Decades before she joined the now infamous call in which Donald Trump asked Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes”, conservative election activist Cleta Mitchell was a young Democratic powerhouse legislator in Oklahoma fighting for progressive causes.
How Mitchell – who advised Trump during his 2016 campaign and who founded the national Election Integrity Network, a group working to get grassroots conservatives to monitor their polls and protect the country from voter fraud – ended up on that phone call, is still confounding for those who knew her earlier in her career. Such a stunning political pivot is certainly uncommon.
Former colleagues and classmates described a gifted, ambitious, but self-interested attorney willing to attach herself to whatever cause might propel her career. The possible explanations they can find for the transition stem from her multiple marriages, the frustrations of a lost election and her husband’s white collar conviction.
