Mitchell, CLETA

=1119 promote pol op7 22 tag cltaSEE CNP GINNI (brandon, mike lee coup?)
JOKfoley & GpruittmaNAFORThtml Griffin2=wtf? an 11 21 no lnx<h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">cleta Mitchell, who helped then-President Donald Trump try to overturn the election results in Georgia and later helped funnel funds to the pro-Trump "fraudit" in Arizona, has been named to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission.</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Election Assistance Commission (not to be confused with the Federal Election Commission, or FEC,) works with states on voting system guidelines, redistricting, cybersecurity, state voter files, voting by mail, and recounts and audits.</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell, a "fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer" whose work in years past included anti-LGBTQ efforts, was on the infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when Trump asked him to "find 11,780 votes," recorded audio revealed in January. The release of that tape led to Mitchell's resignation from her law firm, Foley & Lardner.</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The news of Mitchell's appointment was reported by the editorial director of Votebeat:</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word;">
</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word;">The Guardian's Sam Levine adds that Mitchell was also "involved in efforts to coordinate new voting restrictions in states this year," pointing to this damning Guardian article from April.</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As Huseman notes, Mitchell told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer in August, "I don't think we can say with certainty who won" the 2020 presidential election, which is false.</h1><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell is a member of the secretive and "shadowy" far right wing Christian nationalist and plutocratic Council for National Policy. Among the group's alleged other members are Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, Liberty Counsel's Mat Stavers, and American Family Association's Tim Wildmon.</h1>=<h4 style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">=https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/25/cleta-mitchell-lawyer-us-voter-suppression
no lnxrepublican lawyer is key player in voter suppression drive across US
Cleta Mitchell has emerged in a series of roles that many see as a Republican push on limiting voting rights
Cleta Mitchcell testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on 6 February 2014. ]Peter Stone in WashingtonSun 25 Apr 2021 0It was an abrupt end to two decades as a partner at legal giant Foley & Lardner for the influential and conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell.Days after Mitchell participated in Donald Trump’s controversial 2 January phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state where the then president pressured him to “find” him more votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win, Mitchell resigned her post in the midst of an internal firm review and mounting criticism.[The Reverend Kenneth Pierce speaks on 13 April at a rally to end voter suppression at the capitol building in Lansing, Michigan. Texas has introduced more bills restricting voter access than any other state.‘Shameless’: Texas Republicans lead the charge on voting clampdownRead more]But Mitchell, a combative and top lawyer in the right’s drive to promote unproven charges of sizable voting fraud in 2020 and tighten future voting laws, was not idle for long. She has now emerged in a series of roles that have put her at the heart of what many see as a ferocious Republican push on limiting voting rights that now reaches across America.Last month, Mitchell was tapped by the libertarian FreedomWorks to spearhead a $10m drive in seven key states including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan to change voting laws to curb potential but unproven election fraud, which many Democrats and legal experts view as aimed at limiting minority votes.According to a FreedomWorks spokesman, another key part of Mitchell’s mission leading its “National Election Protection Initiative”, is to rally opposition to a House-passed bill that in part would expand voting rights nationally which its sponsors see as necessary to counter the conservative assaults on voting rights in many states.Georgia last month enacted a law that makes voting tougher with new curbs on absentee ballots and on voters in heavily Democratic urban and suburban areas, sparking lawsuits from civil rights and liberal groups, plus a sharp attack from Biden.FreedomWorks’ president, Adam Brandon, has hailed Mitchell as “an outspoken advocate and voice of reason for improved election laws, especially during the chaotic 2020 election cycle”, and dubbed her “our guide”, chairing its election initiative, which will also include training and deploying activists in the states to monitor election procedures.Likewise, the Trump-allied Conservative Partnership Institute last month recruited Mitchell as a “senior fellow” with a similar mission. Mitchell told the AP she is working to “coordinate” conservative views on voting to bolster opposition to the House passed voting rights legislation that is pending in the Senate.Mitchell’s FreedomWorks and CPI projects come even as a Georgia DA in Fulton county is looking into whether Trump and others broke laws in pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to block Biden’s win. On that call, Mitchell claimed she had evidence of voting fraud, but officials with Raffensperger’s office disagreed and faulted her data.Some voting rights lawyers say Mitchell could face scrutiny over her role in the call.Donald Trump listens as Cleta Mitchell speaks at the White House on 18 August 2020. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/EPA]Gerry Hebert, who spent over two decades as a senior attorney at the Justice Department’s voting rights section, said in an interview Trump’s actions and words constituted “election interference [and] violated both state law and federal law, and he should be held accountable”.Mitchell “reportedly interjected multiple times during the call in which she tried to support Trump’s allegations of fraud”, he said. “Her role in that call may well be part of the investigation” by the Georgia DA. Hebert added the state bar to which Mitchell belongs “has a responsibility to determine if she committed any violation of the legal ethics rules in that state.Reached by phone, Mitchell declined to comment on her work for the two conservative outfits, or the Georgia inquiry into Trump’s call and whether she might face scrutiny.Historically, the 70-year-old Mitchell has done legal work for many key players on the right including the National Rifle Association where she previously was on the board. A former Democrat and member of the Oklahoma legislature, Mitchell in the 1990s switched parties and moved to DC, where she has given legal counsel to many GOP candidates, campaign committees and non-profits.Mitchell’s new roles with FreedomWorks and CPI underscore the right’s goal of swaying future election results with more voting curbs. The conservative blitz to tighten voting laws in which Heritage Action for America is a key player too, is being fueled by tens of millions of dollars, coupled with allegations that Trump as well as Mitchell and conservative allies have spread about unproven widespread voter fraud in the last elections.In post-election radio interviews, Mitchell has escalated her rhetoric charging that Raffensperger is a “pathological liar” and attacking some GOP leaders in Georgia as “morally bankrupt”, according to the watchdog group Documented.In another radio segment, Mitchell said that last September she told Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, there was a “massive effort to steal the election”.More recently, Mitchell told the AP that she and Trump have been in contact “fairly frequently”, but declined to provide details.Meanwhile, other right leaning groups with which Mitchell has had good ties are engaged in campaigns that seem to overlap those of FreedomWorks and CPI to limit voting rights.For example, Mitchell told the AP: “I’ve been working with state legislatures for several years to get them to pay attention to what I call the political process.”To be sure, Mitchell prior to the election served as outside counsel and helped coordinate a major voting law initiative for the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), an influential group of conservative state legislators which promotes model bills for states. Alec has reportedly been increasingly active this year in pushing its ideas for changing voting laws.Known as well connected in conservative big money circles, Mitchell also serves on the board of the deep pocketed Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, a top donor to many rightwing groups including Alec to which it gave $750,000 dollars in 2020, records show.Further, Mitchell has attended meetings of the famously secretive Council for National Policy, an influential rightwing group that boasts top donors, evangelical leaders and prominent conservatives like FreedomWorks’ Brandon.At a CNP national meeting in mid November one panel featured Mitchell, Christian Adams the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and other lawyers discussing “Election results and legal battles: What now?”Mitchell, who also chairs Pilf, which received $300,000 in 2020 from the Bradley foundation, has indicated it could get active in the legal battles over the new Georgia law.To be sure, some conservatives voice doubts about Mitchell’s legal acumen. An ex senior NRA official who knows Mitchell quipped her views are on the “fringe of the fringe”.And one prominent GOP voting rights lawyer said Mitchell “tells clients what they want to hear regardless of law or reality”. The lawyer predicted Mitchell “will get scrutiny, but probably won’t be charged” in the Georgia DA’s inquiry.=</h4>=1021 an rawOn CNN Wednesday, reporter Sunlen Surfaty did a deep dive into Cleta Mitchell — a little-known pro-Trump lawyer who played a big part in trying to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election."She is not a household name," said Surfaty. "But lawyer Cleta Mitchell is a leader in President Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Named multiple times in a newly released Senate Judiciary report for her role in the pressure campaign on the Department of Justice to investigate unfounded claims of election fraud."Surfaty then documented the ways Mitchell pushed to have the 2020 election results overturned, including emailing then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about purported evidence she'd collected about election fraud in Georgia.Mitchell was also heard on Trump's infamous January 2nd call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom he encouraged to "find" 12,000 votes needed to overtake President Joe Biden in the state."Her investment with Trump came as a surprise to many, including her law firm, and led to her swift departure," said Surfaty. "Mitchell was first pulled in 24 hours after election day as she recounts in a little noticed podcast viewed by CNN.""I got a call from Mark Meadows," said Mitchell in the podcast. "I flew to Atlanta, and I — and thus began my involvement with the post-election."Later, Mitchell was involved in the failed "audit" of votes in Arizona, which actually gave Biden a bigger lead over Trump than the official state count.Watch the full report below:=COUP
4. "Trump allies with links to the 'Stop the Steal' movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ."The report included a brief list of the Trump allies who have been accused of pressuring DOJ officials to do the former president's bidding. Those individuals also had ties to the former president's "Stop the Steal" movement and the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that followed Trump's rally on January 6.They are:<ul class="ee-ul" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.438px;"><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.): The report indicates that the Republican lawmaker spoke directly to Donoghue about baseless claims of election fraud in his state.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano (R): As an avid Trump ally, Mastriano reportedly "spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account to provide transportation for Trump supporters to attend the 'Save America Rally' on January 6." The report also indicates that he "was present on the Capitol grounds as the insurrection unfolded." Like Perry, Mastriano also spoke with Donoghue in reference to unfounded claims of election fraud in Pennsylvania.</li><li style="">Trump campaign legal advisor Cleta Mitchell: Described as one of the earliest advocates for Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, the Senate report also notes Mitchell was a "participant in the January 2, 2021 call where Trump 5 pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find 11,780 votes.'"</li></ul><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><a href="https://crooksandliars.com/2021/09/newly-released-documents-show-az-fraudit" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://crooksandliars.com/2021/09/newly-released-documents-show-az-fraudit</a></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">it is not like we didn’t already know that the so-called audit is a fraudit. But the American Oversight group has recently obtained thousands of pages of records related to the “audit” as the result of a public records lawsuit.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">American Oversight is still reviewing the records. VICE News notes that the trove includes communications that suggest Donald Trump wanted to fund it and that his allies were involved from the start.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">one prominent Trump ally who turns up in the documents is Trump’s former chief of staff and former RNC chair Reince Priebus. American Oversight found that audit spokesman Randy Pullen texted Priebus in December, before Pullen was officially involved in the audit.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">That month, Pullen texted Priebus to tell him about the potential for a “Forensic audit,” and in March asked Priebus for “suggestions on election audit firms.” (Priebus said he would check.) Another text from Pullen to [AZ Republican Committee’s Bruce] Ash, sent on March 8, appears to reference Priebus: “I texted Reince and ask if he would like to help out on the audit,” Pullen said, then followed up to say they were speaking later that morning.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Trump lawyers also show up in the documents. They communicated with with OAN “reporter” Christina Bobb, who helped launch the fraudit, helped fund it and was given special access to its proceedings. More from American Oversight:</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In December, according to records previously obtained by American Oversight, One America News reporter Christina Bobb — who later began raising money for the “audit” — provided Fann [Arizona's Senate president] with purported “evidence” of voter fraud, writing that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had “asked me to send you these declarations.” The newly released records include a group text from March 31 involving Fann and Bobb, with Giuliani also included, in which Fann passes along a document with a title that began “Pres. Fann audit hiring.”</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Another Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, was also looped in on a number of communications, including an Aug. 2 email chain started by Scott Sigman, a Pennsylvania attorney who appears to be handling the issuing of checks related to the “audit.” Sigman emailed Mitchell, Logan, Pullen, and Thomas Datwyler (the treasurer of a group called the American Voting Rights Foundation) seeking signatures for payments.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Then there is Shiva Ayyadurai, aka “Dr. Shiva,” an anti-vaxxer, pro-Trumper who dubiously claims he invented email and has falsely accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of being hellbent on forced and mandatory vaccines. American Oversight reported that its newly-obtained documents include a signed contract between Cyber Ninjas, the unqualified firm conducting the audit, and Ayyadurai.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Priebus plans to bring Dr. Shiva to Wisconsin for its "investigation":</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Last month, Priebus reportedly said during an interview that the Wisconsin investigation would be bringing in “Dr. Shiva.” https://t.co/232ivCy3ol</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">— American Oversight (@weareoversight) September 1, 2021</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Some of the frauditors made some darned good money, too!</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Some of the positions paid up to $125/hour. pic.twitter.com/RPY7XYpymB</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">— TRAPEZOID OF DISCOVERY (@get_innocuous) September 1, 2021</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">There’s still plenty left to be discovered. VICE notes that 2,500 of the Arizona Senate’s most sensitive documents, including almost all direct communications with Cyber Ninjas and CEO Doug Logan, have been withheld as privileged. Meanwhile, you can dive into the documents already released here.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">omg </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The New Yorker</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A Reporter at Large</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">August 9, 2021 Issue</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Big Money Behind the Big Lie</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By Jane Mayer</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">August 2, 2021</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits with telltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Society founding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell, who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in the state had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values. By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton. He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.? Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based group that, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams, and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="">More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the Independent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="">Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Although the law bars charitable organizations such as the Council for National Policy from engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="">By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president, echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committee and a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor. In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformation about the coming elections. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality. Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracy was another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined the Federalist Society, the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.” At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network—a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiative has set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” ?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div>=ginni pal
