In July, not long before President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address questioning the legitimacy of American elections, the pioneering conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell and about two dozen of her associates logged onto a private video briefing with the White House.
This story first ran at ProPublica.
Mitchell, who holds no formal position in the Trump administration, had been pivotal to Trump’s bid to challenge his loss in 2020, spearheading efforts to prove his claims of fraud and reverse his defeat in court.
After Joe Biden took office, when others abandoned the fight or scoffed as Trump clung to conspiracy theories, Mitchell doubled down, founding a grassroots organization devoted to rewriting election laws and rules to be more restrictive. Members of her group, the Election Integrity Network, were named to vital election-related positions in swing states and, later, in the second Trump administration.
The pre-speech briefing was an acknowledgment of just how consequential Mitchell and her organization had become. The White House had held similar sessions for key political players, such as governors, members of Congress and major press outlets.
At the appointed time, the screen filled with the faces of EIN leaders and supporters, some sitting in front of digital backgrounds with the group’s logo on them. Mitchell shushed those who’d forgotten to mute and introduced John Solomon, an ally of hers who was helping prepare the speech.
Mitchell and her network hardly needed the run-through, though: Much of the speech was a compendium of allegations and conspiracy theories they had originated or spread.
Her lieutenants were thrilled to hear that the president would assert there were more than 275,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls — a since-debunked claim based on work led by one of her proteges, who occupied a top post at the Department of Homeland Security.
The speech would end with an exhortation for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register, which Mitchell had helped draft.
To Seth Keshel, an EIN adviser on the call, none of it was surprising — Mitchell was in and out of the White House all the time. He’d joined her for one such meeting.
“She’s got an open door with the president,” he said.
No one besides Trump himself has done more than Mitchell, 76, to turn the mundane processes of how ballots are cast and counted in American elections into mortal combat.
Since Trump returned to the White House, Mitchell and her acolytes have been deeply entwined in his unprecedented bid to assert federal control over voting, an effort that has increasingly defined his second term.
Friends and enemies alike credit her with providing much of the administration’s election road map. The White House has turned to those close to her to enact the plan, appointing her associates to help lead the hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls and to reinvestigate 2020 voting irregularities.
“She has the president’s ear,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a close ally of Mitchell’s, said in a July interview. “A lot of the momentum things we’ve seen over the last six months or so come directly from Cleta’s involvement.”
To understand how Mitchell became the hand behind this transformational push, ProPublica traced her obsession with politics and elections back to its roots.
From the start, those who knew her told us, she stood out for her willingness to embrace options others wouldn’t and to do whatever it took to win.
Her relentlessness and long-term strategic vision have enabled her to outflank or outlast not only her liberal opponents, but her conservative rivals.
Much of Mitchell’s influence derives from years of groundwork she’s done to put a foundation under the so-called election-integrity movement, once dismissed as a collection of oddballs and fringe actors.
Beyond building the EIN and raising millions of dollars to fund its activities, she’s helped direct tens of millions more to like-minded policy shops, researchers, law firms and advocacy groups.
The net effect has been to make an agreed-upon set of beliefs about elections — that the 2020 presidential vote was stolen, that U.S. voting systems are rigged, that there’s rampant voting by noncitizens — a core part of conservatism.
Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who collaborated with Mitchell before Trump’s election and now heads the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said she had been crucial in building the institutional infrastructure that has sustained Trump’s “big lie.”
“What she found in Trump was less of a client and more of a movement,” he said.
Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica for this article but occasionally answered emails. “Hahahaha!!!” she wrote in response to one email asking for an interview. To another, she replied: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”
She responded in writing to about a quarter of our detailed questions, disputing that her efforts were designed to undermine elections or upend their results.
“Nothing that we do is designed or intended to ‘sway’ any election outcomes,” she wrote. “What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.”
A White House spokesperson didn’t answer specific questions about Mitchell, saying she has no official role in election policy but is an effective private advocate.
To tell Mitchell’s story, ProPublica interviewed more than 35 people who have worked with her or know her personally, including participants in her network, Republican election lawyers, current and former Trump administration officials, family members and friends. Many, especially conservatives who’ve fallen out with her, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
We examined thousands of emails related to her work obtained from public records requests and sources, as well as court filings and an oral history she gave in 2007.
