Lawyer who tried to overturn Trump's 2020 loss appointed to a U.S.
election board
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[November 20, 2021]
By Alexandra Ulmer
(Reuters) - In January, lawyer Cleta
Mitchell joined a phone call with then-President Donald Trump as he
pressured Georgia's top election official to "find" enough votes to
overturn his defeat in the state, playing an important role in Trump's
attempts to subvert the 2020 results.
Nearly a year later, the longtime conservative has been appointed to the
advisory board of a federal agency with a mission to help states conduct
secure elections.
Her surprise appointment to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's (EAC)
Board of Advisors shows how once-fringe "election integrity" activists
are trying to gain footholds in U.S. institutions in the run up to next
year's congressional elections. And it illustrates Trump's continued
dominance over his party as Mitchell and other backers of his
stolen-election falsehoods win support from powerful Republicans in
Congress.
Mitchell, part of a small network of Republican lawyers who have for
decades pushed the idea that U.S. elections are vulnerable to rampant
fraud, left her partnership at law firm Foley & Lardner days after the
Georgia phone call. She has since been focused on championing "election
integrity" as chairwoman of the conservative Public Interest Legal
Foundation (PILF). She began work at the EAC advisory board on Nov. 3.
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Research by election lawyers shows voter fraud in the United States is
rare, despite what Trump and his allies have claimed about voting in
2016, 2018 and 2020.
Mitchell's appointment, which was made in August but only came to light
this week after a tweet by a reporter with non-profit media organization
Votebeat, alarmed Democrats and voting rights groups. Although the
35-member board is an advisory body and does not have any specific
powers over voting procedures, critics said the appointment gives
legitimacy to someone they accuse of undermining faith in the democratic
process in the United States.
"I would expect Mitchell to continue to spread disinformation about the
actual integrity of American elections," said Lisa Graves, executive
director of watchdog group True North Research and a former deputy
assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice. "Putting
Mitchell on the advisory board demonstrates how devoted the Trump party
is to rewarding those who spread his claims."
Mitchell pushed back against the criticism, saying "millions of
Americans" are concerned about voting integrity.
"The real outliers are the tiny fraction of Americans who oppose voter
ID, who promote an avalanche of unverified mail ballots and who work
constantly to eliminate procedures that ensure proper election
administration," she said in a statement to Reuters.
The EAC's four commissioners said in a statement it was not their role
to "comment on or criticize" appointments to the Board of Advisors.
Mitchell was nominated to the board by conservative members on the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), a bipartisan agency that studies
allegations of discrimination, including in voting rights.
Her appointment is part of a much larger Republican push to try to exert
more control over election administration. At least 18 Republican-led
states have passed voting restrictions this year, while backers of false
stolen-election claims are running campaigns for secretary of state -
the top election official - in election battleground states.
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![](../images/112021pics/news_d39.jpg)
Lawyer Cleta Mitchell speaks during a hearing regarding the IRS on
Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S. February 6, 2014, in this
frame grab taken from C-SPAN television footage. C-SPAN/Handout via
REUTERS/File Photo
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'HOSTAGE'
Mitchell said her role was clinched with bipartisan support by the
eight-person USCCR, evenly split between conservatives and liberals.
But Democratic commissioner Michael Yaki told Reuters that his bloc
was subject to a "hostage-like" situation by conservatives.
The commission's conservative faction refused to ratify Norma Cantu,
who was appointed by President Joe Biden to chair the agency in
February, unless certain demands were met, Yaki and Cantu said.
"One of the changes the Conservative placed as a condition to
ratifying me as the Chair was to create a process for bipartisan
nominations to the board of advisors of Elections Assistance
Commission," Cantu said in a statement to Reuters.
At the time, the USCCR chair put forward nominees, who were then
ratified by majority vote, but Republicans asked each of the two
political factions to put forward a candidate, Yaki said.
The conservatives initially wanted J. Christian Adams, a
Trump-appointed USCCR commissioner who has, without evidence,
alleged "alien invasion" by non-citizens trying to vote illegally in
the United States and spent years suing counties to force them to
purge voter rolls. Adams, president of the PILF group, was also a
member of Trump's election integrity commission, which disbanded
without finding evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016
election.
When Democrats refused to accept Adams, work on the commission
stalled, Yaki said.
Eventually, the two sides reached a deal in which both factions put
forward two appointments to boards such as the EAC's and the
opposite side selects one of them.
Adams told Reuters that the selections should have always been
bipartisan. "They weren't. We fixed that," he said. "You don't
really think having a bipartisan process is 'being held hostage do
you?'"
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2021/Nov/20/images/ads/current/remington_sda_100120.png)
On April 30, the USCCR commissioners ratified Cantu and, minutes
later, agreed to change the appointment process. The commission's
four conservatives then put forward two names for the EAC board,
according to an internal nomination email reviewed by Reuters: Adams
and Mitchell.
"Well, do you drink cyanide or hemlock? It's a Hobson's choice of
nightmarish proportions," Yaki said.
Adams was well-known for his work at PILF whereas Mitchell was more
of an "unknown variable," Cantu said. "I am not pleased with the
appointment and would have welcomed another choice."
(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Grant
McCool)
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