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Thomas remained active on Facebook, condemning Black Lives Matter, opposing COVID-19 shutdowns, and touting the “Walk Away” movement, which purports to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. (At least two individuals featured in the “Walk Away” series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.) She also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the president. Cleta Mitchell, the Republican lawyer who participated in Trump’s shakedown of the Georgia secretary of state, led the project.After Nov. 3, Thomas grew uncharacteristically quiet on Facebook; she did not share popular conspiracy theories about election fraud, perhaps because election challenges would inevitably come before her husband. She provided her clearest statement yet on Jan. 6, when she enthusiastically endorsed the D.C. rally designed to make Congress overturn the election result and give Trump a second term. There is no evidence that Thomas personally attended the rally, and her posts indicate that she watched the events on TV from another location.----=ref<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/04/ginni-thomas-trump-conservative-group/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://theintercept.com/2019/06/04/ginni-thomas-trump-conservative-group/</a>lee nick s<div data-reactid="240" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">CONSERVATIVE ACTIVIST VIRGINIA “Ginni” Thomas is launching yet another project to wage war on multiple fronts of America’s most heated cultural and political debates. This time, however, her plan will include a project to “protect President Trump” using at least two new campaign-related political entities, according to a presentation obtained by The Intercept and Documented.Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, unveiled the new venture in a closed meeting of GOP lawmakers, donors, and Christian-right leaders last month, seeming to make reference to the movement disarray and electoral losses suffered by conservatives in the Trump era — and the gains made by left-wing groups and politicians.</div><div data-reactid="244" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">The sweeping presentation covered a range of topics, including the “mob tactics” used by leftists against those wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and how the “hard left” has co-opted “the corporate community” to support a ban on housing and employment discrimination against LGBTQ people.“Our house is on fire and we are stomping ants in the driveway. We’re not really focused on the arsonists who are right around us,” Ginni Thomas said.Some of the most controversial icons in conservative circles will be involved with other branches of Thomas’s new project, which is dubbed “Crowdsourcers.” One such project is titled “Protect Our Heroes,” led by conservative <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/10/18/james-okeefe-project-veritas-claire-mccaskill/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">filmmaker</a> and provocateur James O’Keefe.The node of the project focused on political campaigns — slated to do business under the name “American D-Day” — will be set up by Cleta Mitchell, a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer and partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner. D-Day will include a 501(c)(4) arm that can solicit undisclosed donations and a separate PAC registered with the Federal Elections Commission.O’Keefe and Thomas did not respond to requests for comment. Mitchell, in response to an inquiry from The Intercept, wrote that it was not her “role to answer any questions on this. Sorry.” Asked who to contact about the new venture, Mitchell wrote, “No one. None of your business.”THOMAS AND MITCHELL announced the suite of projects at an invite-only gathering hosted by the Council for National Policy in McLean, Virginia, in mid-May. The CNP meetings are influential and secretive gatherings designed to advance a hard-edged view of social and political causes.At the CNP event, Thomas issued a dark warning about a “cultural revolution,” a confrontation conservatives might lose unless they “help explain to America the fight against America.”</div><div data-reactid="248" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">The campaign entities and O’Keefe project are among several initiatives to be “incubated” by Thomas’s Crowdsourcers initiative. The presentation lists efforts to “Build Robust Infrastructure,” led by Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer of the American Legislative Exchange Council, and “Brand the Left: You’ve Been Lied To!” led by direct-mail consultant Richard Viguerie.</div>=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-georgia-2649764070">https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-georgia-2649764070</a>Cleta Mitchell, a conservative attorney and activist who assisted President Donald Trump during his call to the Georgia Secretary of State during which <a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2021/01/audio-trump-threatens-and-berates-georgia-official-to-recalculate-election-and-find-11780-votes/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; outline: 0px;">he tried to overturn the results of the election</a> has resigned from Foley & Lardner, the prestigious "white shoe" law firm at which she was a partner.In a letter to clients Mitchell claimed there had been "a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups via social media and other means against me, my law firm, and clients of the law firm, because of my personal involvement with President Trump, his campaign and the White House," the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-legal-adviser-georgia-phone-call-leak" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Washington Examiner</a> reports.Mitchell has a long history of working against LGBTQ people, Democrats, and of working to gin up false claims of voter fraud, which often are attempts to disenfranchise minority groups. Ironically, Mitchell appeared at the White House alongside President Trump (photo) last August to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote – something her activism works to block.She is the Chairperson of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-voter-fraud-special-repo/special-report-how-a-small-group-of-u-s-lawyers-pushed-voter-fraud-fears-into-the-mainstream-idUSKBN2601GZ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Reuters</a> reports said was part of a group "determined to push back on what she called a 'very well-planned-out assault' by Democrats and progressives to manipulate the system by attempting to change the rules on counting ballots after Election Day," which is false.Foley & Lardner, ranked 59th among U.S. law firms, distanced itself from Mitchell after news broke of her involvement with Trump's possibly illegal phone call."We are aware of, and are concerned by, Ms. Mitchell's participation in the January 2 conference call and are working to understand her involvement more thoroughly," the firm said in <a href="https://www.foley.com/en/insights/news/2021/01/firm-response-reports-partner-cleta-mitchells" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">a statement</a> Monday.By Tuesday she was gone from Foley & Lardner, which even scrubbed her bio from its online directory.<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-georgia-2649491077/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Trump is asking Georgia voters to help GOP Senate candidates ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/georgia-electors/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060690411" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060690411</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="headline featured_image_headline" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Where in the world is Scott Pruitt?</h1><section class="byline" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0.25em 0px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.eenews.net/staff/Kevin_Bogardus" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Kevin Bogardus</a>, E&E News reporter <time datetime="2019-07-03 13:22:58 -0400" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Greenwire: Wednesday,</time><time datetime="2019-07-03 13:22:58 -0400" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> July 3, 2019</time></section></div><div style="">A year ago this week, Scott Pruitt was spotted on the White House lawn for Fourth of July celebrations. By the following day, the then-EPA administrator was on his way out.On July 5, 2018, President Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1014956568129892352?s=20" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: 700; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">announced</a> on Twitter that he had accepted Pruitt's resignation. That was the culmination of months of headline-grabbing ethics scandals, forcing Pruitt from office and subsequently the public spotlight.As the anniversary of his exit from EPA approaches, Pruitt — a longtime public figure in Oklahoma as state senator, attorney general and minor league baseball team co-owner — has taken on a more withdrawn persona.The ex-EPA chief's past champions in Washington, D.C., have not been in touch with him.Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in an interview last week that he hasn't spoken with Pruitt since around the time of his resignation from EPA."My answer to your question is I haven't talked to him since that time," Inhofe said.For the past year, EPA observers have played a game of "Where's Waldo?" — replacing the bespectacled children's book hero with Pruitt.Last fall, the former administrator was spotted at a Kentucky Coal Association meeting. In March, he spoke at the Dallas County Republican Party's annual Reagan Day Dinner in Texas. This April, he registered as a lobbyist in Indiana on behalf of a Hallador Energy Co. subsidiary in an effort to save coal power plants. And he has been consulting for coal CEO Joseph Craft, The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/scott-pruitt-epa-expenses/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4f55dbe549e6" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: 700; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">reported</a>.One reporter even <a href="https://twitter.com/KnickmeyerEllen/status/1121479371179667459?s=20" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: 700; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">tweeted</a> that Pruitt was seen on a treadmill in a Tulsa, Okla., gym."He just sort of disappeared after he resigned," said Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment, who said he last talked to Pruitt before he resigned. "He is doing what he is doing. He is keeping a low profile."Pruitt resigned from EPA last July facing allegations that he had abused his public office. Andrew Wheeler, his deputy administrator, took over and was later confirmed by the Senate this February as head of the agency.Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was a vocal critic of the former administrator."I fought his nomination as hard as I fought any nomination, and every now and then, I feel vindicated," Carper said about Pruitt.Pruitt didn't respond to voicemails from E&E News for this story. An automatic reply from his email account — signed with a "blessings to you" valediction — said he is transitioning it to receive messages only from friends and family.<p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin: 1em 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cleta Mitchell, a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP and counsel to Pruitt, also didn't respond to questions.Pruitt has seemingly sought to put the EPA chapter of his life behind him."Scott and Marlyn are doing well and moving forward with their lives," said Nick Garland, senior pastor of First Baptist Church Broken Arrow, in an email, referring also to Pruitt's wife. Pruitt and his family have attended the church for decades.Garland was responding to an E&E News interview request for this story, which he declined.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/climate/pruitt-coal-consulting.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/climate/pruitt-coal-consulting.html</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">wASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency who championed deregulation of the fossil fuel industry, is in discussions to work as a consultant to the Kentucky coal mining tycoon Joseph W. Craft III.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Pruitt has remained largely out of the public eye since parting ways with the Trump administration in July under a cloud of ethics investigations into matters including his ties to fossil fuel industry executives with business before the agency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Craft, the chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners and a major Republican donor, enjoyed a close relationship with the E.P.A. during Mr. Pruitt’s tenure. Mr. Craft met with Mr. Pruitt at least seven times in Mr. Pruitt’s first 14 months at the agency and in December provided him with courtside seats at a University of Kentucky basketball game, a school where Mr. Craft is a prominent supporter.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The former E.P.A. chief laid out his plans to develop a new consulting firm in one-on-one discussions with several executives during a Kentucky Coal Association meeting last week, according to industry officials familiar with Mr. Pruitt’s appearance and activities there. An executive with Mr. Craft’s company, Alliance Resources, confirmed the discussions in a statement Wednesday.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Any discussions that occurred between Mr. Craft and Mr. Pruitt are preliminary, and do not involve him becoming an employee of Alliance Resource Partners,” said Heath Lovell, vice president for public affairs at Alliance, in the statement. “Obviously, any discussions would not involve lobbying the federal government.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Under an ethics pledge imposed by President Trump, Mr. Pruitt would be barred from directly lobbying the E.P.A. for five years in any new role, but he would not be restricted from working as a private consultant advising the company on E.P.A. related matters or working on the state level to influence regulatory policy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of the two executives familiar with Mr. Pruitt’s plans said that he would not be lobbying the federal government and would “not do anything inconsistent with his legal and ethical requirements.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Pruitt, whose tenure at E.P.A. was marked by secrecy and security, did not publicize his speech to the Kentucky Coal Association, and the trade organization did not list him on its website among its featured speakers. Tyler White, the president of the association, acknowledged Mr. Pruitt’s presence at the event after it was pointed out that he was photographed sitting with Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The association invited Mr. Pruitt “because we strive to provide our membership with high quality speakers who have unique experience, knowledge or expertise on issues impacting our industry,” Mr. White said in a statement. “Also, as a native Kentuckian, we were especially proud to have him speak,” he said. Mr. White said Mr. Pruitt had not been paid to address the meeting.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">His remarks there were among the first public comments Mr. Pruitt has made since leaving the Trump administration. Coal industry officials as well as some Oklahoma political leaders said they welcomed his re-entry into the regulatory arena.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It makes sense,” said Dewey F. Bartlett Jr., an oil executive and former mayor of Tulsa. “I know Joe Craft and the coal industry feel that they’ve been unfairly targeted by the E.P.A. and the various regulators, either state or federal, that oversee the coal mining industry. So working with a person like Scott Pruitt — who has given them, from their perspective, a fairer regulatory environment than the previous administration — would be a good fit.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Democrats and environmentalists criticized Mr. Pruitt’s new role, while saying they weren’t surprised.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Scott Pruitt has always been doing the dirty work for coal millionaires,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “The only difference is now he’ll be paid by them directly rather than ripping off the taxpayer.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represented Mr. Pruitt while he was at the E.P.A., did not return emails or phone calls seeking comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Both Mr. Craft and Mr. Pruitt are originally from Kentucky and later moved to Oklahoma, where Mr. Pruitt served in the state legislature and then as the state attorney general before he was nominated to take over the E.P.A. Alliance Resources is based in Tulsa, Okla.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As attorney general, Mr. Pruitt sought to protect the coal industry and coal-burning power plants from federal regulation. Mr. Craft was a financial supporter of Mr. Pruitt’s political causes. After Mr. Pruitt joined the E.P.A., he continued to advance policies that benefited the coal industry.