We also reviewed hundreds of hours of recordings of her network’s organizing calls spanning a four-year period, many of which were shared exclusively with ProPublica, as well as numerous speeches she’s given at private events for conservatives.
On a call earlier this year, she emphasized that Democrats “only win when they cheat” and that people who resist EIN’s agenda are “opposed to honest elections” and “depraved.”
As much as Mitchell has been able to achieve with Trump in the White House, several people we spoke with noted she hasn’t been able to push important parts of her agenda over the finish line.
Her signature legislation — the SAVE Act and its successor, the SAVE America Act — have been blocked by moderate Republicans in the Senate. Election changes she’d hoped the president could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts. And Trump’s mid-July address on elections drew shrugs even from some conservative media.
Critics, including some inside the election-integrity movement, told ProPublica they are worried that Mitchell’s growing frustration is prompting her to press Trump and his allies toward ever more extreme actions. Her lifelong pattern, ProPublica’s reporting shows, has been to escalate conflicts into winner-take-all battles — a pattern playing out now as she tries to shape the midterms.
Hours after Trump’s speech, Mitchell appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, sounding openly exasperated at the dismissive coverage, her lips pressed into a thin line.
Bannon suggested the evidence of election fraud cited by the president justified declaring a national emergency, which he argued would enable Trump to immediately force states to implement parts of the SAVE America Act.
Mitchell went even further, one-upping the right-wing provocateur. Trump needn’t bother with this step, she said, which would inevitably be met with court challenges. He already had authority under a law empowering the government to protect critical infrastructure to unilaterally enforce the bill’s requirements, she insisted.
“We’ve got the blueprint. We’ll help,” she said. “We just need someone in authority to say, ‘Let’s do it.’”
“I Was Always Interested in Politics”
Mitchell’s fascination with politics and voting began at an early age.
One of her first memories, she would recount in the 2007 oral history, was begging her mother “please not to go vote” until she got home from school and could accompany her. Later, she recalled, “I would study all the voter guides and tell my mother who I thought she ought to vote for.”
Mitchell grew up poor in Oklahoma City, the third of six children born to Jack Deatherage and Modean Lane. She’s often credited her mother, a secretary, for pushing her relentlessly to excel. About her father, she’s said much less, telling The Wall Street Journal only that he was “kind of a no-account.”
According to court records, their home life was highly volatile. Her mother initiated divorce proceedings at least five times, citing her father’s chronic unemployment, drinking, cruelty and violence. The couple split up for good in 1962, when Cleta was 11.
She hid the family’s struggles behind a peppy disposition, piling up accolades at school. At 15, she was runner-up in the Oklahoma City Junior Miss pageant. (Asked about these events, Mitchell replied: “I am peppy. I was also named Miss Congeniality in that pageant.”)
At the University of Oklahoma, which she attended on a journalism scholarship, Cleta was known as a “good girl, sorority girl, untouched by the sexual revolution,” one contemporary said.
Before long, she found a seemingly perfect consort: Duane Draper, who’d been the university’s student body president. While friends believed their shared interest in politics brought them together, they had another bond: He, too, had grown up with an abusive father.
“They were mirror images,” said Conrad Draper, Duane’s brother. “They both felt powerless in their childhood, so in their adulthood they constantly pursued power.”
They married in 1971, when Cleta was a junior. When she ran to be student body president, he served as her unofficial campaign manager.
She lost, a setback she blamed mostly on misogyny. Still, she emerged as ambitious as ever. She spearheaded voter drives to defeat Republicans, worked to expand students’ access to voting and helped launch the Oklahoma chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as a delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
As soon as she graduated from law school, Cleta ran for a seat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, taking on an incumbent Republican. She knocked on every door in her district, prospecting for votes at bowling alleys, beauty shops and high school football games. When she won, Duane had the campaigning shoes she’d worn to near-shreds bronzed.
At 26, she joined a Legislature that was literally smoke-filled (it hadn’t banned cigars) and full of men uneasy at the arrival of “this young, pretty, opinionated blond,” she said in the oral history. She was undaunted, swiftly moving up the ranks by cultivating wealthy donors and building a fundraising machine.
