona, Georgia
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raw story tom b, an 5 22
wow not much hunker?
with the midterm election just months away and Donald Trump still eyeing a third presidential run in 2024, the New York Times is reporting that one of the architects of the former president's attempt to throw out the results of his 2020 loss is currently working on recruiting conspiracy-minded poll workers and watchers that have state election officials fearful of future chaos and disruption.
According to the report, attorney Cleta Mitchell who rose to fame as a participant on Trump's infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where the former president demanded the Georgia Republican "find" 11,780 votes, is working with the Election Integrity Network which has financial ties to Trump's still-thriving political operation.
As the Times' Alexandra Berzon writes, Mitchell has been busy traveling the country and meeting with far-right activists, instructing them on how to get deeply involved with the election process in their states, putting them in a position to challenge election results and disrupt certification of the votes.
According to Berzon, no position at the state level is considered too small by Mitchell, who recently told over 150 conservatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, "We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again.”
Pointing out that Mitchell was a participant in multiple lawsuits by Trump to challenge election results at the state level -- none of which succeeded -- Berzon writes that she is undeterred as her conspiracy theories are debunked and that she has the financial backing of several conservative groups.
"In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work," the Times report states, adding that an examination of her efforts reveals " a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures."
Her supporters "include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate [action? ], Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation."
With the Times reporting, "Ms. Mitchell’s trainings promote particularly aggressive methods — with a focus on surveillance — that appear intended to feed on activists’ distrust and create pressure on local officials, rather than ensure voters’ access to the ballot," Philadelphia Republican and former election board member Al Schmidt expressed concern about what is to come next.
“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are truly interested in knowing the truth about elections or they’re interested in propagating propaganda,” he admitted.
Notably, the report adds that attorney Mitchell "has worked closely with Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, on organizing through the Council for National Policy, a national coordinating group for conservative leaders." Virginia Thomas is currently being scrutinized by the Jan 6th House select committee after it was revealed that she had been texting former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows with advice on how to overturn the 2020 election results.
You can read more here.
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CPC LLC
300 Independence Ave S Washington,DC20003
82-5472169
150K
Cameron T Seward
General Counsel Director of Operations
h morgan griffith
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jane m slime machine
...
The A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile. It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cameron Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute, appeared in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of” C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar “charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee. Trump reportedly raised much of the pac’s money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the group an “election defense fund.”
Save America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an associate attorney at the Georgia law firm Foster, Foster, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Buckham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump connection: he worked at the White House during his Administration, in the personnel office. (His father, Ed Buckham, is chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene.)
It’s a great advantage to be able to treat opposition research as a tax-exempt charitable expense rather than as, say, a campaign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as former Vice-President Mike Pence’s political operation, gave a lecture to Christian pastors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just taking it to every Biden-Harris nominee that comes across to Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fighting with the Supreme Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the American Accountability Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re collaborating.” Teller’s group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence campaign for President in 2024.
When the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under penalty of perjury, as a nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in political campaigns nor try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit dark-money organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its donors, so it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly, though, it has big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted revenue projections that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in 2021, a million dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and Trump critic at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing “frightening, sleazy stuff” with serious implications. Not only is the group creating needless vacancies in important Administration positions; it is intimidating well-qualified people from wanting to undergo the nomination process. “It’s tough enough to get top-flight people in government,” Ornstein said. “But, if you also have to go through a well-funded, well-oiled slime machine, it’s really an attack on government.”
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an 222
reason for 180 on 1/6 cooperation? other 5 or 10K? trms
trump PAC transferred $1 million to a Mark Meadows nonprofit as House coup probe got underway
Daily Kos Staff February 02, 2022
nBC News is reporting that, only weeks after the formation of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, Donald Trump's "Save America" PAC donated a whopping $1 million to a conservative training "institute" headed in part by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows—a man who was intimately involved with multiple parts of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. What makes the donation especially conspicuous is that it's orders of magnitude above the Trump PAC's usual gifts.