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Separately on Wednesday, the E.P.A. made public a long-delayed financial disclosure report for Mr. Pruitt covering 2017. That period includes the time when Mr. Pruitt was living in a Capitol Hill condominium that he was renting from the spouse of an energy lobbyist for $50 a night, an arrangement that triggered one of several investigations into his actions and oversight at the agency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The 2017 financial disclosure form does not list the Capitol Hill condo as a gift, a step that some suggested Mr. Pruitt might take, based on the widely held view that he was paying below market value for the unit. (Previously, Mr. Pruitt has denied that it was a below-market-value arrangement.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the time of the rental, Mr. Pruitt was the target of lobbying by the spouse of the condo’s co-owner, J. Steven Hart. Until earlier this year, Mr. Hart was the chairman of the Williams & Jensen lobbying firm.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The form does appear to address the condo question indirectly. The document states that Mr. Pruitt was aware of allegations that “certain actions or activities during 2017” may constitute gifts that require inclusion in the disclosure report. “To the extent that I am aware of specific allegations, I dispute the facts asserted and, accordingly, am not aware of reportable gifts,” the document says. “In the event that there are any future findings to the contrary, I will address the issue at that time and amend this report as directed and/or as necessary.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Pruitt could not be reached for comment and Ms. Mitchell did not respond to questions about the former administrator’s financial report.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The 2017 financial disclosure report (which covers only last year, not the part of 2018 when Mr. Pruitt still led the E.P.A.) also shows that Mr. Pruitt’s wife, Marlyn Pruitt, earned between $15,000 and $50,000 over that time working as a consultant. During his time at the agency, Mr. Pruitt had asked senior aides to help his wife find employment as a consultant, which they did, helping her secure paid work for a conservative judicial group and New York nonprofit organization.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Pruitt’s requests to staff members to help his wife find work are the subject of investigations into his management of the E.P.A.; asking federal government aides to help with personal financial matters may be a violation of federal rules.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The 2017 financial disclosure also lists as much as $300,000 in legal fees from two law firms, debts Mr. Pruitt did not have previously, and that likely reflect his need to hire legal assistance after he became the subject of investigations into his oversight and actions at the E.P.A.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Pruitt in the past has denied allegations of any wrongdoing. In his resignation letter to Mr. Trump he wrote, “the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The former E.P.A. administrator’s next career steps have been the source of interest particularly in Oklahoma, where he is seen as a potential candidate for the United States Senate or to be governor.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/</a><div class="mce-content-body" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear;"><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/04/ginni-thomas-trump-conservative-group/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">an article published by The Intercept</a> this week.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/council-for-national-policy/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">Council for National Policy</a> last month. The CNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/why-has-the-religious-right-embraced-neo-confederate-michael-peroutka/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka</a>. CNP members <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/secretive-council-for-national-policy-pushing-trump-to-sign-religious-liberty-order/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty</a>.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations. Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political trickster James O’Keefe; Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell;and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/american-legislative-exchange-council/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">American Legislative Exchange Council</a>, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/seven-mountains/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">Seven Mountain</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/seven-mountains/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">s Dominionism</a>.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">This January, <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hate-had-a-meeting-in-the-white-house/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">Thomas organized a White House meeting</a> where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-coalition-pushing-freedom-caucus-founder-jim-jordan-to-run-for-house-speaker/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">mobilized</a> a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">Thomas <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-gives-awards-to-james-okeefe-sean-hannity-frank-gaffney-other-right-wing-activists/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity</a> in 2017. In 2016, TPM <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/virginia-thomas-scotus-christian-adams-voter-fraud-campaign" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">reported</a> that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;">Thomas also <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-and-jesse-lee-peterson-discuss-evil-black-lives-matter-illusion-of-racism/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson</a> for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/405437-clarence-thomas-wife-hires-ex-tpusa-staffer-who-once-said-i-hate" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">hired</a> a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conservative-nonprofit-that-seeks-to-transform-college-campuses-faces-allegations-of-racial-bias-and-illegal-campaign-activity" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em;">published</a> screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.</div></div>=<div><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/10/paul-manafort-lawyer-mysterious-payment-hidden-chapter-of-trump-2016-campaign.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/10/paul-manafort-lawyer-mysterious-payment-hidden-chapter-of-trump-2016-campaign.html</a></div><div>
</div><div>Recent court filings are shedding new light on a mysterious $125,000 payment to lawyers for Paul Manafort, paid by a firm that has not been identified until now.</div><div><div class="KeyPoints-keyPoints" id="KeyPoints-5" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 30px;"><div class="KeyPoints-wrapper" style="box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: 100%; max-width: 100%; border-top: 6px solid rgb(0, 47, 108); padding-top: 30px; border-bottom: 1px dotted rgb(155, 155, 155); display: flex;"><div class="KeyPoints-list" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.375; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: 85.7143%; max-width: 85.7143%;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin: 0px; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: 100%; max-width: 100%;"><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 30px -15px; padding: 0px 30px 0px 18px; list-style: none; display: block; position: relative; line-height: 1.375;">The firm is called Multi Media Services Corporation, and its silent owner is Tony Fabrizio, a longtime Manafort associate and the chief pollster on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.</li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 30px -15px; padding: 0px 30px 0px 18px; list-style: none; display: block; position: relative; line-height: 1.375;">The route this money traveled, from its origin as a donation made to a pro-Trump political group, to its final destination in the bank account of Manafort’s attorney, offers a window into relationships Manafort built over decades. ...Recent court filings from special counsel Robert Mueller shed new light on a mysterious payment to lawyers for Paul Manafort, the onetime chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.The payment, for $125,000, was made in June 2017, halfway through Trump’s first year in office. But it wasn’t disclosed publicly until late last year, when prosecutors accused Manafort <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5684993-Manafort-SPC-Support-of-Breach.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">in court filings</a> of repeatedly lying to them about where the money actually came from. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of tax evasion and bank fraud, and sentenced in Virginia on Thursday to 47 months in prison. He faces another sente... In the world of presidential campaign fundraising, where millions of dollars are often raised and spent in a matter of weeks, $125,000 can seem like a drop in the bucket.But the route this money traveled, from its origin as a donation made to a pro-Trump political group, to its final destination in the bank account of Manafort’s attorney, offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of relationships Manafort built over 40 years in Republican politics.These relationships have drawn fresh scrutiny in recent weeks. Both Manafort and another key figure in this story, Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, were among 81 individuals and entities that received formal document requests on Monday from the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating a broad range of potential presidential misdeeds.The path taken by this $125,000 also highlights the ways that Manafort took advantage of the Trump campaign’s underdeveloped leadership structure to install his allies in top positions across the Trump political landscape.Nowhere was this more evident than in the murky, loosely regulated world of super PACs and other political “dark money” groups, which are permitted to raise unlimited amounts of money from donors as long as they don’t “coordinate” directly with campaigns, a legal standard that leaves plenty of room for interpretation. In this world, Manafort’s longtime associates could hold key positions, and oversee the raising and spending of huge sums of money, often with little to no direct oversight.<div id="MidResponsive-ArticleBody-6" class="" style="box-sizing: border-box; position: sticky; max-width: 300px; margin: auto;">One of these positions was leading a pro-Trump super PAC that Manafort helped to establish in June 2016 calledRebuilding America Now.To run the group, Manafort tapped an old friend, Connecticut-based lobbyist Laurance “Laury” Gay. A former official in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, Gay went on to work at Manafort’s lobbying firm in the late 1980s. He is also the godfather to one of Manafort’s daughters.With Manafort’s blessing and Gay at its helm, Rebuilding America Now raised more than $24 million between June and December 2016, more than any other pro-Trump super PAC did during the entire election.</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">According to the transcript from a Feb. 4 hearing in Manafort’s trial, prosecutors believe that in 2017, Rebuilding America Now under Gay’s leadership also played a central role in what they describe as a “scheme” to provide Manafort with “a way of getting cash” out of his time as the unpaid chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign.</div><div class="ArticleBody-subtitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 105.703px; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3px;">The payment</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">Manafort’s decision to take a volunteer job at the top of Trump’s presidential campaign drew national attention to his lobbying career. By the summer of 2017, Manafort was the target of multiple investigations into his <a href="https://apnews.com/20cfc75c82eb4a67b94e624e97207e23" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">personal finances</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/us/politics/paul-manafort-russia-senate-intelligence-trump.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">campaign work</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-22/paul-manafort-s-lucrative-ukraine-years-are-central-to-the-russia-probe" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">foreign lobbying</a>.Faced with mounting legal bills, Manafort reached out to Gay in June of that year and asked him to arrange a $125,000 payment to Manafort’s lawyers, according to both <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5684993-Manafort-SPC-Support-of-Breach.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">prosecutors and Manafort’s defense attorneys</a>. Rather than give Manafort the money himself, however, Gay called someone else.“At the request of Paul Manafort, Laury [Gay] asked that funds be forwarded to an entity designated by Mr. Manafort to assist with his legal expenses,” said Anthony J. Iacullo, a criminal defense attorney who represents Gay, in a recent interview with The New York Times.It’s not clear why Manafort asked for this specific amount. In an emailed response to CNBC, Iacullo said Gay “has not been charged with any wrongdoing nor has he done anything that violates any federal or state laws.” He added that “out of an abundance of caution and respect for the process itself, we decline to comment any further at this time.”CNBC attempted to reach Gay several times, but the phone at Gay’s Canaan, Connecticut-based consulting firm, Business Strategies & Insight, had been disconnected.In order to get the $125,000, Gay reached out to someone else, whose name is redacted in court filings. Prosecutors described the person as having “a long relationship” with Manafort. Manafort’s defense attorneys said the person had “been a vendor on all these campaigns [Manafort has] used in the past.”Crucially, in a January court filing the special counsel also noted that this person ran a firm that had been paid “approximately $19 million” by the super PAC that Gay was running in 2016.There is only one firm that received anything near $19 million from Rebuilding America Now. And reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that this firm received almost exactly $19 million, leaving little doubt about which firm it was that prosecutors were referring to.It is a political ad-buying firm called Multi Media Services Corporation, or MMSC, based in Alexandria, Virginia.At first glance, MMSC appears to be a small, two-man shop with no obvious ties to Manafort or anyone else with whom Manafort has “a long relationship.” Moreover, there are no signs that either of the principals at MMSC was ever “a vendor on all these campaigns [Manafort has] used in the past,” which is how Manafort’s lawyers described the person who ran this firm.But there is more to MMSC than meets the eye. Interviews and corporate records unearthed by CNBC have revealed that MMSC has a silent owner: Tony Fabrizio, a longtime Manafort associate and the chief pollster on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.Fabrizio’s dual role as: a) the owner of MMSC, which was the biggest vendor to the top pro-Trump super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, and b) the Trump campaign’s lead pollster, has not been reported until now.As for the source of the $125,000, CNBC has also uncovered a compelling detail buried in one of the hundreds of exhibits that Mueller’s prosecutors have entered into the record in the case against Manafort in Washington.This one appears to be a bank transfer record of the payment itself.Under the heading “Debit Information” there is a line on the transfer record that reads “Account: MMSC SECONDARY - 7107 - Checking - $132,087.56.”Again, MMSC is the acronym for Multi Media Services Corporation. Two political operatives who spoke to CNBC referred to the firm by its acronym.<img src="https://fm-static.cnbc.com/awsmedia/chart/2019/2/10/MMSC%20Transfer%20document.1552226202966.png" class="inlineChart" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: block; width: 610px;" />CNBC tried repeatedly over several weeks to reach Fabrizio, but he did not respond to emails or phone messages left for him.To be clear, at no point in any publicly available filings does Mueller suggest that Fabrizio or MMSC committed any crimes. On the contrary, details that appear to have been provided by Fabrizio are cited frequently as evidence of Manafort’s alleged misdeed: lying to prosecutors about the source of the $125,000.Manafort’s lawyers deny that he lied. They told the court that he was merely confused or misremembered during each of the three interviews where he told the government three different stories about where the money came from.Legal experts also told CNBC that there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with what Fabrizio appears to have done, namely, use money from a firm he controls to make a payment on someone else’s behalf.In addition to Fabrizio, Manafort and Gay, CNBC also reached out to former Rebuilding America Now political director Ken McKay, former general counsel Cleta Mitchell and finance director Christina Culver. None responded to emailed questions about the group or about their work for it.The connection between Fabrizio, Manafort and the money sent to Manafort’s lawyers from MMSC is only the latest chapter in a relationship between the two men that dates back more than 20 years.</div><div class="ArticleBody-subtitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 105.703px; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3px;">Fabrizio’s role</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">In 1996, Fabrizio and Manafort worked together on the failed presidential <a href="https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article82021592.