Less than two years later, when Cal Hobson, a small-town mayor contemplating a House run, asked whose backing he should seek, he was sent to Cleta. She had only one question when he sought her endorsement, he recalled: Did he back the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed constitutional change to guarantee women the same legal rights as men? Hobson said yes and became her ally in the Legislature, watching as she made “some friends and a lot of enemies.”
With Democrats in control of the Oklahoma House, she exploited a battle between candidates for speaker to win a top post on the powerful Appropriations and Budget Committee, then became its chair.
Once in leadership, she backed a slate of liberal initiatives, from expanding open records laws to creating training centers to help divorced women improve their career prospects.
But her idealism coexisted with a ruthless pragmatism, said David Walters, who came up in Democratic politics in the same era and would eventually become the state’s governor. He remembered his shock when she promised him she’d oppose a powerful state development official in a battle over a new building on the University of Oklahoma campus, then switched sides behind the scenes.
“It was quite remarkable,” Walters said. “This was an example of Cleta saying one thing publicly and doing in private something entirely different.”
In 1982, with her political fortunes on the rise, Cleta’s marriage to Duane ended. The filings offered little explanation, citing only “incompatibility,” but those close to her knew Duane had come out as gay. The heartbreak was “devastating,” Hobson said.
Duane left Oklahoma for Boston, where he became a gay-rights activist. He died of AIDS in 1991.
After the divorce, Cleta did what she’d always done: She “put her nose to the grindstone,” Hobson said, “writing the budget and getting her way at the Capitol.”
She found a new partner in Dale Mitchell, a former college baseball player, registered Republican and bank executive. In 1984, when they married, they agreed that Dale would change his party affiliation if Cleta would take his last name.
Later that year, Time magazine named the newly minted Cleta Mitchell as one of a group of star Democratic state legislators, all female, who might one day “set their sights on a higher prize: the presidency itself.” About a year after they got married, they welcomed a baby girl.
Then, over two years, their life collapsed.
Her political fortunes waned after the ERA, her signature issue, failed to pass in Oklahoma and nationally. Her main political patron, the speaker of the House, had become entangled in a voting-fraud scandal, costing her her position in leadership. She chose not to defend her House seat, then two years later ran for lieutenant governor. When she lost, she found herself out of office completely.
Dale’s troubles dwarfed hers. When oil prices sank, his overleveraged bank collapsed and federal regulators shut it down. He was banned from the banking industry and later convicted on multiple counts of bank fraud, for which he was put on five years’ probation and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution. The crisis ruined them financially.
Cleta emerged from the ordeal infuriated by what she viewed as federal government’s overreach in prosecuting her husband, whom she has defended as “the most honest person I’ve ever known.”
Once out of Democratic politics, Mitchell gravitated toward conservatives, who were gaining ground in much of the country. She explained the shift as a way to realign her politics to match her personal philosophy of self-sufficiency (and no government handouts). Others say she saw a route back to power and took it.
Hobson, who rose to lead Oklahoma’s senate, was gobsmacked by her transformation.
“No one,” he said, “has changed more politically in my lifetime than Cleta Deatherage Mitchell.”
Starting in the early 1990s, Mitchell embarked upon a three-and-a-half decade climb up the conservative power ladder.
She and Dale moved to Washington, D.C., so she could help lead a mostly Republican campaign for congressional term limits. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the fight endeared Mitchell, brought in as the token Democrat, to the conservative elite. She switched her party affiliation in 1996 and, within the next few years, had recovered enough financially to buy a home in an upscale gated community and a luxury vacation getaway in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
After the 2000 election, as George W. Bush fought to hold onto a narrow lead over Al Gore in Florida, Mitchell became one of the Bush campaign’s high-profile media surrogates and defenders. In TV appearances, she argued that Democrats’ demands for recounts were an attempt to manipulate the election system.
She emerged determined to focus more of her legal practice on countering what she saw as an assault by progressive groups on election integrity. If “Republicans don’t commit themselves to learning and practicing the art of political war,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal column, “there may not be much of a GOP to kick around anymore in the future.”
Over the next eight years, she became a go-to election lawyer for Republican politicians and a partner at a powerful D.C. law firm. Later, when the Tea Party emerged, Mitchell embraced hard-right candidates and causes that some other GOP attorneys would not.
She jokingly described herself as the “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy” — a title others found increasingly on the mark.
