David Freedlander deep dive for New York:
“It really makes me sad to see what happened to Cleta Mitchell,” said Rick Hasen, a legal scholar at UCLA who served on an election-law committee with Mitchell through the American Law Institute that was dedicated to the proper resolution of disputed election results. “Trump wasn’t able to get top-tier conservative election lawyers to represent him and for good reason: because he has no serious argument. I don’t know whether Cleta really believes this stuff or she doesn’t, and I don’t know which is worse, but there are no other lawyers of her caliber that are doing this.”
Some people who know Mitchell think she is playing a kind of double game. “We can’t have this situation where all of our voters think that who the next president is gets decided by George Soros and the head of the World Economic Forum,” said Dustin Stockton, a former Mitchell client and someone who later became one of the organizers of the Ellipse rally before the January 6 riot. “She is too smart for this. She knows that the election wasn’t stolen. I think she is just trying to get all the MAGA people to volunteer as poll watchers so they don’t think the election was stolen either and they come back and start voting again.” (“Yeah, that’s true,” Mitchell said when I put this theory to her. “If you think that there were problems in the 2020 election, come over here, I’ll put you to work. I’ll tell you what you can do to make a difference, so that what happened in 2020 doesn’t happen again.”)…
At one point, Mitchell said she would not speak with me anymore until I read her Georgia lawsuit and watched the countless hours of testimony before the Arizona legislature on the vote there and watched a Citizens United documentary on how 2020 was rigged and read a book on it by the conservative author Mollie Hemingway. I did so, and what was surprising was how thin all of the claims were, most the results of shoddy research, coming apart upon even a cursory investigation. For example, the lawsuit Mitchell helped file in Georgia in 2020 claims that there were thousands of underage people who voted illegally; in fact, Georgia allows some 17-year-olds to register to vote so long as they are 18 by Election Day. The actual number of fraudulent votes by teenagers was found by state investigators to be zero. To me, she claimed that Pennsylvania had received more votes than it had ballots, a belief that requires practically making up numbers out of whole cloth.
Central to Mitchell’s understanding of American politics is that it is full of people who are bad actors and covert partisan operators. Nobody, truly, can care just about participation and seeing that an election was run cleanly. The League of Women Voters, which has for years been recruiting election observers and poll watchers, is just “the Plague of Women Voters,” she said. “Because they are a plague upon our elections. They are a partisan, hard-left group masquerading as people only concerned about ‘good government.’”
The League of Women Voters has a long tradition of recruiting nonpartisan poll workers and election observers; in response to Mitchell’s claims, the group says it “never endorses or opposes political candidates or parties.” Of course, in a way, it is an ideological outfit, in that it believes that voting should be encouraged and should be easy. And if there is one party that agrees with that, and one party that doesn’t, then even something as fundamental as the right to vote can no longer be thought of as nonpartisan.
When we spoke, Mitchell cited a study of nonvoters that revealed, she claimed, how little they knew about the issues and the candidates.
“I am glad those people didn’t vote. They had no clue about anything,” she said. “The left sees them as people who are capable of being manipulated so that they vote as a Democrat. That’s what the left cares about. They don’t give a rat’s ass about increasing participation and turnout.”