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">campaign</a> of former Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole. Then, as in 2016, Manafort was initially brought on board to manage the delegates at the 1996 Republican National Convention, while Fabrizio worked as the Dole campaign’s pollster.Since then, Fabrizio has also done work for some of Manafort’s most controversial clients. In 2012 and 2013, foreign lobbying records show that Manafort paid Fabrizio $278,000 for work Fabrizio did to help Manafort’s political clients in Ukraine.Fabrizio’s role in Manafort’s Ukrainian lobbying wasn’t revealed until a year after Trump was elected, however, when Manafort was required to file a foreign agent registration form with the Justice Department. On it, he listed five separate payments to Fabrizio, as well as payments to various other subcontractors.Three years after they worked together on the Ukraine job, Manafort hired Fabrizio again, in May 2016, <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/way-too-early/watch/trump-hires-pollster-in-general-election-shift-687085123673?cid=sm_tw_mojoe" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">this time to work for the Trump presidential campaign</a>.At the time, Fabrizio’s hiring was greeted with fanfare in Republican circles, where it was viewed as a sign that Trump’s chaotic, bare-bones primary operation was maturing into a national presidential campaign, one capable of taking on the massive machine backing Democrat Hillary Clinton.Meanwhile, the fact that Trump had hired a pollster at all <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-hires-pollster-after-previously-attacking-them-n575111" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">was newsworthy</a>, coming, as it did, after months of the candidate insisting that political pollsters were a waste of money.“One of Paul Manafort’s best decisions was hiring Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio to determine how to beat Hillary Clinton,” wrote Roger Stone, a longtime friend of Manafort’s, Trump’s and Fabrizio’s, in his 2017 <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SGeCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT485&lpg=PT485&dq=fabrizio+manafort+florida&source=bl&ots=OTBWB78xzO&sig=ACfU3U13UBdkd800G_dzlNshZbIUGUAFmA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjztKyirfnfAhWMGt8KHThOBes4PBDoATAJegQIBRAB#v=onepage&q=fabrizio%20manafort%20florida&f=false" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">book</a>, “The Making of a President.”“In the end, it was the pugnacious and bulldog-like Fabrizio who insisted that the Trump campaign had to expand the map into Wisconsin and Michigan, while doubling down on Pennsylvania,” Stone wrote.Stone was arrested earlier this year on charges that included lying to Congress about his contacts in 2016 with Wikileaks, which published thousands of emails allegedly stolen from the Clinton campaign by Russian state hackers.Two weeks after Manafort hired Fabrizio to poll for the campaign, Manafort and longtime Trump ally Tom Barrack set up the Rebuilding America Now super PAC so they could raise millions at a time from wealthy GOP donors to help Trump, who was reportedly growing tired of spending his own money to fund his campaign.Five days after Rebuilding America Now was formed on June 2, campaign finance records show that it made its first payment to MMSC, Fabrizio’s ad-buying firm, for a $1 million ad buy. According to prosecutors, Rebuilding America Now hired MMSC “at Manafort’s suggestion.”The rapid succession of these hirings — first Manafort to chair the campaign, then Fabrizio to poll for the campaign, then Gay to run Rebuilding America Now, then Fabrizio’s ad-buying firm to buy the airtime for Rebuilding America Now — offer a striking example of how Manafort turned his unpaid role on the Trump campaign into an opportunity to secure lucrative work for his longtime associates.In hindsight, however, this work appears to have come at a high cost to those who did it.On March 4, Fabrizio was one of more than 80 members of Trump’s extended political and professional orbits to receive a formal letter from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. In it, Nadler wrote that the committee is investigating “allegations of obstruction of justice, public corruption, and abuses of power” by Trump and those around him.According to the letter, the documents Nadler’s committee is seeking from Fabrizio include anything related to “discussions or attempts to provide or receive election information, campaign data, or campaign communications with, to, or from foreign entities or individuals in connection with the 2016 U.S. Presidential primary or general elections.”The letter goes on to say: “this includes, but is not limited to, voter data, polling information, political ad targeting, voter registration rolls, social media data, and campaign or party e-mails.”The special counsel’s interest in hearing from Fabrizio predates the Judiciary Committee’s letter by more than a year, however. In early February 2018, Fabrizio was seen by CNN leaving the special counsel’s office in Washington. The network later confirmed that he had been meeting with members of Mueller’s team.</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">More recently, court filings in the Manafort case also repeatedly mentioned another interview with an individual who appeared to be Fabrizio, this one conducted on Nov. 6, 2018.Prosecutors said this individual provided accurate details about the $125,000 payment and how it was arranged, that they were later able to corroborate with text messages and bank records.The individual also described a financial relationship between MMSC and Rebuilding America Now that was more complicated than it initially appeared in the campaign finance reports that the super PAC submitted to the FEC.</div><div class="ArticleBody-subtitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 105.703px; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3px;">Unusually high commission rates</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">According to the account of the individual who appears to be Fabrizio, Rebuilding America Now agreed to pay Fabrizio’s firm a surprisingly high commission rate, 6 percent, on its media buys during Trump’s 2016 campaign.The reason for this above-average rate, the person said to prosecutors, was that “half the commission was to be provided to” the head of Rebuilding America Now, in this case, Gay. They also said the commission split “was not reflected in the written contract” between MMSC and Rebuilding America Now.This wasn’t the first time that questions had come up about the commission rates Rebuilding America Now was paying for its ad buys.During the 2016 presidential race, potential donors to the PAC also reportedly questioned the rates, along with other elements of Rebuilding America Now’s spending.“The main question is where the money is going,” an attendee at a Rebuilding America Now fundraising meeting during the Republican National Convention told <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/politics/trump-super-pac-paul-manafort-rick-scott/index.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">CNN</a> in the summer of 2016. During that meeting, specific questions were also raised “about the super PAC’s commission rates,” the attendee said.Commission rates on political ad buys are particularly difficult to track, because campaigns and groups like Rebuilding America Now are not required to report them separately from the money they spend to air the ads themselves.So, for example, if a super PAC reported an expense of $20 million paid to an ad-buying firm, it would be impossible to tell how much of that money went to the firm as commissions, and how much of it was actually spent to buy airtime.But “if Gay and Rebuilding America Now knew that 3 percent of all commissions paid to Multi Media Services Corporation would be routed back to Gay, those transactions should have been reported to the FEC as payments to Gay” and not merely as commissions to MMSC, said Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the nonprofit watchdog group The Campaign Legal Center.Federal campaign finance law requires that PACs, like political campaigns, accurately report their expenditures to the FEC.“If a payment is made to one vendor with the intention that it be directed to another person or subvendor, and that recipient isn’t disclosed, then the committee has violated the law” by failing to disclose their expenditures accurately, Fischer said.Gay’s attorney declined to respond to questions about the commission split from CNBC, as did Fabrizio.But the alleged existence of a secret commission split wasn’t the only thing about the relationship between MMSC and Rebuilding America Now that experts said raises questions about where donors’ money was actually ending up.</div><div class="ArticleBody-subtitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 105.703px; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3px;">Unusual reimbursements</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">In May 2017, six months after Trump had won the presidency and Rebuilding America Now had stopped buying ads on TV, campaign finance records show that Fabrizio’s ad-buying firm, MMSC, made three large cash transfers to Rebuilding America Now.The first was on May 27, for $150,000, according to campaign finance records, which detail all these payments and their dates, sources, amounts and recipients. Three weeks later, on June 15, MMSC again transferred money to its former client, only this time it was a much larger amount: $625,000. The very next day, June 16, it transferred $25,000 to Rebuilding America Now, for a total of $800,000 from the ad-buying firm to the super PAC in a little under a month.And not just any month. This was the month leading up to the mysterious $125,000 payment to Paul Manafort’s attorneys. That payment, from the account labeled MMSC - Secondary, occurred on June 26, precisely 10 days after the third and last payment from the firm to the PAC.</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">Records show that Rebuilding America Now reported the $800,000 it received in May and June as media reimbursements. This helps to explain why the money does not appear to have raised any red flags so far with the FEC, even though several other aspects of the PAC’s finances have prompted the FEC to formally request additional information or corrections.Ad-buying firms frequently reimburse clients after elections for any money that doesn’t ultimately get spent by the firm on ads. This payment is called a reconciliation, and it’s usually made as soon as possible, and it’s precise down to the dollar, said Barbara Kittridge, the founder of Motive LLC, a political media-buying and strategy firm in Washington.“January is what we media buyers call ‘audit season,’ where we go back through all our ad contracts from the previous year and carefully match the money that was paid with the actual ads that were run. If there’s any money that wasn’t spent, it’s returned to the client right away,” she said.“Typically, ad-buying contracts require that reconciliations be paid somewhere between 15 and 45 days after the end of either the campaign or the calendar year. Six months is some of the longest I’ve ever seen for a repayment,” Kittridge said.“It’s also odd to see even numbers” like $150,000 and $25,000 in ad reconciliations, she added. “Depending upon the channel that you’re purchasing ads on, it’s not typical that your costs are that even.”Interestingly, several months before MMSC returned exactly $800,000 to Gay’s super PAC in the summer of 2017, campaign filings show that the firm made a different reimbursement payment to Rebuilding America Now, one that Kittridge said looked much more like a typical ad reconciliation than the later amounts did.On Feb. 10, 2017, five weeks after the end of the fourth quarter, MMSC transferred $347,505 back to its client, Rebuilding America Now. Campaign legal experts said the transfer matches what media reconciliations typically look like, because it happened quickly and it was for a very precise amount.“This reimbursement would be more normative, from both a timing perspective and from an amount perspective,” said Kittridge.Yet the same qualities that make the February payment appear run-of-the-mill, experts said, are what make the May and June payments look so unusual.“Six months after the election, with big round numbers, are definitely more suspect,” Kittridge said.“I have never seen such large reimbursement payments coming so long after the election for which the ads were created. It strains credulity well beyond the breaking point to believe that these payments are reimbursement for unaired general election ads,” said a campaign finance lawyer who has been practicing before the FEC for 30 years, and who requested anonymity to discuss an issue that could come before the commission.CNBC attempted to reach Fabrizio, as well as MMSC’s president, Dwight Sterling, and its media director, Neal McDonald, for several weeks to ask them about these unusual reimbursements. None responded to phone messages or emails.Yet one thing is clear from the PAC’s financial reports: In the year that followed these three unusual cash transfers from Fabrizio’s firm to Rebuilding America Now, no one took home more of that money from the PAC, in consulting fees and expenses, than Laurance Gay.</div><div class="ArticleBody-subtitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 105.703px; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3px;">Gay’s role</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">Gay first entered Trump’s orbit in April 2016 as a high-level campaign volunteer, one of <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/trump-turns-over-his-campaign-to-lobbyists-222242" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">several lobbyists Manafort recruited</a> to help him professionalize the Trump campaign as it became increasingly likely Trump would be the Republican nominee. But Gay and Manafort’s professional relationship dates back to long before there was ever a Trump campaign.In the 1980s, Gay worked with Manafort and Stone at their lobbying firm, Black, Stone, Manafort & Kelly. Gay is also reportedly the godfather to one of Manafort’s daughters.During the 2016 campaign, Gay touted his personal and professional relationship with Manafort as one of the major assets Rebuilding America Now had that other pro-Trump super PACs did not.“The advantage that we bring, without compromising any of the boundaries, is we know how Manafort thinks. I’ve done over 40 campaigns with Paul,” Gay told Politico in the summer of 2016.For Gay, his relationship with Manafort would also prove to be extremely lucrative. Between June 2016 and June 2018, Gay collected just over $1 million in consulting fees from Rebuilding America Now.More than three-quarters of that, a total of $775,000, was paid to Gay after 2016, and after Rebuilding America Now had shed staff and stopped running TV ads for Trump.During that same two-year period, Gay collected another $254,000 in travel reimbursements from the super PAC. Again, the majority of this money, $149,164.03, came after 2016 was over.Added together, the expenses and fees that Gay took home from Rebuilding America Now in the 18 months after 2016 equaled $924,164.03. This is very close to the combined total of $925,000 that was paid to the super PAC and Manafort’s lawyers ($800,000 to the PAC plus $125,000 to Manafort’s lawyers) by Fabrizio’s firm, MMSC, in May and June 2017.</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">In June 2018, Rebuilding America Now’s travel expenses caught the attention of the FEC. In a <a href="http://docquery.fec.gov/pdf/800/201806280300012800/201806280300012800.pdf" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">letter</a> to Rebuilding America Now’s treasurer, Ryan Call, the FEC asked him to explain the $42,286 the group had paid to Gay for “Travel” during the first three months of 2018. The FEC gave the group until Aug. 2, 2018, to reply, but so far it has not responded to the request.By this point, more than a year after Trump was elected, Rebuilding America Now appeared to be operating as little more than a meme-posting operation on Facebook and Twitter, trying to engage Trump supporters with “Like if you agree!” style posts.<a href="https://www.facebook.com/ads/archive/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US&view_all_page_id=976995169066217" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">Facebook ad records</a> show that in the spring and summer of 2018, Rebuilding America Now ran a series of ads on Facebook. They asked viewers to “Like” posts if, for instance, they “think Hillary [Clinton] should be behind bars,” and “think CNN sucks.”Yet despite spending money to buy Facebook ads, to pay Gay $35,000 a month and to pay other consultants and lawyers, Rebuilding America Now effectively stopped raising any money after the 2016 election, and only spent money.Between June 2017, when the PAC received the last of the three unusual transfers from MMSC, to October 2018, when Palm Beach real estate developer Llwyd Ecclestone gave the group $25,000, campaign finance records show that Gay did not raise any money at all.Ecclestone’s gift came long after the PAC had effectively gone dormant. He did not respond to an email from CNBC on Friday asking what prompted him to donate $25,000 to the group more than two years after he had last given it any money and months after Rebuilding America Now had stopped doing anything more than posting photos online.Now, it barely even does that. Rebuilding America Now’s Twitter account posted its last tweet on Oct. 10, 2018. And the PAC’s website was taken down sometime in the fall, although it is difficult to tell precisely when.As of March 6, the Rebuilding America Now Facebook page was still active, however, and it linked to the nonexistent website. CNBC sent a message to the Facebook page but has received no response.While the name of Rebuilding America Now may have faded from the pro-Trump political landscape, Gay’s name has re-emerged in the news in recent weeks. This time it is in connection with a different pro-Trump entity that is currently under investigation: Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, or PIC.Bloomberg News recently <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-21/trump-s-inaugural-team-scrambled-to-defend-staff-record-haul" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">identified Gay</a> as having been in charge of the ticketing operation for Trump’s inaugural events. This appeared to be the first time Gay had been identified by name as having had an official role in Trump’s inauguration.</div><div class="group" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.66; margin-bottom: 30px; margin-left: calc((((((100% - 180px) / 7) * 1) + 0px) + 30px) * 1); -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: auto; max-width: 100%;">“Gay didn’t have any known experience managing invitations, according to three people familiar with his role,” Bloomberg reported.Prosecutors in both <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/politics/trump-inaugural-committee-subpoena.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">New York</a> and <a href="https://www.apnews.com/52fc0a46c86f4a53b77f663dcb9b16cf" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">New Jersey</a> have reportedly opened preliminary investigations into Trump’s inaugural committee, including whether foreign nationals who attended inaugural events made prohibited donations to the committee by using “straw man” donors to hide their participation.Gay was not the only member of Manafort’s inner circle working on core elements of Trump’s inauguration. Manafort’s longtime right-hand man, Rick Gates, was the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/15/mueller-seeks-delay-for-ex-trump-official-rick-gates-sentencing-says-he-is-cooperating-in-several-investigations.html" alt="" class="" target="" title="" role="" tabindex="" data-type="" aria-label="" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer;">deputy chairman</a> of the inaugural committee, working directly under Barrack, the inaugural committee’s billionaire chairman.The revelation that Gay was working alongside Gates at the inaugural committee serves as yet another example of how far Manafort’s reach into the Trump campaign continued to extend, months after Manafort himself had been fired from the campaign in August.Gates was indicted in late 2017 along with Manafort, and charged with failing to disclose foreign lobbying and tax evasion. He has since pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and lying to the FBI, and he has cooperated with prosecutors and testified against Manafort in court.Gay’s attorney declined to comment in response to questions from CNBC about Gay’s work for the inaugural committee.</div></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 30px -15px; padding: 0px 30px 0px 18px; list-style: none; display: block; position: relative; line-height: 1.375;">He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. The charges against Stone are unrelated to the Manafort prosecution, nor do they have anything to do with Fabrizio or Gay.</li></ul></div><div>