As an attorney, Mitchell didn’t particularly shine in the courtroom, those who worked with her said, but she was a masterful and aggressive backroom negotiator and strategist.
No longer a candidate herself, she was free not to be “Miss Congeniality,” she acknowledged in a mentorship speech to conservative women titled “It’s Better to Be Respected Than Liked.” She won over allies with Southern warmth but could be a dangerous enemy if crossed. She’d do anything — within the law — to win, a dynamic one fellow election lawyer called “part of her brand.” (Mitchell didn’t respond to the questions about these assessments.)
Mitchell was one of the first Republican lawyers to support Trump’s presidential ambitions.
Starting in 2011, she defended him against a Federal Election Commission complaint that a website floating a possible Trump run constituted an undeclared candidacy.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer, who helped launch the exploratory bid, said Mitchell had come recommended as the most aggressive lawyer in the field and first met the future president when she came to Trump Tower to discuss the case. Cohen said Trump subsequently retained Mitchell several more times.
“Each matter was resolved to our benefit, something both Trump and I appreciated,” Cohen said in a brief phone interview. When ProPublica asked what the other matters were, Cohen responded, “I can’t disclose those,” then hung up.
When Trump ran for real in 2016, Mitchell transferred her support to him once he’d knocked out her longtime client Marco Rubio. Some of her allies were shocked she’d back an insurgent candidate who often chafed at constitutional limits on executive power and violated conservative principles she’d long espoused.
During Trump’s first term, Reuters reported, Mitchell teamed with other prominent GOP lawyers on efforts to tighten election laws and rules, focusing on those related to mail-in voting and voter ID. Mitchell helped steer millions of dollars into these initiatives, as well as backing lawsuits against Democratic-leaning cities and counties aimed at compelling them to purge voters from their rolls.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Mitchell was among the first GOP lawyers to urge the Trump campaign to develop plans to dispute the contest’s results, focusing on six to eight battleground states.
Mitchell’s subsequent role in helping Trump try to challenge his loss has been much chronicled in news articles and examined in multiple investigations. Over time, experts said, it’s become clear she helped originate several of the most aggressive actions taken by the president and his allies.
“She had her finger in just about every pie the select committee looked at,” said Marc Harris, senior investigative counsel to the House congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the capitol.
Mitchell led litigation on the president’s behalf in Georgia, accumulating 1,800 pages of election fraud allegations. She maintains events moved too fast for this material to be properly evaluated by a judge. “President Trump NEVER got his day in court in GA,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions.
These claims figured prominently in the infamous phone call on which she joined Trump as he pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overcome Biden’s slim margin in the state.
As Trump poured on the pressure, Mitchell fed him details of election irregularities from her case and demanded that Raffensperger share his findings from investigations into them.
Mitchell insisted to ProPublica they merely wanted to provide Raffensperger with evidence, not to push him “to take any official action to ‘overturn the election.’”
In the call, Trump made clear what he wanted.
“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” he said.
Mitchell also played a largely overlooked role in launching Trump’s final and most extreme gambit, the so-called fake electors strategy.
She recruited her longtime friend, law professor John Eastman, to prepare a memo outlining a constitutional framework under which Republican legislators in swing states where Trump had lost could appoint alternate electors who’d support him.
In her emailed responses to ProPublica, Mitchell called the idea an outgrowth of work she’d done early that year advising the American Legislative Exchange Council about steps state lawmakers could take to help Trump in a contested election.
“A movement is stirring,” Mitchell wrote to Eastman in an email two days after the election released by the House Jan. 6 Committee. “But needs constitutional support.”
Ultimately, what congressional investigators came to call the “Trump-Eastman scheme” culminated with a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to certify the fake electors’ votes, flipping the Electoral College in Trump’s favor. But Pence rejected the idea, becoming the target of enraged Trump supporters when they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Experts said Mitchell helped set the day’s events in motion though she was not at the riot.
“She worked closely with John Eastman in developing and seeking to implement dubious legal strategies to overturn the election result,” Harris said. “She encouraged the selection of fake electors.”
Mitchell denied any responsibility for Eastman’s work or what ensued.