The Trump PAC distributed a total of $1.35 million in the last half of 2021, reports NBC News. And that single $1 million donation to Meadows' group accounted for the lion's share of it.
It should be immediately clarified that this is not Donald Trump's own money. Trump's fascist-premised "Save America" fundraisers have been sucking the money out of Trump supporters' pockets just as every other Trump grift has, providing a means for Trump to give financial rewards to party allies without having to write any of the checks himself.
And Donald Trump is not known for writing checks himself. It is said that the reason Trump's fingers are so short is that whenever anyone comes to him asking him to write a check, the man bites his own fingers off so that nobody can make him pick up the pen. After the unpleasant visitor goes away, a team of surgeons reattaches each finger—always with a bit of loss, shrinking each digit by a few millimeters or so—and the cycle repeats. Or something. It is only a rumor I heard.
Trump's sudden shove of $1 million to Meadows is notable for its large size, even as the rest of his PAC spends its days trickling out money only a few thousand dollars at a time, but also because it has been clear from the beginning that Mark Meadows knows more about the Trump White House's attempts at self-coup than perhaps any other person, Trump included. Meadows participated in the call to Georgia election officials in which Trump asked them to "find" enough Trump votes to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the state. Meadows was involved in discussions about taking pseudo-military action to erase or "redo" the election. Meadows was involved in Trump's efforts to gather a crowd of his most rabid public supporters and set them loose to "march" to the U.S. Capitol at the precise day and hour that a joint session of Congress would oversee the final constitutional acknowledgement of his loss.
Mark Meadows is, in other words, up to his ex-House-Republican eyebrows in a multipronged plan to overthrow the United States government, and Trump throwing a million bucks his way just after it became clear that House Republicans had not been able to halt the investigation of Jan. 6 and that Congress would be making an effort to haul Meadows' aiding and abetting ass into a hearing room, a donation absurdly out of scope of what the Trump PAC was doing before and since, can certainly be taken as a distribution of hush money.
And that might be an untoward accusation to make if Donald Trump had not already been caught red-handed handing out similar "hush money" in the past. And it's difficult to find examples of Trump spending money anywhere, at any time, that hasn't been directly linked to what the recipient has personally done for or said about Trump. We can be sure that Trump's PAC did not throw $1 million at Mark Meadows because Donald Trump—sincerely and urgently—believes in the "Conservative Partnership Institute" goal of training new conservative staffers for future generations. Donald Trump doesn't give a flying damn about anything that does not provide immediate and tangible benefit to Donald Trump.
So sure, maybe it's hush money. Maybe it's witness tampering with a big ol' check attached. One way to determine what the money is for is to watch how Meadows' group spends it. If it turns out the "institute" is suddenly spending $1 million or so on unexplained legal fees, as Meadows' own battles with the Jan. 6 committee heat up, well then golly gee won't that be something.
But it ain't gonna be spent on anything that Donald Trump did not personally want it spent on.
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ref
no lnx
Trump gave $1M to Meadows nonprofit weeks after Jan. 6 panel's creation
The contribution was made to the Conservative Partnership Institute, where Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, is a senior partner.
Trump's PAC gave to 69 candidates for federal and state offices, many of whom have embraced his lie that he was defrauded in the 2020 presidential election.
Feb. 1, 2022, 4:19 AM PST
By Jonathan Allen
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump's political action committee donated $1 million to the conservative nonprofit organization where his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a senior partner, according to a campaign finance report filed Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.
In December, the House voted to recommend that the Justice Department pursue contempt of Congress charges against Meadows over his refusal to cooperate with an investigation into the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The tax-deductible seven-figure contribution to the Conservative Partnership Institute is by far the largest chunk of $1.35 million in donations Trump's "Save America" PAC made to political allies over the last six months of 2021, according to the campaign finance report.
