Free Republic

On Thursday Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist confirmed our reporting from February last year. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.

It was a surreal experience,” attorney and election-law expert Cleta Mitchell told The Federalist, referring to the hours-long questioning she faced when called before the Fulton County special purpose grand jury. “I knew coming out of there that the whole thing was a loose cannon,” Mitchell said, adding that “they were definitely going to recommend indicting basically all the Trump allies — it was a completely political situation — nothing to do with the law. NOTHING.” With Friday’s release of the grand jury’s final report, Mitchell, who had represented former President Trump in his challenge to the Georgia 2020 election,...

There are many crucial steps in our election process for the electorate to have confidence in the outcome. They didn’t happen last TuesdayA number of noteworthy things did not happen on Election Day 2022. Everyone knows the red wave didn’t happen. But that isn’t all that didn’t happen.The chaos at the polls that was going to be caused by the presence of citizen poll watchers did not happen. Despite being hysterically predicted (hoped for?) over the past 18 months by reporters who wrote the same story with some version of the same headline again and again and again — “Election...

Cleta Mitchell is the top political and non-profit lawyer on the right. For quite a few years, she has been a partner in Foley & Lardner, a major national law firm that originated in Milwaukee. In recent years, she has been attacked and lied about repeatedly by the Left. This reached a crescendo over the last few days, following the leaked telephone conversation between President Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State, in which she was participated on behalf of the president. The Left mounted a vicious campaign against Cleta, her law firm and her firm’s clients, not accusing her of...

Cleta Mitchell, the conservative lawyer that can be heard interjecting in the now infamous call between President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, resigned from her role as partner at the Washington office of law firm Foley & Lardner on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports. Mitchell, who advised Trump during his Saturday phone call with Raffensperger in an effort to overturn the presidential election, could be heard multiple times during the call helping the president as he made baseless claims regarding the election and demanding that the secretary of state release election data. “So what are we going...

Cleta Mitchell is a top campaign-finance lawyer in Washington, D.C. This year she’s also been the target of a political and media smear that reveals some of the nastiness at work in the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. A partner at Foley & Lardner, Ms. Mitchell was astonished to find herself dragged into the Russia investigation on March 13 when Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued an interim report. They wrote that they still wanted to interview “key witnesses,” including Ms. Mitchell, who they claimed was “involved in or may have knowledge of third-party political...

Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell said on Friday that Barack Obama has acted more like a dictator than a president, and that President-elect Donald Trump should make it a priority to “restore the rule of law.” “We have been living under a dictatorial tyrant for the last eight years,” Mitchell said at the Conservative Women’s Network event, co-hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “And one of the most important things that Donald Trump can do as president is to restore the rule of law,” Mitchell said. …

A self-identified IRS employee admitted he would go after, target and try to end conservative groups who wanted to abolish the IRS, to Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing those groups, on a Washington Journal segment on C-SPAN. Mitchell, a political law attorney who has represented conservative groups during the IRS targeting scandal since 2010, was a guest on C-SPAN to discuss the possible impeachment of the IRS commissioner John Koskinen. The first caller was a self-identified IRS employee who said he would go after the groups Mitchell represents if their goal was to abolish the IRS. “I am a lowly...

Cleta Mitchell, one of Washington’s most respected elections attorneys, told Newsmax she has tangible proof that high-ranking IRS officials in Washington were fully aware of the agency's campaign to target conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, despite their denials. And she thinks the president knew about the practice too. If proven, she said, it could be an impeachable offense. Mitchell, in an interview with Newsmax TV on Tuesday, said she was told by a Cincinnati IRS agent that applications by two of her conservative clients were being processed by—and would ultimately be approved or denied—in Washington. She said she also is...

Cleta Mitchell, one of Washington's most respected elections attorneys, told Newsmax she has tangible proof that high-ranking IRS officials in Washington were fully aware of the agency's campaign to target conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, despite their denials. And she thinks the president knew about the practice too. If proven, she said, it could be an impeachable offense. Mitchell, in an interview with Newsmax TV on Tuesday, said she was told by a Cincinnati IRS agent that applications by two of her conservative clients were being processed by — and would ultimately be approved or denied — in Washington. She...

Surprise! The IRS claims it has lost emails belonging to even more employees embroiled in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservatives. Guy covered the details of the newest revelations earlier today and the AP reported about the lost emails over the weekend. The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status. The tax agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes...