“I was completely uninvolved in the Jan 6 rally at the Capitol,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions. “I had nothing to do with the issues and advice from Dr. Eastman to the President, the Vice-President, or anyone else involved in that. None whatsoever.”
In an email responding to ProPublica’s questions, Eastman acknowledged Mitchell had solicited the memo but disputed his strategy was aimed at upending the election.
The California Supreme Court disbarred Eastman for his actions.
Mitchell resigned from her law firm after the Raffensperger call sparked backlash, blaming her exit on pressure from anti-Trump groups.
But unlike many who’d fought alongside her, Mitchell wasn’t dispirited once Biden entered the White House. She was just getting started.
In 2022, behind the closed doors of hotel ballrooms and conference suites, Mitchell appealed to crowds of conservatives in seven swing states, asking them to help her overhaul U.S. elections.
“Welcome, fellow deplorables!” she said to open the proceedings in Michigan, after a welcome video from Trump urging the crowd to get behind her. “As an old Southern Baptist, I like evangelizing. So, this is your Bible!”
Brandishing the 20-page manual provided to each participant, Mitchell implored attendees to master the arcane rules of American elections, work the polls and cozy up to — or, better yet, serve on — local election boards.
The tour was part of the nationwide launch of the Election Integrity Network. In the aftermath of losing the fight over 2020, Mitchell decided she needed an army — a popular movement large and loud enough to tear down what she saw as an election system dominated by Democrats.
“My sole focus has been for the last year and a half, how we as conservatives could build an infrastructure to do hand-to-hand combat with the Left, starting at the local level,” she said on a September 2022 EIN organizing call.
The network served as the centerpiece, providing the boots on the ground, but Mitchell also created an ecosystem to support it, spreading money to allied researchers, law firms and policy shops.
A ProPublica analysis of data from the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit, shows that between 2021 and 2025, Mitchell helped put more than $70 million into this work. According to tax filings, at least $11 million of that total came from nonprofits she oversaw. Tens of millions more came from the Bradley Foundation, where she served on the board, and the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank where she was a senior legal fellow.
Roughly 30 conservative election-integrity nonprofits were started after 2020. Well over half have received money from Mitchell or have close ties with her, the data shows.
“She occupies a unique position,” connecting donors, activists and political leaders, said Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of strategic investigations. She’s leveraged this spot, he said, “to turn election denial from a fringe position into an organized national movement.”
In assembling the EIN, Mitchell built chapters from scratch in some states; in others, she absorbed long-standing groups that did similar work.
Much of the network’s organizing takes place on the regular video calls held by each state chapter and about half a dozen national working groups, which focus on subjects such as reshaping voter rolls and scrutinizing voting machines.
In reviewing hundreds of hours of these meetings, ProPublica found a mixture of mind-numbing technical discussions, wild speculation and hyperpartisan vitriol.
On a July 2025 call to honor Eastman, heurged network leaders to assault the Left as the Romans attacked the ancient city of Carthage. “They will never stop until not only are they defeated, but the land from which they came is salted over so they can’t grow up again,” he said.
Mitchell disputed that EIN was partisan. “I defy you to show me hyperpartisan vitriol on any EIN related call,” she wrote to ProPublica. “That is not what we do. Mind-numbing technical discussions, yes.”
Local calls often fixate on micro-efforts aimed at a single county or election office. Members — who sometimes call themselves “election believers,” a counter to the “election denier” label used by critics — discuss lobbying particular politicians or combing voting records for evidence of fraud. If, as often happens, they find no widespread problems, the meetings serve as echo chambers in which supporters are urged to keep the faith and see conspiracies behind small bureaucratic mistakes.
Current and former members said being in the network made them feel like part of a special strike force saving America. Mitchell’s charm could be irresistible.
“It’s like she’s the sun and you’re the sunflower,” a former EIN leader said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. But Mitchell’s wrath could be volcanic if members disagreed with her or explored working with other election-integrity groups.
“Vindictive is not a strong enough word,” the former EIN leader said. “She treats you like a heretic.”
(Mitchell didn’t respond to these observations.)
Mitchell joins rank-and-file calls every month or so, on which she’s praised effusively and given titles like “the world’s leading expert on election integrity” and “our patron saint.” She also chairs a Friday morning leadership meeting that draws high-profile guests like Lisa Nelson, the head of the American Legislative Exchange Council, state election officials and luminaries from conservative think tanks. “It’s a who’s-who of who matters in the movement,” the former member said.
