Election Integrity: A Conversation with Cleta Mitchell

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Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hansen, and I'm hosting today without our Sammy Wink, the Victor Davis Hansen podcast.

And we're going to do an interview that a lot of you have requested.

And it's my honor to have my friend and guest, Cleta Mitchell, with us today.

She's on the Bradley board, as I am, but more importantly, she was a partner in Foley and Lardner for years in Washington, D.C.

And she specialized not just in nonprofits and the intricacies of that legislation and law, but she's been a dynamic force for conservative and traditional audit of our balloting process well before the 2020 election.

And so it's my pleasure that we're going to talk to her about something that's very relevant to all of our concerns about the next election, and that is the integrity of our vote.

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And we're back with Cleta Mitchell.

Cleta, thank you so much for coming.

Before we begin, why don't you just tell us a little bit what you've been doing?

You were,

I guess we would call you a, I don't want to use the word corporate lawyer, but you were in one of the largest firms based in Wisconsin in the Washington office, and you're on a number of nonprofit boards.

I know that.

And you've, what else are you doing right now?

Well, I was a partner at Fully and Lardner until January 31st of 2021.

And my law firm and I, after 20 years, decided to part company.

And since then, since February 1st of 2021, I've been the senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, D.C.

And that is an organization that was founded by former Senator Jim DeMint, who many may know.

He also was the founder of the Senate Conservatives Fund and

was president of the Heritage Foundation for a time

before founding the Conservative Partnership Institute.

And the work of the Conservative Partnership Institute is really to support and build the conservative movement and

help to steer people and policymakers to our founding principles.

And what I've done, what I've been doing for the last two years is really focusing on election integrity.

And as you noted, Victor, that is, I was an election lawyer.

I am an election lawyer.

And I've represented candidates and party committees and nonprofit groups.

I helped found a nonprofit group, a public interest law firm, the Public Interest Legal Foundation is the name of it, that just focuses on election integrity litigation because there are dozens and dozens, hundreds of left-wing voting related groups that are very well funded.

The Capital Research Center estimates that they've raised and spent between $11 and $14 billion,

the left, from left-wing billionaires like everybody thinks George Soros.

So it's not just George Soros, it's Pierre Omidiar from eBay, one of the eBay founders, who we know has put in anywhere from 300 million to half a billion dollars of his money in helping to build these, quote, democracy entities.

They always call them democracy entities.

Or integrity.

They love the word integrity, don't they?

Well, they actually like the word democracy.

That's what they really like.

They love democracy because they really don't like the fact that America is a constitutional republic.

And so a lot of their work is focused around this democracy and democratization of everything.

And

so anyway, the last two years I've been helping to try to build and steer some of that that

angst and

upset after the 2020 election.

People all over the country said, wait a minute, something's wrong here.

And to try to steer that energy into something that is permanent and useful by building an election integrity infrastructure at the local level with local task forces, state coalitions, and national working groups so that we can monitor what the left is doing, try to get legislatures to adopt changes in the election laws to try to undo some of the damage that's been done over the last decade.

And so that's what I'm involved in all day, every day.

I know that the 2020 was sort of an inflection point because at that moment, we went from roughly, not in all states, but in the majority of states, 70% plus showing up on Election Day to 30%

when the left very brilliantly

in a Machiavellian sense used the lockdowns and COVID to change the voting laws.

But I want to go back a little bit earlier because I remember one of our first conversations and one of our subsequent conversations,

and I don't know if you remember, but we were at the Bradley meeting, and you had just come off the 2012

election, and you were telling me about Lois Lerner and these nonprofit groups that were genuine, sincere, and

the administration was denying them nonprofit status

so that they would not organize or they would not have any influence in the election.

And it had been successful.

How did that finally turn out?

Well,

the Obama administration was successful.

They taught the IRS.

I mean, as you mentioned,

In my law practice, I did a lot of work for nonprofits.

I've created and formed for lots of people nonprofit entities, 501c3s, 501c4s.

These are tax code designations, depending on the type of entity that

an organization or group of people want to form.

And that's basically,

I would always say to clients, you know, you tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you the right kind of entity or platform for conducting those activities.