[Jan. 6 committee recommends Mark Meadows for contempt of Congress
DEC. 13, 202104:15
Trump's PAC gave to 69 candidates for federal and state offices, many of whom have embraced his lie that he was defrauded in the 2020 presidential election. He lost to President Joe Biden by an electoral vote rally of 306 to 232 — and by more than 7 million raw votes.
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The contribution to Meadows's nonprofit stands out both for its size and for its timing. On July 1, the House voted to establish a select committee to investigate the Capitol attack. Trump's PAC donated to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which bills itself as a training ground for conservative staff and elected officials, on July 26.
"CPI is proud to have the support of President Trump, along with tens of thousands of Americans across the nation, for our work to build and unite the conservative movement," CPI chief operating officer Wesley Denton said in a statement to NBC News.
Tim Mulvey, a spokesman for the Jan. 6 committee, did not immediately respond to a text seeking comment on the donation to Meadows's employer.
"Save America" is one of the former president's several political fundraising vehicles, which collectively raised $51 million in the second half of 2021, according to Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich. It employs about two dozen people and its most frequent expense is Facebook advertising, according to Monday's disclosure.
[Fox News' Sean Hannity's text messages revealed, Capitol police prep for Jan. 6 anniversary
JAN. 5, 202202:28]
The PAC's largest contribution to a candidate, $10,000, went to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has been a guide to Trump in navigating Texas's Republican primary politics. Most of the donations were made in $5,000 increments, and they went to most of the candidates Trump has endorsed.
Recipients of "Save America" checks include several candidates running for statewide offices, including secretary of state and attorney general, that have influence over the administration of elections. For example, Trump gave $5,000 to Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, a secretary of state candidate who has called for the decertification of the 2020 election, and a matching amount to Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., who voted against certifying the election and is now running for secretary of state in Georgia.
Arizona and Georgia were the states decided by the smallest margins in 2020.
The PAC's contributions to Senate candidates included a donation to Republican Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia and professional football star who played for Trump's team in the defunct USFL, the New Jersey Generals. And on the House side, Trump gave to Harriet Hageman, who is running a primary challenge to Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. Cheney voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack and is one of two Republicans sitting on the committee investigating it.
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this is like gingr farm team?
Digital communication isn’t rocket science. But, it does take training, practice, and mentorship. The Revere Project has tapped industry leaders to create a training program that will graduate digital and communications professionals with the skills necessary to win the messaging war.
Paul Revere took a clear message straight to the people and changed the course of American history. The Revere Project aims to equip a new generation of communicators with the same powerful voice today.
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ceo ed Corrigan has over 25 years of leadership experience on Capitol Hill and in the conservative movement. In 2009, GQ magazine named Corrigan to its list of “50 Most Powerful People in DC.” He was tapped by the Trump Transition to lead the personnel selection process for all domestic policy departments, placing hundreds of conservatives in key administrative positions.
Known for his passion to build the conservative movement, he works with the Conservative Action Project and serves on the board of the Leadership Institute. Corrigan previously served in senior roles in the U.S. Senate. From 2003 through 2012, he was executive director of the Senate Steering Committee, the caucus of conservative senators, under two chairmen — Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL). He served again at Steering as executive director under Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT) during the Spring of 2017.
He got his start on Capitol Hill as an intern on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). From 1991 to 2003, he served in various capacities, including legislative director, in the office of Senator Bob Smith (R-NH). In 2011, Corrigan received the Weyrich Award for Capitol Hill Staffer of the Year, an honor named after former Hill aide Paul M. Weyrich, who became the first president of The Heritage Foundation. In 2013, Corrigan was named Heritage Foundation’s group vice president for policy promotion, which worked to advance conservative policy on Capitol Hill and in the conservative movement.
Corrigan was born in the town of Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, where his father was stationed while in the Army. He grew up in Longmeadow, Mass. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He and his wife, Sue, have two children, Ally and Danielle. They currently reside on Capitol Hill.