Since Trump retook the White House, officials from his administration have occasionally attended, discussing how they can coordinate with the network’s activists.
In summer 2025, a DHS official joined a network call to discuss an effort to persuade states to use an agency tool to search their voter rolls for noncitizens. Many states had resisted, uneasy about sharing confidential data with the federal government. The official wanted network members to encourage state and local officials to cooperate.
“This is your team,” an EIN leader said. “These are the people that are going to do the work in the states that you need to make this magic happen.”
Early on, many EIN branches weren’t particularly effective and several had notable stumbles. A then-participant in North Carolina’s chapter accompanied a group that unsuccessfully tried to force its way into a voting office. The chapter’s leader was accused of following election workers in his car and other disruptive behavior. (He denied his actions were problematic.)
But by 2023, the network started getting significant wins.
Mitchell and EIN were instrumental in spurring Republican states to pull out of a program to cross-check voter rolls for duplicate registrations. Mitchell claimed the program aided Democrats by requiring states to encourage unregistered residents to sign up to vote.
EIN members also helped persuade numerous states to pass laws banning “Zuckerbucks” — private donations from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others aimed at bolstering underfunded local election offices. Mitchell had claimed the donations helped Democratic turnout, paying for things like Spanish translators in election offices.
EIN continued to grow, expanding from seven chapters in 2022 to at least 26 today.
In Georgia, the network came close to realizing the goals Mitchell sketched out when she first pitched the group.
EIN members secretly pushed a rule through the State Election Board allowing local officials to delay certifying the state’s vote count — a step experts warned could enable them to dispute a Trump loss in the upcoming 2024 election. (Mitchell disputed that the rule change was aimed at this.)
A court struck down the rule, but that didn’t stop a group aligned with Mitchell from mounting an ad campaign urging election officials nationwide not to certify results they didn’t like.
As her state-level plans advanced, Mitchell readied an even bigger swing, one aimed at changing elections across the country and setting the agenda for a second Trump administration.
In January 2024, Mitchell met with a small group of Republican lawyers and election-integrity leaders to discuss how best to prevent fraud in the November presidential election.
Those gathered in the Arizona hotel room were especially worried about noncitizen voting, though numerous audits, studies and analyses — even those by Republican groups and states — show it is vanishingly rare.
Arizona had passed a law compelling residents to provide proof of citizenship when they registered, rather than just swearing they were citizens under penalty of perjury, as is typical in most states.
Mitchell suddenly had an inspiration, she later recounted in a private speech to Virginia’s EIN chapter: She’d lead a push for a similar federal law. “I didn’t think of this,” she told those at the event. “God made me do this.”
When Mitchell returned from Arizona, she was, indeed, a woman on a mission. She convened her closest congressional allies, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. Their staffers met with her to help draft the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
The bill set a high bar for proving citizenship, demanding that would-be voters produce documents like certified birth certificates and passports that many Americans don’t have. It also required states to use the DHS’ databases to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls.
The ideas in the measure would presage some of the second Trump administration’s most norm-breaking actions. “When we look back to the original SAVE Act in 2024 to the administration’s actions today, the through line is clear,” said Michael McNulty, a director for the watchdog nonprofit Issue One.
Mitchell knew the initial version of the act wouldn’t pass. When it was introduced in May 2024, Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House.
Rather, people in the election-integrity world said, she saw the measure as a strategic opportunity — both to cement her position atop the movement and to reignite the fervor for voting restrictions among the Trump faithful. For years, she’d fought behind the scenes for Trump’s ear on election issues, vying with more moderate Republican election experts as well as fringe activists.
To make sure her rivals had no choice but to support the SAVE Act, she brought on a backer too powerful to ignore: Stephen Miller, senior adviser to Trump in his first term and architect of his immigration policy. (Miller didn’t respond to questions about his relationship to Mitchell or the SAVE Act.)
Mitchell denied Miller had a hand in the measure. “Stephen is someone I greatly admire but we never worked together on the SAVE Act,” she wrote to ProPublica.