And what began to happen

in 2010, late 2010, early 2011 is that an application for a 501c4

organization

that would normally take 30 days maximum to before you got the letter from the IRS started taking three months, six months, eight months, years.

A 501c3

entity that would usually take anywhere from 30 to 60 days because contributions were deductible

as charitable contributions so that that would take a little bit longer.

But those began to disappear.

I had at least, I went back and counted, I had at least 10 clients between 2010 and 2013 when they finally admitted what they'd done after the estimate.

What was the criterion that they were using, just vocabulary and the titles of the groups, or what was how did they spot them?

Well, in the names, if you had the name, if you had the name Tea Party or Patriots, so one of my clients was the Tea Party Patriots, so they really got it double whammy.

If you had your purpose was to help make government more responsive, because you have to tell the IRS, here's our mission, our purpose, if your stated mission, to ensure greater accountability among elected officials.

Anything like that, they would just pull it off the conveyor belt.

Did they ever get their nonprofit status restored?

Most of them did after

the election.

It was 2013 and 2014.

So, yes, it was after the 2012 election.

They did not, here's what happened.

Obama and the Obama White House were so concerned about this rise of the Tea Party movement.

And you'll remember that the rise of the Tea Party movement changed the outcome and captured the House for the Republicans in the 2010 election.

So

they wanted none of that happening in 2012.

So as these groups that had started in 2010, then in 2011 started saying, well,

we need to coalesce into a real organization.

So they would create a nonprofit corporation, apply for taxes and status, and that would go to the IRS and they just sat on them.

And they sat on them and sat on them.

And then what began to happen in 2012

was that these,

I started getting

for these clients, because I was the designated representative, these questions.

10, 12, 14, 20 pages of questions.

Who are your donors?

Tell us every group you've spoken to and the president has spoken to.

The name, address, and a copy of the

transcript of your speech.

Wow.

I mean, who are your donors?

Who, you know, what?

That was asymmetrical.

That wasn't a requirement of left-wing groups.

Well, here's what's interesting.

No, it was not.

But what was interesting is

I got a printout.

I want to say in September of 2013, somebody had managed to get a printout from the IRS,

and they had like four or five hundred groups maybe

10% of them were

conservative were not conservative all the rest were it's all conservative except for maybe 10 or 20 percent that were liberal like progress Texas or progress there was a whole group of progress Texas progress whatever state but the and so the the New York Times and all that all those reporters and the left or left-wing members of Congress they all said oh oh, well, see, the IRS was targeting them too.

They're on the list.

But when you looked at the dates, it was a spreadsheet.

So it had the name of the organization, when their application was submitted, and then it would have a column of, was it approved?

And you look at the left-wing groups, Progress Texas, well, they got their IRS exempt status.

So all these, a number of these left-wing groups, they got their status.

It was the conservative groups that were held over and did not get their status.

And it made an impact on the 2012 election.

All we remember, I think, listeners,

there was never any admissions of culpability other than the embarrassment or the humiliation or the early retirement of Lois Werner.

Was that it?

Was there any reparation or anything?

There was never any, there was never, you know,

in the very first 48, 36, 72 hours, everybody was really outraged.

And I said to Boehner, was the speaker then, I said, listen, you better move quickly and you better appoint a committee and you better do some things because in a nanosecond, they're all going to stop and go, wait a minute.

We actually like the idea of targeting conservatives.

And so they're going to, all this outrage is going to dissipate in a flash.

And so it did.

There were never any

penalties.

Lois Learn is still collecting her government pension.

There was no, no one was ever punished.

There was ultimately a settlement that I actually encouraged Jeff Sessions to do when he became Attorney General.

I said, you should really settle with all these groups.

There had been a class action filed.

And so some of the groups that were still around, a lot of them by then didn't even exist anymore.

It was 2017.

And so there was some financial settlements to some of the groups that were still around.

But no, there was never any punishment.

They got what they wanted.

They used the government to punish their political enemies.

Does that sound familiar?

Yeah, it does.

Before we get to the main controversies that came out of 2020, the other conversation I had with you was

it was in February, March, April of 2020.