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cpi demint incub off bs https://www.conservativepartnership.org/staff
Matthew is Deputy Director at Large of OpenTheBooks.com. Matthew is also an active board member of Project Veritas, where he works closely with founder and modern-day muckraker James O'Keefe. In addition to his domestic issue-based political activism, he is also an engaged Polish dual citizen and advises the current conservative Polish government on an ad hoc basis. Mr. Tyrmand frequently appears in Polish mass media commenting on Polish, American, and European political issues. Moreover, he pens a weekly column for one of Poland's top conservative newsweeklies, Do Rzeczy. He has contributed to Breitbart, Forbes, American Thinker, The American Conservative, The Jerusalem Post, The European Conservative, and numerous other Polish and American outlets and has authored two books in the Polish market. He is a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and a member of the Philadelphia Society. Before entering the conservative movement full time, Mr. Tyrmand spent the years following his graduation from the University of Chicago in the finance industry as an equity and equity derivatives trader, analyst, and portfolio manager at some of Wall Street's most well-known hedge funds. https://www.conservativepartnership.org/staff
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https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservative_Partnership_Institute
Conservative Partnership Institute is a Washington D.C.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint.[1]
CPI describes its purpose as "providing a platform for citizen leaders, the conservative movement, Members of Congress, congressional staff and scholars to be connected. The organization works to provide these leaders with the tools, tactics, resources and strategies to help make them successful in advancing conservative policy solutions."[2]
CPI is a partner of State Policy Network associate member Forge Leadership Network, an Ohio-based, right-wing recruiting and training operation.
News and Controversies
1.1 Trump Gives CPI $1 Million Less than a Month After House Launches Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 Insurrection
1.2 Former Trump Adviser Cleta Mitchell Joins CPI
1.3 Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Joins CPI
1.4 DeMint Will Work with Other Right-Wing Organizations to Implement "The Conservative Agenda"
1.5 Ties to the Millennial Debt Foundation
2 CPI's Voter Suppression Network Holds Statewide Summits
2.1 Georgia
2.2 Arizona
2.3 Florida
2.4 Pennsylvania
2.5 Virginia
2.6 Michigan
3 Ties to the Council for National Policy
4 Ties to the Bradley Foundation
5 Funding
6 Core Financials
7 Personnel
7.1 Staff
7.2 Board of Directors
8 Contact Information
9 Articles and Resources
9.1 IRS Form 990 Filings
9.2 IRS Tax Exempt Application
9.3 Annual Reports
9.4 Related SourceWatch
10 References
News and Controversies
Trump Gives CPI $1 Million Less than a Month After House Launches Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 Insurrection
Trump's Save America PAC gave CPI $1 million, according to an FEC filing reported by NBC News.[3]
"The contribution to Meadows’s nonprofit stands out both for its size and for its timing. On July 1, the House voted to establish a select committee to investigate the Capitol attack. Trump’s PAC donated to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which bills itself as a training ground for conservative staff and elected officials, on July 26," NBC News reported.[3]
Former Trump Adviser Cleta Mitchell Joins CPI
Lawyer Cleta Mitchell joined CPI as a senior legal fellow and is planning to use her role to "coordinate" conservative voting positions, including in opposition to Democrat-led H.R.1, an elections reform bill that would undo Voter ID laws, support mail-in ballots, and enact automatic voter registration.[4]
Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Joins CPI
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows joined the Conservative Partnership Institute in January 2021. Meadows will "operate behind the scenes to help create more members [of Congress] like Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley– conservative firebrands with strong networks and staffs."[5]
DeMint Will Work with Other Right-Wing Organizations to Implement "The Conservative Agenda"
CPI was founded by Jim DeMint, former South Carolina senator and former president of the Heritage Foundation. DeMint was "ousted in May [2020] after internal disputes over Heritage's mission."[1] DeMint said CPI would work with "other right-leaning organization, citing a common goal of 'the conservative agenda' as Republicans in Congress struggle to form consensus around marquee campaign issues, such as health care"[1]
Ties to the Millennial Debt Foundation
CPI employees Rachel Bovard and Jim DeMint are both senior advisors at the Millennial Debt Foundation.
