“Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies” (NYT Has 400 Hours of Cleta Mitchell Zoom Calls)

NYT:

In the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020, one of his election lawyers set out to keep the lies about his loss alive.

The lawyer, a well-connected conservative named Cleta Mitchell, knit together grass-roots activists, Republican lawyers, party officials and deep-pocketed advocacy groups into a vast national network. The aim was nothing less than remaking American elections.

Over the past four years, Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action.

Its participants have propelled specious theories from corners of the internet into the halls of Congress. They successfully lobbied for new state election laws and procedures, diving deep into the intricacies of election regulations. They have fanned out in neighborhoods on the hunt for evidence of election fraud.

And they have huddled in private, weekly meetings, methodically laying the groundwork that could be used to contest a Trump defeat.

The New York Times has obtained recordings of more than 400 of those meetings, over 400 hours of conversations, along with additional documents and training materials. It is a trove that provides an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at how misinformation is used to manufacture a movement.

Even as it claims to be nonpartisan and grass-roots, Ms. Mitchell’s network has closely coordinated with the Trump-controlled Republican National Committee. It found an audience with several election officials, including four Republican secretaries of state, as well as more than a dozen state legislators.

Pillars of the conservative movement — groups funded by the megadonors Rebecca Dunn, Richard Uihlein, as well as the Bradley Impact Foundation and others — provided organizational and financial backing. The network was initially a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group associated with Mark Meadows, a chief of staff in the Trump White House. Citizens for Renewing America, a related group founded by Russell T. Vought, a close Trump ally, also contributed money early on, according to public records.

Ms. Mitchell and others who played pivotal roles in Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, including the former law professor John Eastman, the architect of the fake electors scheme, advised the ranks of activists as they sought to remove thousands of voters from the rolls and pushed to reimagine how elections are certified.

Right-wing media outlets, including Gateway Pundit and the Federalist, joined the calls and later publicized the activists’ work to sympathetic readers across the internet.

All of this coordination allowed debunked theories to jump from state to state. The network was instrumental in prompting state officials, in rapid succession, to abandon a widely regarded election data system, for example.

Earlier this year, Ms. Mitchell said she was called by God to shift her attention to the possibility that noncitizens were voting. Now, in the final weeks of the campaign, Republicans across the country, chief among them Mr. Trump, are wholly convinced of the baseless claims that Democrats are registering undocumented immigrants in droves in a plot to steal the election…..

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