And you, I remember, you were warning me that in these state legislatures, in key states, that these left-wing activist groups were either cherry-picking judges or

filing suits or

using bureaucratic fiats to overturn the will of these legislatures as it concerned balloting.

And that ranged from

early mailing balloting,

changing the regulations about deadlines, whether you could cure a ballot, whether it came in too late, whether the registrar's list of names had to, your ballot had to be there, you could have exemptions, whether you have one name or two, two all of these changes but what i remember you and i asked you and i was curious because i had known something about it that what was the trump administration uh the trump administration doing or what were people that

didn't anybody on the conservative side see what was going on when these changes were being made did they have a team of lawyers that went to these states and said, wait a minute, this is in the Constitution that the state legislatures have the primary, primary, not all, but the primary responsibility to establish ballot procedures.

What happened?

Well, Victor, this has been, sometimes I feel as though my whole life has been spent going around beating a drum that no one's listening to.

Because

what happened was that in 2019,

the left, remember,

the left always, process issues are always at the top top of the left's list, always.

So Bill Clinton gets elected, what's the first bill that he wants to get passed?

National Voter Registration Act, what we now know is motor voter.

And

when Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats take over the House of Representatives in 2007, very first bill had to do with lobbying changes.

Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats take over

in the 2018 election, 2019, very first bill, HR1, the Speaker gets the first 10 numbers for bills that are the Speaker's top priorities in the House, H.R.

1, was a bill to federalize the elections to do all the things and make it federal that

they've put in place all over the country that are terrible, but I wouldn't talk about that.

But they didn't pass it in the Senate.

It stopped in the Senate.

And so then they began to file lawsuits.

They started filing lawsuits in the spring of 2019,

well before COVID.

And doing just what you said.

go in, I'll give you an example, North Carolina.

North Carolina is a Democratic Attorney General, same one then as now.

So they would go in, Mark Elias, who's

the multi-billionaire George Soros' lawyer who's funded

Elias to

he's just the litigation machine to challenge election laws and try to keep the election laws from being enforced and overturn them.

And so they started filing lawsuits all over the country.

And when COVID hit, but I'll give you the example of North Carolina.

They came in.

The North Carolina legislature had said to be eligible to vote, you know, you couldn't be a felon unless your rights had been restored.

And then you would get your right to vote back.

They sued over that.

The Attorney General doesn't defend it.

So guess what?

That becomes the law.

A judge issues an order.

They sued about the statute to overturn the statute that said that people in nursing homes, that you couldn't just send in a Republican or you had to have one person from both parties to

go into a nursing home to protect the vulnerable voters and nursing homes and group homes and all.

They challenge that statute.

The attorney general doesn't defend it.

The judge says in the order, well,

there's no objection.

There's no statement of material facts that are in controversy.

So I guess the plaintiff wins.

And they did that all over the country.

Once COVID hit, they changed everything in their

what was the reaction, though.

I mean, didn't they say that this was going to make in many states 70% showing up to 70% voting either early or by mail, and that was going to really favor the Democrats with less audits?

Well, they would never say that.

They would come in, and that's never what they said.

But you knew it, and I knew it.

Everybody knew it.

Why wasn't there a rapid response team?

Because Republicans and conservatives never talk about or worry about process issues it it they the left has been changing systematically changing these laws for a decade and I've actually found a PowerPoint that I presented in December of 2013 saying people this is what they've announced they're going to do and they had they did all of it and we just basically let them do it because we don't

fund that and it's funny it's the biggest revolution in my life that election day

it's election month yes and elections

and elect an election night returns in front of the tbc that doesn't exist anymore finding a verdict and that changed without a vote of the people or a vote of the legislatures it was the biggest revolution

in a lot of places the legislatures did adopt those but they didn't have any pushback we didn't have any non-profit groups that were working on it we didn't have anybody educating republican legislators uh the the left went after the american legislative Exchange Council

back, remember Trayvon Martin?

Yes.

And one of the things that they did at the time was the corporate members of

ALEC and the left, they attacked ALEC and said, you can no longer educate legislators or have model policies on anything related to voting.

That was the only group that would have had a chance to educate voters, these legislators, conservative legislators over the decade from the last 10 10 years.