But Roy, the bill’s House sponsor, said in a podcast interview that Miller helped draft it. Mitchell sought to dovetail her election agenda with Miller’s immigration agenda, those who’ve worked with them said. They stood side by side at an event at the Capitol to launch the bill, warning that Democrats were letting people into the country illegally in part to swing elections.
In a coup for Mitchell — anointed the Mother of the SAVE Act — pretty much every significant player in the election-integrity space joined the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group she launched to back the bill.
Mitchell directed more than $6 million to groups that bought ads, put out research and took other actions supporting SAVE, tax filings show. Some $800,000 went to the nonprofit arm of the conservative media organization The Federalist, which provided glowing coverage of the legislation.
Sean Davis, The Federalist’s CEO, didn’t answer questions about whether the donation affected coverage. “Cleta Mitchell is a saint,” he said in an email.
The measure sailed through the House in July 2024, then predictably died in the Senate. The bill had drawn fire from voting advocacy groups, which said the measure could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, particularly women, the poor and minorities, all critical Democratic voting blocs.
Mitchell hardly missed a beat. That same month, she led a panel at an American Legislative Exchange Council conference that approved model legislation similar to the SAVE Act for conservative lawmakers to introduce in states across the country. Twelve states have since passed laws that strongly resembled SAVE and 23 have changed their voting procedures to reflect aspects of it.
That November, Trump won back the presidency and Republicans secured majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Mitchell saw the chance not only to pass an even tougher federal version of SAVE — a “SAVE Act on steroids” as she called it in a November organizing call — but to make even more far-reaching changes to American elections.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” she told attendees on the call. “I don’t want us to miss this.”
Two months after Trump took the oath of office, America got its first glimpse of how he planned to overhaul the nation’s election system.
His March 25, 2025, executive order — titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections — looked a lot like the SAVE Act. It required voters to prove their citizenship when they registered, mirroring the types of identification listed in the bill.
It also expanded on the notion of using DHS data to verify voters’ eligibility, saying that all of the federal government’s relevant troves of sensitive information should be made available for this use. Further, it directed the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of election crimes and noncitizen voting.
Mitchell was close to a pair of White House lawyers involved in drafting the order and was among a small group of outside attorneys who provided suggestions for it, according to several people who helped write it.
The order was the first in a string of behind-the-scenes victories that have not only allowed Mitchell to shape the Trump administration’s election blueprint, but have given her substantial influence over who’s been chosen to carry it out.
At least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Mitchell, ProPublica’s reporting shows, with several holding key posts directly related to elections.
“She’s had a lot to do with even White House hires in this regard,” Bannon said. (The White House denied Mitchell had swayed its hiring decisions.)
Heather Honey, a senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, has a portfolio that touches on almost everything the administration does on elections. She’s figured centrally in the government’s efforts to find and prosecute noncitizen voters.
Before joining DHS, Honey was a Mitchell protege and led EIN’s Pennsylvania chapter. A high-ranking federal official knowledgeable about the hiring process told ProPublica that the agency hired Honey over more experienced candidates. Her “sole qualification was who she worked with,” the former official said. “She worked with Cleta.”
A DHS spokesperson called this “false,” saying Honey had been recommended by senior government leaders for her election expertise.
Mitchell also has had a hand in shaping the administration’s reinvestigation of fraud allegations involving the 2020 election, beginning with the FBI’s seizure of election records from Fulton County, Georgia.
As ProPublica has reported, the affidavit justifying the raid included material compiled by an EIN-affiliated researcher and cited network participants as witnesses.
When the case bogged down as the prosecutor overseeing it began to doubt its strength, Mitchell was among those who recommended a replacement: Dan Bishop, a former North Carolina congressman whom she’s praised on social media and supported with campaign donations.
At a May meeting, a Georgia EIN leader said Bishop was tapped “thanks in large part to Cleta Mitchell,” an account echoed by an administration official familiar with the matter.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency “has no knowledge of any role Cleta Mitchell played” in Bishop’s appointment.
Mitchell told ProPublica she didn’t believe she’d affected this decision. “I was very worried about the direction of the case earlier this year and made known my displeasure quite strongly,” she said. “The decision to appoint Dan was made by the President and I applaud it, but I cannot claim credit for that brilliant idea.”
Soon after stepping in, Bishop tried to subpoena personal information for thousands of Fulton County poll workers, a move the county and election experts denounced as politically motivated intimidation. A court quashed the subpoena. Bishop has appealed.