CPI's Voter Suppression Network Holds Statewide Summits
Starting in February 2022, CPI's Election Integrity Network organized and held statewide voter suppression summits in the states. CPI's Election Integrity Network is chaired by voter suppression advocate and GOP attorney Cleta Mitchell.
The Center for Media and Democracy tracked the summits as they were announced. As of April 4, 2022, below are the statewide events held/announced:
Georgia
CPI held the Georgia Statewide Election Integrity Summit on February 18 & 19, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia. The summit featured a number of breakout sessions on elections and a "special" keynote from Mark Meadows, “What Happened in 2020 and What We Must Do to Protect Future Elections in Georgia."[6]
Arizona
CPI held the Arizona Statewide Election Integrity Summit on March 11 & 12, 2022 in Phoenix, Arizona. The summit featured a number of breakout sessions on elections and a "special" keynote from Mark Meadows, “What Happened in 2020 and What We Must Do to Protect Future Elections in Arizona." The summit also held a "bonus session" on "Special Grassroots Training / Building the Citizens Campaign to Win the Fight for Voter ID in Arizona."[7]
Sponsors of the Arizona event included: AMAC Action, America First Policy Institute, America Pack, Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Election Transparency Initiative, EZAZ.org, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action for America, Public Interest Legal Foundation, Tea Party Patriots Action, Virginia Institute for Public Policy, and Voter Reference Foundation.
Florida
CPI held the Florida Statewide Election Integrity Summit on March 25-26, 2022 in Orlando, Florida. The summit featured a number of breakout sessions on elections and a "special" keynote from Sen. Jim DeMint and a speech from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The summit also held Florida specific sessions, "How Floridians Vote: Mail, Machines, and Role of the USPS – How to Be Citizen Watchdogs", and "What We Must Do to Enhance Florida’s Election Code."[8]
Sponsors of the Florida event included: AMAC Action, Citizens United Foundation, Defend Florida, Foundation for Government Accountability, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action for America, James Madison Institute, Tea Party Patriots Action, and Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
According to a report from AMAC Action, over 400 Floridians attended and other speakers included Cleta Mitchell, Florida state Rep. Cord Byrd, Chair of the Floria Election Commission Nick Primrose, Republican National Committee's Josh Findlay, and Virginia Policy Institute's Lynn Taylor.[9]
Pennsylvania
CPI held the Pennsylvania Statewide Election Integrity Summit on March 31, 2022 in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. The summit featured a number of breakout sessions on elections, a sneak preview of “Rigged": a "New Citizens United Documentary" and a speech by Kristen Eastlick from the Capital Research Center titled “The Real Kraken — How Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg Manipulated the 2020 Election." The summit also held a Pennsylvania specific session, "Understanding Absentee Voting, Recent Court Decisions about No Excuse Absentee Voting in PA, & the Role of US Post Office in Election Mail"[10]
Sponsors of the Pennsylvania event included: AMAC Action, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action for America, Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, Tea Party Patriots Action, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Virginia
CPI scheduled a Virginia Statewide Election Integrity Summit for April 22-23, 2022 in Williamsburg, Virginia. The summit will feature a number of breakout sessions on elections, and a specific session on Virginia titled, "What Did the Virginia Legislature Do this Year? What Remains to Be Done?"[11] A special screening of "Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump", the new documentary from Citizens United will be held. Speakers are not listed for this event.