And they took them off the playing field.

And in a state like California, we went from motor voter where you had to request a ballot

to it was automatically sent to you, given your information they had with your car registration.

But then it blossomed to every state agency.

You go in for disability.

And the result is in the last election, we're told 10 million ballots were mailed out, and no one has any idea whether they were counted.

Nobody knows where they they were, whether they were counted, where they were filed.

And

that's not solved, as you've warned us.

It really makes a lot of things futile, which brings us, I want to bring up now more germanely and controversially, what you've had, your experience, because I think everybody's going to be fascinated by it because of what we've seen this week with Tucker Carlson.

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We're back with Cleta Mitchell, one of the foremost election and balloting legal minds in the country.

And

so,

Cleta, we had this narrative of an armed surrection, which I think is pretty much refuted.

Now we've got the 40,000-plus hours of Tucker Carlson that shows you that there's two sides of the story, which we all knew.

But you yourself, at one point, were subpoenaed and you testified before the January 6th Committee.

Yes, I was like,

what was that like?

Or what was the circumstance?

Well, I was not even in Washington on January the 6th.

So So let's start with that.

But I was a volunteer attorney for President Trump's campaign in Georgia after the November 2020 election.

I got a call from the White House asking if I would go there and just see what was going on.

And what I found when I got there was

the realization, as we looked at everything, it was a completely lawless election.

The Secretary of State in Georgia was so committed and interested in

being beloved by the national media

that he was,

that was more important to him than making sure that the election was conducted properly.

And there are a lot, you know, since the time, I can just tell you lots of things that have been confirmed about the problems and the Georgia election to the point that we had, we looked at government data, people came in, experts helped us.

We filed an election contest, and we identified more than 30 categories of votes that had been cast and counted, were in suit, were included in the certified total, but which were in violation of state law.

Now, that's not fraud, that's just that this the statute says this is what it takes to be a qualified registered voter in the state of Georgia.

And we would have, I'll give you one example.

In Georgia, you have to be registered at your

residential address where you primarily live.

And we found 18,325 votes that were cast and counted and included in the certified total of the presidential election were addresses that were not at,

they were listed under the post office records as vacant.

That's either vacant lots or vacant houses, but they weren't occupied.

We had another

what was the

what was the response of the attorney general's office?

Oh, they were not any help.

They were fighting us.

They were fighting.

What did they say?

Technicality or whatever.

No, they didn't want any part of this.

The Republican establishment, the governor, Secretary of State, and the Attorneys General, all three wanted no part of any of the challenges.

And the problem is,

remember, the margin between President Trump and Joe Biden in Georgia was 11,779 votes.

And you have 18,325 votes cast from vacant locations.

And we had other categories.

But the fact of the matter is,

I can make that same statement that there are more illegal votes cast, counted, and included in the certified total than the margin of difference between President Trump and Joe Biden.

I know that for a fact in Georgia.

That was also established and proven by the audit in Arizona.

More illegal votes than the margin of difference.

difference.

A separate organization, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty,

with which you're familiar, they did an analysis of the Wisconsin election of 2020, and they stated in the report that there are likely more illegal votes included in the totals than the margin of difference, which was roughly 20,000 votes.

The same thing was found in Pennsylvania.

And so those four states, now, you know, It's not fraud.

And there were problems in Michigan and there were problems in Nevada.

But do you think it thematically, when this happens, if it's not brought up before the actual,

I should say before election day, but election day doesn't exist anymore.

But if you do it after the media has reported the count is final, then the whole impetus and the machinery of the bureaucracy says, well, it's over now and you can't stop it.

Well, we can't stop it.

And I say that to people.

The judiciary is no help to our side.

Now, the judiciary was a lot of help, at least initially, to Al Gore in 2000 and entertained all of these challenges and all.

And the media was all

egging that on.

That's not ever going to be the case with us.

But how do you stop it for 2024?

Well,

let me tell you, Victor, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and talking to people about this because we really have to fix the problems in Clark County, Nevada.

Clark County is just like California.

They have all of these unregistered, they have all these people on the voter rolls who are dead or they've moved away.

They don't live there anymore.