A second federal judge has now ordered the IRS to explain under oath how the agency lost emails from former division director Lois Lerner, the woman at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton told Obama administration lawyers on Friday he wants to see an affidavit explaining what happened with Lerner's hard drive. The IRS claims her computer suffered a crash in 2011 that wiped her email records at the time clean. But at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by conservative group True the Vote, Walton said he wants to...

Even though President Obama has declared the innocence of all involved, we have much to learn about the illegal targeting of conservative/Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status. Lois Lerner is supposedly under investigation by the Department of Justice for this activity that coincidentally benefited the administration and seemed to be conducted with the administration’s interests at heart. Now we can add a few more items to be determined: The acting deputy U.S. attorney general in charge of overseeing ‘public integrity’ prosecutions testified Friday that he doesn’t know who’s in charge of the criminal investigation of Lois Lerner, the former...

April 12, 2014 True the Vote president calls Cummings damning emails ‘the tip of a very ugly iceberg’ by Michael Dorstewitz The explosive discovery by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that its ranking Democratic member coordinated with the IRS to target True the Vote came as no surprise to its founder and president. She called it “the tip of a very ugly iceberg.”Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the committee’s chairman, released emails earlier this week strongly suggesting that Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., was in direct communication with disgraced IRS supervisor Lois Lerner in an effort to target True the...

Washington superlawyer Cleta Mitchell represents True the Vote, one of the groups illegally targeted by the IRS in the scandals that have exposed the agency as a partisan operation. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht has been harassed by federal law enforcement authorities representing three different federal agencies. They represent the price of politics in the Age of Obama. As John notes below, yesterday the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee released emails that show Democratic staffers communicating with the IRS about True the Vote. It appears that Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat and therefore the Congressman to whom these...

One of the Articles of Impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon was merely threatening to use the Internal Revenue Service to selectively audit political opponents. Don’t let anyone forget that. Today, IRS officials should go to jail for the overt campaign of intimidation, threats, and persecution of tea party organizations, conservative organizations, and individual critics of the liberal agenda. Yet the conservative response to the IRS scandal consists mainly of begging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute and begging the IRS to start playing nice by releasing information implicating its own staff in wrongdoing and perhaps criminal...

Though the White House has insisted the IRS stopped formally targeting Tea Party and conservative organizations in May of 2012, two attorneys representing conservative organizations have claimed the IRS's targeting may still be ongoing. Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and Cleta Mitchell, the attorney representing True the Vote, have evidence their clients are still being targeted. According to National Review, Sekulow "plans to file suit in federal court in the coming weeks on behalf of more than two dozen conservative groups that claim their harassment at the hands of the nation’s tax authority continued...

I have, for me, shown an amazing amount of restraint in keeping my mouth shut on an issue about which I can stay silent no longer — GOProud and CPAC. RedState’s parent company, Eagle Publishing, Inc., is a long time sponsor of CPAC. RedState itself is helping FreedomWorks sponsor Bloggers Row. We were the sole sponsor of Bloggers Row last year. I will be speaking at CPAC at the Young America’s Foundation luncheon named in honor of Tom Phillips, my friend and also the big boss at Eagle Publishing, Inc. I have done my best to stay out of this...

'Asked for GOProud’s response, the group’s chairman apologized for his comments about Cleta Mitchell. “For the past six months, we have watched as unfair and untrue attacks have been leveled against our organization, our allies, our friends and sometimes even their families. Everyone has their breaking point and clearly in my interview with Metro Weekly I had reached mine. I shouldn’t have used the language that I did to describe Cleta Mitchell and for that I apologize,” said Chris Barron.' Still no apology to Sen. Jim DeMint or others for saying they belonged on the "island of misfit toys." No...

The new chair of the American Conservative Union, Al Cardenas, today distanced his organization from GOProud, telling FrumForum in an exclusive interview that “it’s going to be difficult to continue the relationship” with the gay conservative organization. The ACU, which annually organizes the Conservative Political Action Conference, has faced some criticism for including GOProud as a co-sponsor for the second year in a row. Socially conservative organizations have denounced the move, and the Heritage Foundation claimed that GOProud’s inclusion was part of their decision to opt-out. Cardenas, who was selected yesterday to replace outgoing chairman David Keene, told FrumForum that...