Sponsors of the Pennsylvania event included: AMAC Action, Heritage Action for America, Middle Resolution, Tea Party Patriots Action, Virginia Fair Elections, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Michigan
CPI scheduled a Michigan Statewide Election Integrity Summit for May 13-14, 2022 in Detroit, Michigan. The summit will feature a number of breakout sessions on elections, and a specific session on Michigan titled, "Building the Michigan Election Integrity Infrastructure".[12] A special screening of "Rigged: The Story of How Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg Manipulated the 2020 Election", the new documentary from Citizens United will be held. Speakers are not listed for this event.
Sponsors of the Michigan event included: AMAC Action, Heritage Action for America, Michigan Election Protection Team, Tea Party Patriots Action, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Ties to the Council for National Policy
CPI's Senior Director of Policy, Rachel Bovard, is a member of the Council for National Policy and Cleta Mitchell is a Board of Governors member as of September 2020. CPI's founding chairman, Jim DeMint, is a member of CNP and served on the organization's Executive Committee as of 2020.
Council for National Policy
The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a secretive, Christian Right organization of funders and activists founded in 1981 by activist Morton Blackwell, commentator Paul Weyrich, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye. Anne Nelson's book about CNP, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes how the organization connects "the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives.”
CNP membership as of September 2020 is available here.
Ties to the Bradley Foundation
CPI receives funding from the Bradley Foundation, and a Bradley board member, Cleta Mitchell, is a CPI Senior Legal Fellow and chairs CPI’s Election Integrity Network.
Bradley Files
In 2017, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of SourceWatch, launched a series of articles on the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, exposing the inner-workings of one of America's largest right-wing foundations. 56,000 previously undisclosed documents laid bare the Bradley Foundation's highly politicized agenda. CMD detailed Bradley's efforts to map and measure right wing infrastructure nationwide, including by dismantling and defunding unions to impact state elections; bankrolling discredited spin doctor Richard Berman and his many front groups; and more.
Find the series here at ExposedbyCMD.org.
Funding
The Conservative Partnership Institute is not required to disclose its funders but major foundation supporters can be found through their IRS filings. Here are some known contributors:
CB Foundation: $25,000 (2017)
Charles L. Shor Foundation for Epilepsy Research: $2,500 (2017)
Chicago Community Trust: $200,000 (2018-2019)
Colbert Foundation: $12,500 (2017)
DonorsTrust: $732,500 (2018-2020)
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation: $2,250,000 (2018-2020)
Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund: $20,000 (2019)
Hamlin Family Foundation: $5,000 (2017)
James F. Causley, Jr. Family Foundation: $5,000 (2018)
Lazof Family Foundation, $2,500 (2018)
Leandro P.Rizzuto Foundation: $100,000 (2020)
Liptak Family Foundation: $25,000 (2020)
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation: $200,000 (2018-2019)
Middlemas Family Foundation: $5,000 (2017)
National Charitable Christian Foundation: $55,000 (2017)
National Philanthropic Trust: $100,000 (2018)
Robert S. and Star Pepper Foundation: $40,000 (2018)
Servant Foundation: $11,000 (2019)
Stanley E Fulton Family Foundation: $500,000 (2019)
Thirteen Foundation: $10,000 (2020)
W. L. Amos, Sr. Foundation: $50,000 (2017)
Woodford Foundation for Limited Government: $1,000 (2018)
Core Financials
2019[13]
Total Revenue: $5,322,860
Total Expenses: $5,168,958
Net Assets: $1,143,614
2018[14]
Total Revenue: $4,328,406
Total Expenses: $4,220,955
Net Assets: $925,080
2017[15]
Total Revenue: $1.787,723
Total Expenses: $995,069
Net Assets: $792,654
Personnel
Staff
As of December 2021:[16]
Jim DeMint, Chairman
Mark Meadows, Senior Partner
Ed Corrigan, President & CEO
Cleta Mitchell, Senior Legal Fellow and chairs CPI’s Election Integrity Network
Wesley Denton, Chief Operating Officer
Rachel Bovard, Senior Director of Policy
Cameron Seward, General Counsel & Director of Operations
Doug Stamps, Counselor to the Chairman
Richard McAdams, Regional Director
Jeffrey Trimbath, Senior Advisor & Director of Legacy Society
Phil Reboli, Director of Government Affairs
Kali Kountoupis, Events Coordinator
Jacqueline Fowler, Senior Coordinator for Development
Mimi Singleton, Government Affairs Coordinator
Tiffany Coutris, Associate Producer
Former Staff
Lauren Kaylor, Government Affairs Coordinator
Jeremy Crane, Policy Outreach Coordinator & Press Assistant
Sallie Taylor, Event Coordinator
Board of Directors
As of December 2019:[13]