And Nevada passed a law, the Democrat legislature passed a law in 2021 that all of those people on the registration list will automatically get ballots automatically.

So that's a lot of live ballots floating around out there that ballot harvesters and political operatives, they know what to do with that.

They know how to work that system.

So you've got Clark County, Nevada.

We better fix that or we can't carry Nevada.

Arizona, Maricopa County, we document it because one of the things that we worked really hard on in 2021 and 2022 was making sure we got Republican observers

and Democrats.

I don't care.

I mean, the statutes call for parity between the Democrats and Republicans as poll watchers and workers.

And so we were very intent upon making sure that we had that parity, but that we had citizens watching.

And of course, the left and the media went crazy because we were out recruiting and training and getting people deployed to be watchers.

And they observed and had eyewitnessed,

documented what happened.

Maricopa County on Election Day of 2022 was utter chaos.

utter chaos.

Because one of the things the left decided 10 years ago was they were going to get away from precinct voting.

Not only do they get away from voting on election day, okay, let's get in person on election day.

Now we're going to get away from precinct voting.

So you have these huge vote centers and that was just a complete breakdown nightmare.

The printers didn't work and then the tabulators didn't work and people got disgusted and ballots got mixed and the chain of custody was completely broken.

And we better fix that.

What do you think the chances are?

Just, I know this is putting you on the spot.

So we're now, it's hypothetical, we're in late October of 2024 and we're living in a state that counts, I mean, electorally, that will be ambiguous, a Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin,

Arizona, Arizona, Georgia even.

Who knows?

Georgia, absolutely.

Nevada.

And all of a sudden, we've got millions of ballots that have been mailed out.

We have a greater likelihood in 2024 that those ballots, A, match a registered name, that the person is a U.S.

citizen without a phone that he follows the criteria of the statute that the name is complete when he signs that the address is accurate is that

greater chances than than 2020 that that can happen because I do think there there is a greater chance because we have people working on this all the time now.

We have local task forces, we have citizens groups in all of those places, and they are working on all of those things.

We don't begin to have the resources, the money and the entities and the power of the left, but we're making a difference.

But how did all this, give me, how did all this

get you

in front of the January 6th committee?

Oh, I forgot to answer that question.

Well, there's no, I don't see the connection.

Well, there wasn't, but other than the fact that I was one of the lawyers who represented President Trump, and we filed an election contest in Georgia.

And so anybody who was in any way involved, including lawyers who've been involved in representing President Trump, have been, I had to go testify before that Fulton County grand jury, which was a bit of a

Georgia.

Was the whole point just to take lawyers that wanted to ensure voter integrity, the ideas that we're going to punish you by running up your legal bills and we're going to have you.

Well, that's a big part of it.

That's a big part of it.

I mean,

done to dr john eastman he's a great constitutional i know john

he's a wonderful attorney constitutional lawyer and man they wanted to get him off the playing field because he's a he's a great lawyer and we they it's okay for mark elias to file election challenges which he filed to uh he filed he filed election contests against two republican women who were elected in november 2020 he didn't get brought in to be interrogated by the J6 committee.

What do they want to know from him?

What do they want to know?

What could they possibly ask?

So you were on this phone call, but that's your client, right?

The president?

Right.

I mean, you know, that's that, that, that phone call that they

supposedly, ostensibly wanted to talk about was the phone call

that President Trump and I and other two other lawyers and the chief of staff and then some people from the Secretary of State's office.

We didn't get a judge appointed, by the way.

I forgot to tell you that.

What happened was we filed this contest on

December the 4th of 2020 and it was supposed to be expedited.

We did not get a judge appointed.

And so

on Saturday, January the 2nd, the president wanted to do a phone call with Brad Raffensperger because and,

you know, to try to see if there was some way to resolve this

and get them to look at the data that we'd filed.

Because the Secretary of State, we've been trying to get the Secretary of State's office to sit down with us.

And I kept saying, we'll bring our data, you bring your data, we'll sit down.

If we're wrong, we'll tell everybody that.

But if you're wrong, you need to do something.

But they wouldn't do that.

That was at the time when then they were leaking and saying we're under enormous pressures by the right-wing election divided and we were trying to stand up for the integrity of the democracy.