</div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div>=
4/15 superpacMike Snyder, a locally famous ex-anchorman for Dallas-Fort Worth’s NBC station, was running media strategy. Janeé Hill, a motivational speaker, handled outreach.
Randy Hill, Janeé’s husband, was hired to be the PAC’s executive director. Along with his business acumen – Hill once said his peanut transport system moved 80 percent of the nation’s crop – he was well connected. Then-Gov. Rick Perry had appointed him to the state’s emerging technologies committee.
Hill’s father had been Wal-Mart’s chief ethics officer, and was invited to join the PAC’s board. Gary Hill found the PAC’s patron to be “very eccentric.” When they first met, he recalled in an interview, Ken Davis told him the nametag on his sport coat was on the wrong side, ripped it off and fixed it onto the other side. But he joined the board anyway.
Patrick Davis, the group’s senior consultant, had the most political experience among the hires. He served as the political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2004 cycle and had helped run dozens of local, state and national campaigns.
Through his lawyer, Davis said he was attracted to the Fort Worth group because the national debt had long been an interest of his. And his style appealed to the oilman. He would often kick off conference calls by leading a prayer, asking for the Lord’s guidance in being responsible stewards of their patron’s money.
But very quickly, fissures appeared.
In his July memo to the board, Randy Hill alleged irregularities in Patrick Davis’ reimbursement requests. He wasn’t turning in receipts, Hill wrote, and some expenses didn’t track, such as a bill for an Iowa hotel stay that had been prepaid and a bill for a plane ticket even though Davis had driven to his destination.
Hill also questioned whether events organized by Davis were all they claimed to be. At an Iowa phone bank, Hill said, a caller admitted they were just “pretending to make phone calls” for the benefit of the campaign’s video cameras.
Hill was particularly concerned about Patrick Davis’ associate. She was combative with the rest of the staff and acting erratically, he said, so he began looking into her past.
Her name was Italia Federici. A decade earlier, Federici figured in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, which contributed to the resignation of House Majority Leader Tom Delay and led to the criminal convictions of 21 people, including a House member who admitted taking bribes.
Federici was accused of using her position as head of a conservative environmental advocacy group to serve as intermediary between Abramoff and her friend, Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles. Abramoff funneled $500,000 to her group, offered her box seats to NFL games and paid for her meals and parties at his D.C. restaurant. In return, she allegedly exploited her romantic relationship with Griles to get Abramoff inside information and to lobby for his tribal clients.
When she testified before the Senate Indian Affairs committee, North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan accused her of being involved in “one of the most disgusting tales of greed and avarice” and mocked her denial of a quid pro quo: ”I come from a really small town, but I think I can spot a pretty big lie from time to time.”
Federici pleaded guilty in 2007 to tax evasion and obstructing a Senate investigation. She was given probation for her crimes and moved back to Colorado, where she’d lived before Washington.
There, her problems continued. The IRS accused her of being delinquent on more than $250,000, which her lawyer said was the result of a penalty assessed against her in connection with the Abramoff scandal. Her Boulder landlord told ProPublica she kicked her out for not paying several months of rent. “She doesn’t have clear boundaries between truth and fiction,” said the landlord, Diane Dvorin.
Through her attorney, Federici said she was truthful and moved out promptly after not being able to make rent.
In 2012, Federici and Patrick Davis met while working to promote Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign in Colorado. Davis had moved to Colorado and set up his own consulting firm after finishing his stint at the Republican senatorial committee.
Davis’ work was at times controversial after he left Washington. In 2008 he led a nonprofit that backed the presidential campaign of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. It was blasted by other conservatives for allegedly making robo-calls to voters in multiple states that masqueraded as polls and suggested that a rival candidate, Sen. John McCain, “voted to use unborn babies in medical research.” The group was widely denounced, including by Huckabee’s campaign.
While he was working for Vote2ReduceDebt, Davis was also running the campaign of Annette Bosworth, a South Dakota physician making a bid for the Senate. Bosworth, who got 6 percent of the vote in the Republican primary last year, faces trial on a dozen felony counts of perjury and filing false statements in connection with allegedly forged names on nominating petitions.
Before Davis was running Bosworth’s campaign, records show he got paid a consulting fee by a PAC that boosted one of her opponents, a fact Bosworth’s attorney said was never disclosed to her.
Through his attorney, Davis said the relationship was disclosed, and that the calls on behalf of Huckabee were not push polls, but rather educational calls. The attorney said Davis had no knowledge of the alleged crimes committed by Bosworth.
In his July 2014 memo, Randy Hill asked for Davis and Federici to be fired.
The next day, Patrick Davis wrote a memo of his own to the board. In it, he alleged that after a June 5 Vote2ReduceDebt rally, as they drove to the Midland, Texas airport, Hill told him about a secret plan.
At the time, Hill was in talks with television executives to create a reality show about his quest to start a NASCAR racing team. He already had a website billing himself as “The Entrepreneur… Chasing the Dream,” encouraging visitors to follow along as he recruited a driver, sponsors and a spot on the racing circuit. He told colleagues this would be good publicity for the PAC – he’d emblazon his racecars with the Vote2ReduceDebt logo and take them on tour.
But Patrick Davis alleged that Hill took it a step further in their conversation. In order to start filming, Hill said, he needed to get a team together, and that required money he didn’t have. Hill missed his first deadline with NBC, and though he was granted an extension, time was running out.
By Davis’ account, Hill offered him a trade of sorts. He would make Patrick Davis “a character in his reality TV show.” And Patrick Davis would help Hill get $4 million out of the PAC: half a million for PAC promotions, and the rest going toward racing expenses including drivers and pit crews. Ken Davis, recently hospitalized, would be told the money was going towards legitimate get-out-the-vote operations.
In his memo, Patrick Davis wrote that he would never go along with such a scheme because it would have “required lying to Mr. Ken Davis which was something I was not going to do.”
The board and Ken Davis had to decide whom to believe. Patrick Davis warned the leadership that if they sided with Hill, they would risk future disaster. “In other cases where I’ve occasionally been ignored, clients have really created problems for themselves,” he wrote.
For her part, Federici began pressuring Snyder, who was in charge of media strategy, and the PAC’s attorney, Chris Gober, who was looking into the allegations. One evening in July, she sent Gober a barrage of text messages. She demanded he turn over video from a PAC event she believed would play in their favor. He emailed the texts the same evening to Ken Davis.
“SECURE THE EVIDENCE YOU’VE BEEN NOTIFIED FOR A MONTH EXISTS,” Federici texted in all caps, according to the email. “If you think I’m cowed in any way, think again. I will ferociously expose you and anyone else I feel is complicit in destroying documentation about the fleecing (of) this family.”
“Screw with this PAC at your peril…Who do you think you are?… If you want to sue me/us… Do it! Otherwise, do your fucking job and stop being Mike Snyder’s bitch.”
“WTF. I could care less about your Harvard ‘creds,’” she continued, even though the attorney said he didn’t respond. “Do. Your. Job. We asked for docs and recorded material weeks ago. How impotent are you? Or is it criminal. Your choice.”
In an interview, Hill said the reality TV show scam was a figment of Patrick Davis’ imagination, one that Davis fabricated to distract from his own fraud. He said the board decided to side with him, voting to fire Davis and Federici.
But he said he was called into Ken Davis’ office and berated.
“Nobody fires anybody until I tell ‘em to,” the oilman said, according to Hill.
That afternoon, Hill said, Patrick Davis flew in and met privately with Ken Davis. The next day Hill was fired.
Patrick Davis remained and his influence grew. According to records and interviews, he pushed for multiple six-figure payments to organizations run by him or his close associates.
He convinced the PAC to hire a Virginia company called ccAdvertising for calls to voters, at a price of about $230,000, records show. Davis’ attorney, Cleta Mitchell, said that Davis has a “long term business and personal relationship” with the company’s owner. Mitchell declined to respond to questions about whether Davis received personal benefit from the contract.
At least three of the outside companies Davis recommended to Vote2ReduceDebt were run by one of his business associates, Joel Arends, an attorney and political operative based in South Dakota. Davis and Arends have known each other for two decades through various Republican campaigns. Most recently, they had worked together on the South Dakota primary in which their candidate got indicted and blamed Arends for the allegedly falsified filings.Italia Federici testifies during a Senate committee hearing on lobbying by Indian tribes in Nov. 2005. (AP Photo/Yuri Gripas)Hill said that one proposal from Patrick Davis involved a cross-country bus tour using a company linked to Arends that was so obscure it didn’t have a website. On another occasion, Davis pushed for the PAC’s printing services to be handled by Arends. Davis said through his lawyer that he felt Arends would be faster and cheaper than other options.
Vote2ReduceDebt didn’t go with Patrick Davis’ suggestions on either of those jobs, but did heed his advice when choosing who to hire for a $200,000 contract to produce voter rallies. Davis again picked Arends, who ran a company called Red State Productions. Davis’s lawyer said in a statement that Red State “is a skilled political campaign services provider with years of experience and excellent results over many campaigns.”While Arends had worked with campaigns in the past, Red State’s website, which displays photos of big political rallies featuring Republican stars such as Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, was created a couple of days before Red State pitched the $200,000 deal to Vote2ReduceDebt, domain registration records show. The company was incorporated in South Dakota a few days after the pitch.
Red State’s events, according to the website, “are widely attended, photographed and reported.” A search of online databases turned up no previous record of payments to Red State Productions by a candidate or political committee. The D.C. number for the company has since been disconnected. The address listed on its website is for a service on Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor that provides mail drops and temporary office space.
Vote2ReduceDebt staffers were not pleased with Red State’s work, according to a lawsuit the super PAC filed in December to get the money back. One of the firm’s main responsibilities was promoting rallies and getting people there. But most of the people who attended their rallies, the PAC alleged, were paid Vote2ReduceDebt staffers, with one rally only drawing seven outsiders.
Arends’ attorney did not respond to questions from ProPublica. His company has sued Vote2ReduceDebt for terminating the contract, and harming its reputation with future clients.
CLETA Mitchell, Davis’ attorney, said the events Red State organized were “very successful,” including one attended by more than 250 people and others that drew volunteers, elected officials and local activists.
Arends and Patrick Davis “are not in business together,” said Mitchell. Asked if Davis received a personal benefit from the work the PAC gave to Arends, Mitchell said: “If there were any business arrangements with any vendors, those arrangements would have been (and were) fully disclosed.”
Another move by Patrick Davis raised questions among some PAC colleagues. He secured payments of about $410,000 from Vote2ReduceDebt – roughly a seventh of the total funds raised by the super PAC - to another PAC, one he and Federici had created in 2013.
Until the payment from Vote2ReduceDebt, their PAC, called Person to Person, had almost no contributions or activities. According to an invoice, other internal records and a person with knowledge of the transactions, the money was paid in expectation of a service: Person to Person would recruit 320 volunteers for door-knocking and phone work in Vote2ReduceDebt’s eight target states.
But Patrick Davis reported the money to the FEC as a contribution, not a fee for service. According to Noble, the former FEC attorney who reviewed the filings for ProPublica, that distinction allowed Person to Person to do whatever it wanted with the money and pay no taxes on it.
Person to Person quickly began spending its windfall. According to federal disclosure records compiled by the OpenSecrets website, more than $115,000 has gone to Red State Productions and Patrick Davis’ consulting company.
In October, Vote2ReduceDebt parted ways with Davis. By then, records show, the super PAC had paid more than $875,000 – almost a third of its total spending – to companies and organizations owned or operated by Davis and Federici or their associates.
Both declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a recent interview with a conservative commentator for the Daily Caller, they said they are preparing the Person to Person PAC for the 2016 cycle. The host asked Patrick Davis if he believes that some conservative groups exist not to affect elections but to bilk donors.
“There is a problem, but Person to Person PAC is not participating in the problem,” Davis said.
Federici directed listeners to the group’s website, where they could log on and donate.
Mitchell, Patrick Davis’s lawyer, denied that Davis and Federici falsified reimbursement requests, faked phone banking events or were dishonest with Vote2ReduceDebt staff.
In fact, Mitchell described Federici as a whistleblower who took on dishonest employees within the PAC. She described one instance in which a PAC state director with a suspended license was secretly using one of the group’s employees as a chauffeur for five weeks.
“One lesson Tali learned from the experience of being dragged into the Abramoff mess was to be very cautious and to ask questions,” Mitchell said. “That was in large part what led her to blow the whistle… before a problem was created and funds were misused.”
Mitchell said Patrick Davis still does not understand why Vote2ReduceDebt terminated his consulting contract. “Had Person to Person PAC been allowed to complete the deployment project,” she said, it would have “met and exceeded” its promised volunteer numbers. Mitchell said Patrick Davis was correct in reporting the money as a contribution, and it was Vote2ReduceDebt that reported the payment incorrectly.
The breakdown of his super PAC has left Ken Davis with some ambivalence about entering election politics.
In a brief interview, he declined to discuss the allegations that he had been duped. He did acknowledge that he may have been in over his head and that he’s not sure the group had the impact he desired.
“I’m convinced there’s a lot of people that jumped into politics with the idea that they’re gonna make a change in the world and they’ve found out it ain’t that easy,” Davis said. “Just because you think it’s needed doesn’t mean you can make it happen.”
Help us investigate: Have a tip about campaign finance? Email robert.faturechi@propublica.org.---==