As she’d envisioned in her call with EIN members just after the 2024 election, Mitchell has gotten the president to sink enormous political capital into passing even tougher versions of the bill, now known as the SAVE America Act.
The 2026 measure would require voters nationwide to present photo ID to vote and compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS, which would scour them for noncitizens. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, threatening not to sign other bills until it passes.
Lee, the Utah senator who sponsored the bill, said Mitchell was central to the updated version, especially the strict voter ID provisions. Trump, he added, gave it the new name.
Former officials and people in the election-integrity movement told ProPublica that Mitchell has had to overcome naysayers within the administration, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
On an EIN call in early 2025, Mitchell complained that Wiles had responded frostily to plans she offered for the incoming administration, “saying, ‘Thank you, I’ll take a look as soon as I come up for air.’”
At the time, Mitchell said she’d wanted to reply that wouldn’t happen for four years. When ProPublica followed up about the incident, she wrote: “Susie is remarkable and a great chief of staff. She doesn’t have time to read all the things that people like me send her.”
Mitchell has surmounted these obstacles, in part, by continuing to build out her array of alliances.
By the middle of this year, when the White House brought on Solomon — a longtime Mitchell supporter who vetted material for Trump’s prime-time elections address — it was clear she had found another way in. (A White House spokesperson said that Solomon, who also runs a conservative news site, interacted with Mitchell as a journalist would speak to a subject-matter expert.)
A former administration official who said he’d tried to stymie Mitchell acknowledged she’d won out. “The White House listens to her,” he said.
Mitchell had told her EIN disciples not to worry after Wiles’ brush off. She had more cards to play, she assured them.
“I always know if plan A doesn’t work, I have a plan B,” she said. “If plan B doesn’t work, I have a plan C. And so forth.”
By the time the first mail-in ballots of the midterms were cast in September, Mitchell had shaped and staffed the Trump administration’s election efforts to an astonishing extent. And yet, the knockout blow had eluded her.
Courts had blocked large parts of Trump’s executive orders. The hunt for noncitizen voters and the reinvestigation of 2020 voting irregularities had produced little of consequence, despite the considerable resources poured into them.
Mitchell’s critics and even her allies, including some in the election-integrity movement, say frustration has prompted her to push for more drastic steps.
During the summer, she mounted an escalating pressure campaign to save the SAVE America Act, mobilizing EIN members to badger recalcitrant senators, according to recordings of EIN meetings. She also worked with the bill’s Senate sponsor and Trump to kill the filibuster, a pathway known as the nuclear option, to get the bill over the line, but was blocked by a handful of moderate Republicans.
Mitchell has taken a similarly all-or-nothing approach in pressing states to pass laws modeled on the SAVE America Act, sometimes with similarly self-defeating results.
Earlier this year, she waded into a battle over an Ohio bill despite being warned that the governor would veto the tougher version she preferred. The final bill contained the provision Mitchell sought. The governor promptly vetoed it.
Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, an election-integrity movement leader who’s worked with Mitchell for decades, said Mitchell sometimes runs the risk of making elections less secure by torpedoing practical solutions.
“It was her way or the highway,” he said. “We need to focus on getting concrete wins.”
(Mitchell didn’t respond to Blackwell’s broader criticism but called the more moderate election measure he’s backed in Ohio “not nearly as good as it should be.”)
As the midterms near, she has become increasingly vocal — in media appearances, online and with her network members — in calling for the president to exert unprecedented powers to sway the vote.
“Even if she fails, she always finds another point of attack,” said Max Flugrath, a director at the voting advocacy group Fair Fight. “She’s relentless.”
On the Oct. 6 episode of “War Room,” Mitchell angrily pounded home that several agencies, particularly the Commerce Department, could intervene “today” to shore up purported vulnerabilities in voting machines. She repeated the word “today” seven times during the appearance, like a drumbeat.
Some of those who’ve known Mitchell the longest say her urgency has crescendoed as, at 76, she’s confronted the possibility that this administration is her last chance to realize her goals.
“In her mind, in her timeline, it’s existential,” the former network leader said. “She’s got to do it all, and she’s got to do it now. … The election integrity movement, c’est moi.”