That was, I can remember that was going on.

Right.

Well, that, and that was the ostensible reason why I was summoned to testify.

I don't know if anybody else had to go to, well, you know, the JSICS committee brought in Brad Raffensburger and put him on, he's the Secretary of State of Georgia, and they put him on primetime TV.

I mean, he loves that.

He's just like, you know, scratching a dog's ears.

He just loves that.

But in terms of actually being aggressive about making sure that the election, there's a lot of, there are a lot of questions about, yeah, he sent out without any statutory authority, he sent out hundreds of thousands of absentee ballot applications without the people themselves, the voter asking for it to be sent.

Well, that's a violation of Georgia law.

But that's hundreds of thousands of applications sent out there in total violation of the law in the state of Georgia and people voting in more than one state and all.

And we just wanted, we had tried, been trying for several weeks to get him to sit down with us and because he just kept saying, Your data's wrong.

I said, Well, what's wrong about it?

Just tell us.

Well, we've looked at it and it's wrong.

Well, we never got to go to trial, so we never had, he never had to produce his data.

Ours was all in our contest filing.

But do you see anybody?

And is

because of all of this controversy, and there has been attention to it.

Do you see either the 2024 candidates, a DeSantis of Trump, that have legal staff that are looking in this or the RNC in general as an umbrella organization?

Well, I've been trying to get the RNC to pay, to understand.

You know, they did establish an election integrity unit at the RNC in 2021, and they did make getting poll watchers

certified and in those positions and election workers, Republican election workers, they did do that.

And they did a good job of that.

But there's so much more to it than just that.

And I am constantly beating my head against the wall trying to talk to various ones of those to tell them, you know, you need to step it up.

We need to, you know, we're in a presidential cycle.

I've had conversations with them this week.

And

there's no culture in the Republican Party or among

some conservatives.

Now there is, I will say this, we now have an election integrity movement,

but it's a grassroots movement and all, but we have legislators across the country who are beginning to realize that things need to be done to change.

Do you think that's because of the corporate veneer that Republicans like to feel that they follow the Marcus of Queensbury rules?

Or do you think it's a lot of very prominent Republicans feel that it really doesn't make a big difference which particular party is in power that they can navigate with either one of them.

What is it?

Well, I don't understand.

You know, look, I cut my political teeth as a Democrat in Oklahoma.

And that's a little different from being a Democrat in the Bronx, I realize.

But one of the things I learned early on for

Democrats, process is

number one.

process, the political process.

By process, you mean changing the rules so that you can get it.

So the election, how's the election conducted?

Rules of procedure.

How's the election conducted?

They burrow down and study and understand those rules.

But campaign finance laws.

Money and politics.

Who is it that's always spent and talking about money and politics?

It's always these guys on the left.

The lobbying laws, ethics laws, FOIA laws.

Political process.

I agree.

Who is behind junking the Electoral College, getting rid of the filibuster?

Correct.

Correct.

Getting rid of,

gosh, they want to pack the court.

That's always changed the rules.

Yeah, that's right.

Because their view is, and

there were big meetings starting in January 2013.

Now, Obama's just been re-elected.

Let's not forget that.

And starting in January 2013, Mother Jones did a big article about

how all of these leaders of labor unions, environmentalists, women, feminist groups, all, they come together and they say, we are going to change the political process in this country.

We are going to change the political process.

And we're going to, their top three priorities were to

get big money out of politics.

Well, they proceeded to raise

millions more money.

Jillians more money.

Right.

And then, and number two was to change the Senate filibuster rule.

And the third major thing was to pass laws to expand voting and to fight voter ID.

And then they had another meeting and they pledged to raise millions of dollars.

They ended up raising billions.

Then there was another meeting that summer of 2013 where you had left-wing Democrat lawmakers from around the country, they come in, they say, here are the things we're going to do, here are the things we're going to change in the election laws.

And they had this laundry list and Victor, they did every one of them.

They got rid of precinct voting.

They're all about quote expanding the electorate.

They got rid of expanding the electorate.

We're going to get more college kids voting.

So now they put polling places on campuses and drag these kids out.