James DeMint, Chairman
Edward Corrigan, Executive Director
Wesley Denton, Senior Director for Communications and Operations
Tom Jones
Charlotte Davis
Gaston Mooney
Bret Bernhardt, Treasurer
[[W. Bret Bernhardt
legislative staff member
W. Bret Bernhardt, American legislative staff member.
Background
Bernhardt, W. Bret was born on June 26, 1956 in Stillwater, Oklahoma, United States.
Education
Bachelor in accounting, Oklahoma State University, 1978.
Career
Staff Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company, 1978—1979. Member Oklahoma Republican State Committee, 1979—1980. Legislation assistant, legislation director Senator Don Nickles, Washington, 1981—1988, legislation director, 1991—1996, administrative assistant, 1997—2004, chief of staff, 2004—2006.
Business operator Annapolis, 1989—1990. Chief of staff Senator Jim DeMint, Washington, since 2006.
Achievements
West. Bret Bernhardt has been listed as a noteworthy legislative staff member by Marquis Who's Who.
Connections
Married Ellie Mooney Bernhardt. 4 children.]]
{{ off bs
Bernhardt served as Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation. He brought to the job a background in accounting and small business as well as two decades on Capitol Hill.
Besides acting as a senior adviser to DeMint, Bernhardt manages the day-to-day operations at Heritage. He served as DeMint’s chief of staff in the U.S. Senate from 2005 until January 2013, when the second-term senator from South Carolina stepped down to head the leading conservative think tank.
Bernhardt learned his way around the Hill as an aide to Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) for more than 15 years -- initially as a legislative assistant, then as legislative director and eventually as chief of staff until Nickles’ retirement in 2004.
Newly elected to the Senate, DeMint found his chief of staff in Bernhardt, who identified with the issues DeMint championed in the House. After their close work together during DeMint’s eight years in the Senate, it was no surprise when the new Heritage president asked Bernhardt to take the chief of staff post at the think tank.
Born and raised in Stillwater, Okla., Bernhardt pursued an accounting degree at Oklahoma State University, where he also honed his conservative perspective.
His private sector experience includes operating a small business as co-owner of Party Perfect Rentals in Annapolis, Md., from 1988 to 1990; overseeing fund-raising as finance director of the Oklahoma Republican Party in 1980; and working as a staff accountant for Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. (now KPMG) in Oklahoma City after his graduation from OSU.
Bernhardt and his wife, Ellie, currently reside in Arlington, Va. They have four children who live in the Washington area.}}:
Contact Information
Conservative Partnership Institute
300 Independence Avenue SE
Washington, DC 20003
EIN: 82-147-0217
Website: https://www.conservativepartnership.org/
Web contact form: https://www.conservativepartnership.org/contact
Phone: (202) 742-8988
Fax: (202) 595-0282
Articles and Resources
[990s] annual rept 2021]
related SourceWatch
501(c)(3)
Contributions of the Bradley Foundation
Council for National Policy
Donald Trump
DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund Grant Recipients
DonorsTrust
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation
Forge Leadership Network
Heritage Foundation
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Millennial Debt Foundation
SPN Members
State Policy Network
References
...
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