congr test voter id with cj adams and bs okeefe video

The Constitution Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary <a href="http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/04/18/voter-id-laws-take-center-stage-at-house-judiciary-hearing/" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">held a hearing</a> this week that illustrated just how far from reality the advocates of photo IDs, and other methods of suppressing votes, will go to peddle their phony message that voter fraud is rampant in America and must be stopped by enacting legislation that disenfranchises legitimate voters.

The first indication that these hearings were an outright sham was the inclusion of a video by the notoriously dishonest crockumentary maker, <a href="http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?tag=james-okeefe" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">James O’Keefe</a>. O’Keefe is best known for producing videos that have been deliberately edited to give false impressions that advance his political agenda. His antics include plying teachers with alcohol in order to embarrass them, and attempting to seduce a CNN reporter aboard his “Love Boat.”

==

<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/meet-cleta-mitchell-the-conservative-movements-anti-gay-eminence-grise/274629/">http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/meet-cleta-mitchell-the-conservative-movements-anti-gay-eminence-grise/274629/</a>

In 2011, a little-known group called GOProud was a sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual marquee event for the right. A staunchly right-wing, fiscally conservative group that also promoted a pro-life message, GOProud seemed like a great fit for the event. There was just one problem: GOProud's main function was as a gay-rights group.

Enter Cleta Mitchell.

Mitchell was, and is, on the board of the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. After calls from angry social-conservatives who threatened to boycott the event if GOProud was allowed to remain as a sponsor, Mitchell orchestrated a push to expel GOProud. It wasn't initially successful -- the group remained as a sponsor that year

But after that the 2011 conference, Al Cardenas succeeded David Keene as ACU president. With Mitchell's support, he called a vote of the board on whether or not GOProud should be allowed in CPAC. The board voted strongly in favor of banning the group.

GOProud has been absent ever since. This isn't to say the decision has been universally popular at CPAC -- indeed, an independent, unsanctioned panel at the convention center on welcoming gays into the movement that featured GOProud Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia and conservative journalists Jennifer Rubin and Jonah Goldberg at this year's conference <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/jimmy-lasalvia-goproud-cpac-republican-_n_2885256.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">was packed with well-wishers</a> -- but the ban has stuck.

Mitchell doesn't dispute her central role in the ban, but says she only did what was in the best interest of the conference, calling herself "the advocate of CPAC" and pointing out that participants in the boycott -- including Heritage, the grandfather of conservative groups, were too big to ignore. But some involved in the process say Mitchell's role went well beyond simple responsiveness. "She ginned up opposition from Jim DeMint and Jim Jordan and groups that had never really been involved in CPAC in order to make it look like [GOProud] deserved it," a key organizer of the 2011 confab told me. (A spokesman for DeMint said that is "simply false," and added that his <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/24/jim-demint-chris-christie-cpac_n_812886.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">decision not to speak</a> at the conference was uninfluenced by Mitchell.)

What's more, the organizer points out, most of the groups that threatened to boycott 2011's CPAC didn't actually do so in the end, with Heritage a notable exception. "Even Focus on the Family continued to be at CPAC when GOProud was there," the organizer said. "CPAC 2011 made more money, had more cosponsors, and had more attendees than any previous CPAC. Even if Cleta's opposition to GOProud was based purely on profit, she was wrong."

Cleta Mitchell is not a household name, even among conservatives. She's part of the behind-the-scenes power-players that run the show in the Beltway. In addition to her role at the ACU, Mitchell sits on the board of the National Rifle Association and is a longtime attendee at <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-06-01-grover.htm" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">Grover Norquist's infamous Wednesday planning meetings.</a>

But first and foremost, Mitchell is lawyer to the stars of the conservative movement at Foley & Lardner, one of the biggest and most powerful firms in the country. Her clientele is the cream of the Republican crop: Marco Rubio, Jim DeMint, Kelly Ayotte, Jim Inhofe, and Pat Toomey, among many others.

What makes Mitchell's role as a prime mover and shaker in conservative circles so fascinating, however, is that she hasn't always been a conservative -- or even a Republican. In fact, she entered politics as a liberal Democrat in a red state. From 1976 to 1984 she served as a representative in the Oklahoma State House, where she became the <a href="http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/M/MI048.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">first woman in the U.S. to chair a state appropriations and budget committee.</a>

When Mitchell first dove into hot-button social issues, it wasn't as a defender of traditional values. She was a <a href="http://dc.library.okstate.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/legislature/id/115" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">driving force behind the passage of Oklahoma's Equal Rights Amendment.</a> The Oklahoma incarnation of the amendment was supported by then-president of the National Organization for Women Eleanor Smeal, who came to the state house in person to support the amendment. Conservative luminary Phyllis Schlafly, who helped kill the national version of the amendment, backed the opposition. These days, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/16/phyllis-schlafly-cpac_n_2891493.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">Schlafly is a mainstay of CPAC</a>.

In 1978, Mitchell <a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=PQ8gAAAAIBAJ&sjid=k2UFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1407,690116&dq=cleta+deatherage&hl=en" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">criticized Carter aide and women's-rights activist Midge Costanza</a>, saying her views didn't go far enough: "I don't think she is sensitive to political reality. She doesn't know enough about where we are in the women's movement and the ERA."

Even amidst all this social activism, according to a lawyer who is a close friend of Mitchell's and fought for the ERA with her, Mitchell "never talked" to her about gay issues while she was in the legislature. And yet it was work to keep gay-rights groups out of events like CPAC has come to define her public image -- though Mitchell says "no one cares" about this aspect of her career -- rather than any of her prior social activism. It has also led GOProud's Chris Barron to once call her <a href="http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=5987" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">"a nasty bigot,"</a> and LaSalvia to accuse her of "personal animosity towards gay people."

Mitchell hasn't spoken at any length as to why she suddenly seemed to be a champion of these issues as of late -- and what brought her to the Beltway wasn't social issues or even fiscal issues but term limits (she was made head of the Term Limits Legal Institute in 1991) and most of her work since has focused on areas other than social policy. But her stance is ironic in light of her past.

Namely, her first husband was gay.

Mitchell married Duane Draper, who she met in the city of Norman in her home state of Oklahoma. In 1980, Draper moved to Massachusetts to take a teaching fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The couple divorced two years later in July 1982 <a href="http://newsok.com/deatherage-gets-divorce/article/1990875" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">on grounds of "incompatibility."</a> (Mitchell's friend from the Oklahoma legislature, after hesitating, said she didn't feel comfortable discussing whether Draper's sexuality was a reason for the divorce.)

In 1988, Draper became director of the Massachusetts AIDS policy office. His interest wasn't just academic or humanitarian -- he himself contracted the disease. By the time he died of AIDS in 1991, Draper was living as an openly gay man. From his hospital bed, he told the Boston Globe that his support for AIDS victims and gay rights were two elements of a single mission to make life easier for "all AIDS people, especially gay men uncertain of how families, friends, and co-workers will take [their diagnosis]."

In 1984, Mitchell (nee Deatherage) married Dale Mitchell -- son of all-star left-fielder Dale Mitchell, who was the final strikeout in Don Larsen's 1956 World Series perfect game. As The Oklahoman noted at the time, Cleta Deatherage took her husband's last name, and in return he <a href="http://newsok.com/do-you-cleta-agree-to-change-your-last-name-i-do-if-dale-changes-party/article/2060495" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">switched parties from Republican to Democrat</a> -- even though she said after her retirement that she was finished with politics. But she couldn't resist the pull of elected office, and mounted an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor in 1986.

Around the same time, the FBI began <a href="http://newsok.com/mitchell-cited-in-bank-fraud-case/article/2401860" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">investigating Dale Mitchell for banking malpractice.</a> In late 1992,<a href="http://newsok.com/jury-finds-ex-banker-guilty-on-5-counts/article/2415554" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">he was convicted of five felony counts</a> of conspiracy to defraud, misapplying bank funds and making false statements to banks and <a href="http://newsok.com/ex-bank-executive-unable-to-pay-restitution-lawyer-says/article/2447949" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">ordered to pay $3 million</a> in restitution--something that his wife says convinced her <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/10/21/1996_10_21_107_TNY_CARDS_000376229" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">that government had grown too big</a>.

By 1996, she had changed her party affiliation to independent, later changing it to Republican.

As powerful as she is, Mitchell is wary of the press. When I first approached her to request an interview, she repeatedly speculated that I would write a "hit piece," and only agreed to speak on the condition there would only be one GOProud-related question. When I asked her in an email about a<a href="http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2011/02/09/why-conservative-power-attorney-cleta-mitchell-bashes-goproud-while-her-firm-embraces-diversity/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">blogpost</a> linking Draper's sexuality to the couple's divorce, she clammed up. "I think I'm finished talking about this with you -- it is a hit piece as I suspected from the start," she said. "Swing away!"

But maybe the reason Mitchell is so reticent to talk, particularly about gay marriage-related issues, is that when she starts on the issue, she has quite a bit to say. As BuzzFeed's Chris Geidner <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/at-cpac-the-marriage-fight-is-over" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">noted</a>, she helped turn a panel on bullying at this year's CPAC into an anti-gay diatribe. Yet she professes ignorance of what GOProud actually does, calling them "nothing-burgers" and adding, "I have no idea what they do except promote the homosexual agenda."

Meanwhile, despite Mitchell's best efforts, gay rights are decisively on the march. Along with Supreme Court hearings on the Defense of Marriage Act last week, a steady stream of elected officials are embracing marriage equality -- including Republican Senators <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04/02/mark-kirk-becomes-second-gop-senator-to-back-gay-marriage/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">Mark Kirk</a> and Rob Portman -- and it's hard not to wonder how and when the conservative establishment will adapt.