You know, the kids will stumble out of bed, register, and vote.

One of the best things that ever happened to me at the Hoover Institution, when I got there, I got a call from Tom Soule and he said, Victor, you're here.

I don't come in much, but you and I should have lunch.

So we did.

And then he said, let's do this every three to four weeks, as long as we're both here.

So I did that until Tom's, I think, 95.

I did that for 15 years.

And I can remember so many things that he just casually tossed off that were very profound.

And he said one thing, and I think this is germane to what you're saying.

And I think our audience knows it too.

He said, you know,

the left's agenda is contrary to human nature on so many fronts.

And in reaction to that, they have two alternatives to obtain and keep power, since the agenda is not one if people are fully informed that they would embrace.

One,

they have to change the demographic.

And he was talking about open borders

and

blurring the line between a resident or green card and a citizen.

And the second thing is they have to, he said, he didn't use the word process, but that's what you're talking about.

He said exactly what you're saying.

He said rules.

They don't want to play by the rules.

And then he said, and I can remember we were talking about this, as long as they're not conducive, when they're conducive, they have no problem about changing.

And he gave the example, I can remember, of Barack Obama filibustering Justice Alito and how wonderful the filibuster was until the blue wall fell in 2016.

That was very, and that's sort of the idea when you look at it, Cleta, that all of our major institutions, where we thought the people, especially during the Tea Party, I thought to myself, wow, the Tea Party is a reflection of a grassroots America that sees through Obama.

Obama.

And I thought, uh-oh, corporate boardroom, professional sports, Hollywood foundation.

And you gave a wonderful presentation about the foundation,

the left versus right foundations.

I mean, they're all nonprofit, but the ones that turn lean left and right in terms of their assets.

And it's not even close.

It was just, it was one of the most depressing things.

And no offense, but you depressed me because when I left, I thought it's hopeless.

But the point is that they capture the institutions and they try to and the media try to manipulate or change mentalities rather than just go out and appeal to people's self-interest.

They can't do that.

Oh, right.

They can't do it.

Because for the left,

for them, I said the golden rule of politics for the left is he who writes the rules wins the gold.

Yeah.

And they believe if you change the process, you change the policy outcome.

And it manifested itself in 2020 because they have all these different changes.

And they, the Zuckerberg, you mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, they used the $419 million, half a billion dollars by one guy.

targeted to election offices.

They turned those election offices in the five Democratic cities in Wisconsin, in the big blue counties in Georgia, Maricopa County, Arizona, Clark County, Nevada, Pennsylvania,

the Key Counties in Pennsylvania, and they turned those offices, election offices, into Democrat turnout machines.

They weren't there to just run the election.

They put, you know, Zuckerberg gave this money to this thing called the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

And they got the bulk of the money.

And they put people from these left-wing groups.

They were working in the election offices.

They had access, behind the scenes, direct access to the voter data and who would vote.

Sam Bankman Free, too.

Yeah,

right.

So they turned those offices into Democratic turnout machines.

So they use the process and look at the policy outcomes since 2020.

I know.

So

we're going to come back right back.

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And we're right back.

And Clito,

when I got to know you, you were this partner with this very prestigious big firm.

It had offices in Washington, one of the largest firms in the United States.

And you were

an icon among, I would call them, the conservative establishment.

And then we had the Trump phenomenon.

Right.

And I think comparing my small experience to yours, we found that all of a sudden, the reference that we'd known, people we'd known our entire lives, institutions, magazines, suddenly it wasn't enough to oppose Donald Trump or MAGA or the grassroots, but it was almost, I'd never seen anything like it.

They tried to ostracize people.

And I can remember picking up

looking at the bulwark and one of my editors at Commentary had written 2,500 words suggesting I was a racist and anti-Semite.

And I couldn't believe it because this guy I used to know very well.

And when you were in this process of leaving or thinking of leaving, did you have the, it seems like your grassroots empathy for a lot of these people who identify themselves as MAGA or whatever, the former Tea Party, the Perot voter, the Blue Dog, whatever we call them.

Why do you think that they incur such hatred from this New York, Washington conservative?