There are, of course, holdouts -- Ed Gillespie, who said on Fox News Sunday recently that he doesn't see the GOP changing its views on the definition of marriage, or Rick Santorum and other staunch social conservatives. But with people like <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/03/31/flake-inevitable-that-a-gop-presidential-candidate-will-support-gay-marriage/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">Senator Jeff Flake saying</a> that not only could he support a Republican candidate for president who endorsed gay marriage, but that such a Republican is "inevitable," <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/03/25/priebus-rnc-gay-marriage/2017901/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">RNC Chair Reince Priebus saying</a> that the party should be more accepting of pro-gay marriage groups, and the rise of a more libertarian strain in the party, led by Ron and Rand Paul, the GOP faces either a policy switch or deep irrelevance.

Mitchell herself, ironically, offers a clear model of how people can change. What's not clear is whether the right as a whole is ready to emulate that model.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/meet-cleta-mitchell-the-conservative-movements-anti-gay-eminence-grise/274629/

---

just interviwed on NPR

corkery <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/11/wellsprings-flow.html">http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/11/wellsprings-flow.html</a>

<div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Obviously donors could simply give money to the organizations they wanted to give to,” <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/11/06/243022966/secret-persuasion-how-big-campaign-donors-stay-anonymous" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none;">said law professor Donald Tobin</a> of Ohio State University’s Moritz School of Law. “The idea of bundling it into a 501(c)(4) and then using that (c)(4) as a way to distribute money [to] other organizations is new, and I think is generally designed to help cleanse money through the system.”</div>

</div>

<div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As political activity by 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade groups has increased, so have questions about whether they’re following the law. The IRS, which oversees them, says that such organizations can spend up to 49 percent of their resources on politics. What constitutes “politics” isn’t always clear. But the definition of “social welfare,” which is supposed to be the major purpose of (c)(4)s, is also problematic. Organizations like Wellspring consider their grants to other nonprofits to be social welfare, even when those groups are deeply involved in politics. </div>

</div>

Republicans Boast About Voter Suppression in Tampa, but the Ground Is Shifting

George Zornick on August 29, 2012 - 4:06 PM ET

On the first full day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay, Republicans were not running from their record of voter suppression. At a fundraiser Tuesday afternoon not far from the Tampa Bay Times Forum, GOP superstars lined up to pay their respects to one of the key architects of recent voter-suppression tactics—Cleta Mitchell, a Tampa Bay–based attorney who is head of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Earlier this year, before the House Judiciary Committee, Mitchell proudly testified that the “burdens” of voter identification laws—that is, some people not being able to vote—were justifiable to prevent non-existent fraud. “Because the purpose of a voter identification, a photo identification, is to ensure and protect the integrity of the election, whatever burden may exist is offset by the need to protect the integrity of the elections,” she testified. And Mitchell is not a newcomer to the voter-suppression game—back in 2008, she was running “training sessions” for GOP poll-watchers so they could fight back against a supposed “long pattern of abuses in registration by groups such as ACORN and their Democratic allies.”

The guest list to her party included six Republican senators, including powerhouses Jim DeMint and Marco Rubio, as well as former presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who would address the convention hours later. (I staked out the entrance to the party and didn’t see the A-listers enter, though they appeared to be coming in through a secure parking garage. I did, however, spot conservative columnist George Will and Grover Norquist coming in).

Later that night, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley got one of the biggest applause lines of the convention so far when she boasted about her voter-suppression achievements back home. “We said in South Carolina that if you have to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed and you have to show a picture ID to set foot on an airplane, then you should have to show a picture ID to protect one of the most valuable, most central, most sacred rights we are blessed with in America—the right to vote,” she said.

But Haley’s timing was awful—the ground beneath voter-suppression efforts is falling away, in her state and elsewhere. On the same day Haley spoke, a trial was underway in South Carolina in which the state is suing Obama’s Department of Justice for blocking the voter identification law. And it isn’t going so well for the state. (Ari Berman has excellent coverage here).

The bill’s author, state Representative Alan Clemmons, took the stand yesterday and admitted he cannot produce a single example of in-person voter impersonation, and also conceded his law wouldn’t really stop a dedicated impersonator anyhow. Then, one lawyer presented racist e-mails sent to Clemmons about voter-identification laws—with which Clemmons agreed. (Someone e-mailed Clemmons to denounce the idea that black voters wouldn’t sign up for photo identification if an incentive was offered, saying “it would be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon.” Clemmons replied, “Amen, Ed, thank you for your support,” a response he admitted in court yesterday was “poorly considered.”)

And just this morning, in Mitchell’s home state of Florida, a federal judge ruled that he would strike down one of the more pernicious Florida vote-suppression laws—one that restricted the ability of third-party groups to register voters. Republicans in the legislature passed laws that hurt Floridians’ ability to vote, all of which have now been halted: they shortened voting hours (which was blocked by a federal judge this month), attempted to purge voter rolls (also stopped by a court), and now the harsh restrictions on groups like the League of Women Voters and Project Vote have been lifted. These restrictions caused a huge imbalance in partisan voter registration—see this chart from The Rachel Maddow Show

That gap is likely to be closed dramatically now that third-party registration can resume.....

===

BS

Cleta Mitchell is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Foley & Lardner LLP and a member of the firm’s Political Law Practice. With more than 30 years of experience in law, politics and public policy, Ms. Mitchell advises corporations, nonprofit and issue organizations, candidates, campaigns, and individuals on state and federal campaign finance law, election law, and compliance issues related to lobbying, ethics and financial disclosure. Ms. Mitchell practices before the Federal Election Commission, the ethics committees of the US House and Senate and similar state and local enforcement bodies and agencies.

Ms. Mitchell has extensive experience on the federal lobbying and ethics law enacted by Congress in 2007, having taught more than a dozen seminars on the subject since its passage. In 2008, Ms. Mitchell authored The Lobbying Compliance Handbook, published by Columbia Books, Inc.

Ms. Mitchell represents numerous candidates, campaigns and members of Congress, as well as state and national political party committees. She has served as legal counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. Ms. Mitchell served as co-counsel for the National Rifle Association in the Supreme Court case involving the 2002 federal campaign finance law.

Ms. Mitchell has been appointed to the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Election Law and has been appointed an advisor on the American Law Institute's Election Law Project entitled, “Principles of Election Law: Dispute Resolution.” She serves on the boards of directors of the National Rifle Association and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, is chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation, and is president of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Ms. Mitchell has been Peer Review Rated as AV® Preeminent™, the highest performance rating in Martindale-Hubbell's peer review rating system and was selected by her peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America® 2010, 2011 and 2012 editions for her work in administrative/regulatory law. She was also named a "Top Lawyer" in Washington D.C. by the Washingtonian for her work in political and campaign law. For her work in government and political law, she is listed in Chambers USA: America's Leading Business Lawyers (2010 and 2011). Ms. Mitchell was a teaching fellow at the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1981 and was the Shapiro Fellow at the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in 2001.

Ms. Mitchell was a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976-1984 where she chaired the House Appropriations and Budget Committee. She served on the executive committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Ms. Mitchell was in private law practice in Oklahoma City in litigation and administrative law until 1991 when she became director and general counsel of the Term Limits Legal Institute in Washington, D.C. She litigated cases in state and federal courts nationwide on congressional term limits and served as co-counsel with former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell in the U.S. Supreme Court case on term limits for members of Congress.

Ms. Mitchell received her B.A. (high honors, 1973) and J.D. (1975) from the University of Oklahoma. She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, the State of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court of the United States and federal district and appellate courts.

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<label class="views-label-field-employer-value"> Employer: </label>Chair of the American Conservative Union Foundation, Attorney and Lobbyist with Foley & Lardner

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<div class="views-field-field-biography-value"><label class="views-label-field-biography-value"> Biography: </label>

Cleta Mitchell served as a Democratic member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976-1984. At that time, Mitchell was considered <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/27/913974/-Oh,-Cleta-How-far-you-have-fallen">a rising star in national Democratic politics</a>, drawing comparisons to former Texas Governor Ann Richards. After leaving the Oklahoma House of Representatives, Mitchell divorced Duane Draper, her husband of nine years, citing incompatibility and entered into private practice as an attorney in Oklahoma [<a href="http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/18623/why-conservative-power-attorney-cleta-mitchell-bashes-goproud-while-her-firm-embraces-diversity">Draper, whose male companion was mentioned in his obituary, later served as director of AIDS programs for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health until this death from AIDS in 1991</a>]. Moving to Washington, D.C. in the early 1990s, Mitchell became a high-profile election law attorney for Republican political candidates. Some of Mitchell’s past and present clients include Senator Elizabeth Dole, Senator Jim Inhofe, Senator David Vitter, Senator Roy Blunt, Representative Tom Cole, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, and Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum.

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Controversial Actions and Statements:

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On November 2, 2011, the Minnesota Independent reported that Mitchell would serve as the <a href="http://minnesotaindependent.com/91099/nom-brings-high-powered-tea-party-lawyer-to-minnesota-in-marriage-ballot-disclosure-battle" target="blank">primary lobbyist</a> for National Organization for Marriage’s campaign to ban gay marriage in Minnesota through a ballot initiative. In response to Mitchell’s lobbying activities, Human Rights Campaign dropped the law firm that employs Mitchell (Foley & Lardner) <a href="http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=10051&MediaType=1&Category=26" target="blank">from a perfect score to one of the lowest on the organization’s Corporate Equality Index</a>.

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Mitchell <a href="http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2010/12/social-conserva-1.php" target="blank">led opposition</a> to a decision by the American Conservative Union (ACU) to allow GOProud, a gay conservative group, to participate in the 2011 CPAC conference. GOProud Board Chairman Chris Barron called Mitchell a “<a href="http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=5987" target="blank">nasty bigot</a>” in response to her efforts to shut out his organization.

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Mitchell served as an “<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304316404575580670676270344.html" target="blank">attack attorney</a>” for many Tea Party Congressional candidates during the 2010 elections, including Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller. She has suggested that the Democratic Party’s “<a href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/10/sharon-angles-lawyer-accuses-reid-vote-buying" target="blank">tricks</a>” include widespread engagement in voter fraud. Mitchell famously wrote a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304316404575580670676270344.html" target="blank">fundraising letter on behalf of Angle where she accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of attempting to steal the election</a>. Mitchell also <a href="http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Mitchell080724.pdf" target="blank">accused the Democratic party of stealing the 2002 South Dakota senate election</a>, where Senator Tim Johnson was victorious over Senator John Thune. Both <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/12/sharron-angle-defends-con_n_807911.html" target="blank">Angle</a> and <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/07/senate-candidate-joe-miller-guns-not-unusual-in-political-rallies-in-alaska.html" target="blank">Miller</a> have been involved in high-profile controversies surrounding guns and the Second Amendment.

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<a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/ties?tid=14">Republican Party (GOP)</a> | <a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/issues?field_issue_value_many_to_one="> </a></div>

In 2009, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/15/national/main5982848.shtml" target="_blank">Mitchell spearheaded an initiative to overturn the legalization of gay marriage in the District of Columbia</a>.

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<a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/issues?field_issue_value_many_to_one=Gay%20Rights">Gay Rights</a>

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Mitchell served as the attorney for the American Issues Project, <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94029102" target="blank">a group that ran a television ad falsely accusing President Barack Obama of having a close personal relationship with former-Weather Underground member Bill Ayers in the months prior to the 2008 presidential election</a>. Because AIP’s tax-exempt status makes it illegal for the organization to have a mission that is primarily political, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/21/experts-obama-ayers-ad-ma_n_120495.html?view=print" target="blank">the legality of the ad was questioned by elections experts</a>. Laura MacCleery, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the ad a “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/21/experts-obama-ayers-ad-ma_n_120495.html?view=print" target="_blank">clear abuse of federal election law</a>.” Fox News declined to air the spot.

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In 2006, Mitchell appeared on MSNBC to defend a number of Republicans embroiled in ethical scandals. Of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Mitchell said, “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr8qQ-VX9i8&feature=player_embedded" target="_blank">Those allegations, the indictment against Tom DeLay, were completely politically motivated</a>.” She then bet public relations strategist Cliff Schecter dinner that DeLay would not go to jail. In January 2011, DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering.

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<a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/ties?tid=13">Political Corruption</a> | <a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/ties?tid=14">Republican Party (GOP)</a> | <a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/issues?field_issue_value_many_to_one="> </a>

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In May 2005, Mitchell served as the Master of Ceremonies at an ACU event honoring U.S. Representative Tom Delay (R-TX), who was embroiled in ethics investigations (and has since been convicted of money laundering). After telling those in attendance that she and other conservatives “<a href="http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/186711-1" target="blank">love</a>” DeLay, Mitchell claimed he was under investigation only because he is “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/12/politics/12delay.html" target="blank">effective</a>.” She also declared, “<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0512/p02s01-uspo.html" target="_blank">The tribute is a statement to him: You're not alone. We'll stand by you. And it's to say to people in this town: If you pick a fight with him, you've got us to contend with.</a>”

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<a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/ties?tid=13">Political Corruption</a> | <a href="http://www.meetthenra.org/ties?tid=14">Republican Party (GOP)</a> | </div>

wiki

Cleta Mitchell (born September 15, 1950<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-OKHistSoc-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a>) is an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" title="United States" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">American</a> lawyer, politician and conservative activist.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-leadership-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-wsj-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[6]</a>

<h2 style="background-image: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border: none; display: inline;">Contents</h2>

[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#" class="internal" id="togglelink" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">hide</a>] </div>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Biography" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">1 Biography</a>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-2" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Early_life" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">1.1 Early life</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Career" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">1.2 Career</a></li>

</ul>

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<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Bibliography" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">2 Bibliography</a>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-5" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Press_articles" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">2.1 Press articles</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Scholarly_articles" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">2.2 Scholarly articles</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#Books" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">2.3 Books</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#References" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">3 References</a></li>

</ul>

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<h2 style="background-image: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170);">Biography<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=1&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Biography" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h2>

<h3 style="background-image: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none;">Early life<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=2&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Early life" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h3>

Cleta Mitchell was born as Cleta B. Deatherage in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City" title="Oklahoma City" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Oklahoma City</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma" title="Oklahoma" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Oklahoma</a> in 1950.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[7]</a> She received a B.A. in 1973 and a J.D. in 1975, both from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oklahoma" title="University of Oklahoma" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">University of Oklahoma</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a>

Deatherage married Duane Draper, a fellow Oklahoman from Norman, in 1973. In 1980, Draper moved to Massachusetts to take a teaching fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The couple divorced two years later in July 1982 on grounds of "incompatibility." Draper later came out as a gay man and became director of AIDS programming at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

In 1984, Cleta Deatherage married Dale Mitchell, who was the son of all-star Brooklyn Dodgers left-fielder <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Mitchell_(baseball)" title="Dale Mitchell (baseball)" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Dale Mitchell.</a> It the early 1980s, the FBI began investigating Dale Mitchell for<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://newsok.com/mitchell-cited-in-bank-fraud-case/article/2401860" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">banking malpractice</a>, and in 1992 he was <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://newsok.com/jury-finds-ex-banker-guilty-on-5-counts/article/2415554" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">convicted of five felony counts</a> of conspiracy to defraud, misapplying bank funds and making false statements to banks, and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution. According to Cleta Mitchell, this is what convinced her that government had grown too big.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-8" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[8]</a>

<h3 style="background-image: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none;">Career<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=3&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Career" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h3>

She served as a member of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_House_of_Representatives" title="Oklahoma House of Representatives" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Oklahoma House of Representatives</a> from 1976 to 1984, as member of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)" title="Democratic Party (United States)" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Democratic Party</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-OKHistSoc-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a> She was the first woman in the United States to chair a House Appropriations and Budget Committee.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-OKHistSoc-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-leadership-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a> She served on the executive committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-leadership-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a>

She is a partner at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley%26_Lardner" title="Foley & Lardner" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Foley & Lardner</a>, a law firm headquartered in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,D.C." title="Washington, D.C." style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Washington, D.C.</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-leadership-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a> She has served as legal counsel for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Republican_Senatorial_Committee" title="National Republican Senatorial Committee" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">National Republican Senatorial Committee</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Republican_Congressional_Committee" title="National Republican Congressional Committee" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">National Republican Congressional Committee</a> and the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association" title="National Rifle Association" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">National Rifle Association</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a> She represents Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Dole" title="Elizabeth Dole" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Elizabeth Dole</a> (R-NC), Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe" title="Jim Inhofe" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Jim Inhofe</a> (R-OK) Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter" title="David Vitter" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">David Vitter</a> (R-LA), Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_H.Smith" title="Gordon H. Smith" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Gordon Smith</a> (R-OR), Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_DeMint" title="Jim DeMint" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Jim DeMint</a> (R-SC), Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Blunt" title="Roy Blunt" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Roy Blunt</a> (R-MO), Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Rubio" title="Marco Rubio" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Marco Rubio</a> (R-FL), Sen.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Toomey" title="Pat Toomey" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Pat Toomey</a> (R-PA), Sen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Ayotte" title="Kelly Ayotte" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Kelly Ayotte</a> (R-NH), and Rep. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cole" title="Tom Cole" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Tom Cole</a> (R-OK).<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-leadership-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-wsj-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[6]</a> She has also represented <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement" title="Tea Party movement" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Tea Party</a> candidates <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharron_Angle" title="Sharron Angle" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Sharron Angle</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Miller(Alaska_politician)" title="Joe Miller (Alaska politician)" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Joe Miller</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-wsj-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[6]</a> She refused to represent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_O%27Donnell" title="Christine O'Donnell" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Christine O'Donnell</a> because she couldn't afford her services.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-wsj-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[6]</a> She has been appointed to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association" title="American Bar Association" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">American Bar Association</a>'s Standing Committee on Election Law and as an advisor on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Law_Institute" title="American Law Institute" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">American Law Institute</a>'s Election Law Project entitled "Principles of Election Law: Dispute Resolution."<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a>

She serves on the Board of Directors of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Foundation" title="Bradley Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Bradley Foundation</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-bradleyboard-9" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[9]</a> She also serves on the Board of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association" title="National Rifle Association" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">National Rifle Association</a> (NRA) and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Conservative_Union" title="American Conservative Union" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">American Conservative Union Foundation</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-10" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[10]</a> She sits on the Board of Governors of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_National_Lawyers_Association" title="Republican National Lawyers Association" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Republican National Lawyers Association</a>, where she is a former president.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-rnla-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a>

<h2 style="background-image: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170);">Bibliography<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=4&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Bibliography" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h2>

<h3 style="background-image: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none;">Press articles<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=5&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Press articles" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h3>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/06/setting-the-record-straight-on-voter-id-laws/print/" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Setting the record straight on voter ID laws</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Caller" title="The Daily Caller" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">The Daily Caller</a>, July 6, 2011.</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444327204577617133260342296.html" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Campaign-Finance Reform and Its Casualties</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal" title="The Wall Street Journal" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">The Wall Street Journal</a>, August 31, 2012.</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/08/does-our-voting-system-need-to-be-fixed/give-partisanship-a-rest-and-address-real-issues" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Give Partisanship a Rest and Address Real Issues</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">The New York Times</a>, November 9, 2012.</li>

</ul>

<h3 style="background-image: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none;">Scholarly articles<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=6&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Scholarly articles" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h3>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">'The Rise of America’s Two National Pastimes: Baseball and the Law' (1999, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Law_Review" title="Michigan Law Review" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Michigan Law Review</a>)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a></li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">'Donor Disclosure: Undermining The First Amendment' (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Law_Review" title="Minnesota Law Review" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Minnesota Law Review</a>, 2012)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a></li>

</ul>

<h3 style="background-image: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none;">Books<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=7&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: Books" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h3>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">The Lobbying Compliance Handbook (2008, Columbia Books)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-foley-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_note-acuf-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a></li>

</ul>

<h2 style="background-image: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170);">References<span class="mw-editsection" style="user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 0.25em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleta_Mitchell&action=edit&section=8&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: References" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">edit</a>]</h2>

<li id="cite_note-OKHistSoc-1" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-OKHistSoc_1-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-OKHistSoc_1-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">b</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-OKHistSoc_1-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">c</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-OKHistSoc_1-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">d</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-OKHistSoc_1-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">e</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-OKHistSoc_1-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">f</a> Pappas, Christine. <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/M/MI048.html" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">MITCHELL, CLETA DEATHERAGE (1950- )</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_Historical_Society" title="Oklahoma Historical Society" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Oklahoma Historical Society</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-foley-2" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">b</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">c</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">d</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">e</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">f</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">g</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-7" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">h</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-8" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">i</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-9" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">j</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-10" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">k</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-11" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">l</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-foley_2-12" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">m</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.foley.com/cleta-mitchell/" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Foley & Lardner biography</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-acuf-3" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">b</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">c</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">d</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">e</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">f</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">g</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-7" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">h</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-8" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">i</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-9" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">j</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-10" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">k</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-11" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">l</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-acuf_3-12" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">m</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://conservative.org/about-acu/board-of-directors/cleta-mitchell" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">American Conservative Union Foundation biography</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-rnla-4" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">b</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">c</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">d</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">e</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">f</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-6" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">g</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-7" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">h</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-rnla_4-8" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">i</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.rnla.org/bio/BioDetail.asp?MemberID=4049" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Republican National Lawyers Association biography</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-leadership-5" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-leadership_5-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-leadership_5-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">b</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-leadership_5-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">c</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-leadership_5-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">d</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-leadership_5-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">e</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/breakfast/bio.cfm?speaker=2156" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Leadership Institute Speaker Bio</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-wsj-6" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-wsj_6-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-wsj_6-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">b</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-wsj_6-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">c</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-wsj_6-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">d</a> Elizabeth Williamson, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304316404575580670676270344.html" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Riding Shotgun on Campaign Trail</a>, The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2010</li>

<li id="cite_note-7" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-7" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a>} <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.nndb.com/people/909/000129522/" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Cleta Mitchell</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-8" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-8" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a>} <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/meet-cleta-mitchell-the-conservative-movements-anti-gay-eminence-grise/274629/" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">Meet Cleta Mitchell, the Conservative Movement's Anti-Gay Eminence Grise - Jonathan Krohn - The Atlantic</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-bradleyboard-9" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-bradleyboard_9-0" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a>} <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.bradleyfdn.org/board_of_directors.asp" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">The Bradley Foundation Board of Directors</a></li>

<li id="cite_note-10" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleta_Mitchell#cite_ref-10" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style=" top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a>} <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://meetthenra.org/board-list" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaaoaaaakcayaaacnms="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs" aaaaveleqvr42n3pgqkaiaheuxdqj3dqj3e6iotpusqcgj4eq5iluile0jil3pecxhchgbhz8kg4hwxau3mzecgeyfnaxp4hqnqpnt7ql0nadpd6whcclvnakksq8iiaaaaaaelftksuqmcc="AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" background-position="background-position" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" xmlns:data="data">National Rifle Association Board of Directors</a></li>

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<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:University_of_Oklahoma_alumni" title="Category:University of Oklahoma alumni" style="text-decoration: underline; background-image: none;">University of Oklahoma alumni</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_lawyers" title="Category:American lawyers" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">American lawyers</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Members_of_the_Oklahoma_House_of_Representatives" title="Category:Members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:National_Rifle_Association" title="Category:National Rifle Association" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">National Rifle Association</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people" title="Category:Living people" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Living people</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Oklahoma_Republicans" title="Category:Oklahoma Republicans" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Oklahoma Republicans</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_state_legislators_in_Oklahoma" title="Category:Women state legislators in Oklahoma" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Women state legislators in Oklahoma</a></li>

</ul>

</div>

===

fedsoc bs

Cleta Mitchell is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Foley & Lardner LLP and a member of the firm’s Political Law Practice. With more than 40 years of experience in law, politics and public policy, Ms. Mitchell advises nonprofit and issue organizations, corporations, candidates, campaigns, and individuals on state and federal campaign finance law, election law, and compliance issues related to lobbying, ethics and financial disclosure. Ms. Mitchell practices before the Federal Election Commission, the ethics committees of the US House and Senate and similar state and local enforcement bodies and agencies.

Ms. Mitchell has extensive experience on the federal lobbying and ethics law enacted by Congress in 2007, having taught dozens of seminars on the subject since its passage. In 2008, Ms. Mitchell authored The Lobbying Compliance Handbook, published by Columbia Books, Inc.

Ms. Mitchell has testified before Congress on numerous occasions related to election law, campaign finance and lobbying and ethics laws, and is a frequent speaker and guest commentator on political law. In 1999, she authored "The Rise of America’s Two National Pastimes: Baseball and the Law," published by the University of Michigan Law Review, and in 2012, Ms. Mitchell authored “Donor Disclosure: Undermining The First Amendment,” published by theMinnesota Law Review. In 2013, she was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, “How to Investigate the IRS.”

Ms. Mitchell served on the advisory council to the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Election Law and as an advisor on the American Law Institute's Election Law Project entitled, “Principles of Election Law: Dispute Resolution.” She serves on the board of directors of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, is chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation, and has served as the president of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Ms. Mitchell has been Peer Review Rated as AV® Preeminent™, the highest performance rating in Martindale-Hubbell's peer review rating system and has been selected by her peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America® for five consecutive years since 2010 for her work in administrative/regulatory law. She was also named a "Top Lawyer" in Washington D.C. by the Washingtonian for her work in political and campaign law. For her work in government and political law, she is listed in Chambers USA: America's Leading Business Lawyers (2010 - 2013). In 2012, National Journal named her one of Washington’s 25 Most Influential Women. Ms. Mitchell was a teaching fellow at the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1981 and was the Shapiro Fellow at the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in 2001.

Publications

<div class="authorItem" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 2px 0px 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><a href="http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/supreme-court-october-term-2009-what-is-in-store-event-audiovideo" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Supreme Court October Term 2009: What Is In Store? - Event Audio/Video</a>

October 1, 2009</div>