I don't even know if they're conservative, Republican or stuff, the Mitch McConnell wing, the Bush, Jeb Bush, the Romney wing, and the pundits, and the entire,

it's something that's really strange.

And

were you surprised when they turned on you?

Because you've known these people your whole life, your entire life.

Yeah, I mean, but you know,

I don't suppose that I am because President Trump asked me once during the,

when I was working on the election contest, he asked me one day, called me one day and said, Cleta,

is Ronna McDaniel helping you?

Is RNC helping you?

I said, no, Mr.

President, they're not helping.

They're not helping you?

Well, you know, Ronna, right?

You want me to get her on the phone?

You talk to Ronna?

I've since talked to her fairly regularly now, but I didn't at the time.

But he said, you want me to get her on the phone?

I said, no, that's okay.

I don't need that.

Because

we had grassroots people who were helping us as volunteers on this lawsuit.

We called ourselves

the band of deplorables.

But

he said, well, he didn't understand.

I said, look, Mr.

President, I'm not an RNC person.

I'm a conservative, Christian, you know, Trump supporter, but I'm not an RNC person.

And he seemed surprised by that.

And I've tried to explain to people that

a Washington Post reporter once that there's a difference between the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Those are two different things.

And

it's not so on the Democratic side, but it's definitely so on the Republican side.

I think that the difference is that the people are affected so much by government that they're willing to win messily, in a messy fashion if they have to.

And the establishment feels that they would rather lose what they think is nobly because it won't make a difference to them because of their cocoons or privilege or connections.

But they don't seem to have the zeal or the desire to take on the left blow for blow.

They just feel that's beneath them and they don't need to, that they can function pretty well with the left.

I guess that's the difference.

I don't know, but I'll tell you something, Victor.

As discouraging as it can become, when you think about the billions of dollars on the left and all the big billionaires, and we don't have a lot of help a lot of times from the DC establishment and the Republican establishment.

But

if you were in my shoes and I do this like today,

I moderate every week

a

working group, a Zoom call on cleaning voter rolls.

And I have between 130 and 160 people a week who dial in, zoom in for this call.

But they're not just listeners.

They're talking about what they're doing in their counties, their towns.

And it's pretty darn remarkable.

And that's only one of nine working groups.

We have state coalitions now and 22 states.

This is an RNC.

Oh, gosh, no.

Oh, no, no.

This is all, you know, it's in, it's, it's CPI helped, the Conservative Partnership Institute helped found this, and now it's being operated out of the Virginia Institute.

If people wanted to help this group,

how do they contact you?

Or what was your, what would be a way for them to donate?

Well, that would be wonderful.

They could,

you know, they could go to the Virginia Institute for Public Policy and the Election Integrity Network because this whole project has been moved to the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.

They manage all of these coalitions, train all these people,

do all of the calls.

the notices, the agendas, the notes.

And we're building that.

I think we just added Ohio this week, knitting together these local groups.

It's amazing what citizens are doing around this country.

Detocville was onto something, and that hasn't changed.

And that's how we're going to get our country back, because that's how we're going to save our elections.

It's amazing.

I think all of our listeners understand.

You and I, and I think most people probably saw Tucker Carlson's last June

about January 6th.

And so I can remember him both nights saying explicitly, I'm not condoning a violent minority.

And then

he shows the pictures of

the tragic fate of Officer Sicknick

walking in around the rotunda after the media has reported that he's been killed violently with a

fire extinguisher.

Yeah, this

sort of buffoonish person who was a Navy veteran, who supposedly was violent and leading on this attack.

And he's, I mean, he shouldn't be there on an unauthorized visit, but he's offering a prayer for the safety of law enforcement.

Right.

And then what was even more remarkable is he has these pictures and this testimony of this EPS person who's

urging people to get into the Capitol and at one time was on the so all of this is there.

It's got both audio and visual.

And yet, when you pick up the media, the proverbial paper go online, it's he should be banned.

Right.

Chuck Schumer

from the floor of the Senate says that he should not be allowed to do this, that they should shut him down, that this is conspiracy.

Michael Steele, whom I know you and I used to bump into once in a while, former head of the RNC, speaking of the RNC, says that he's a demonic figure.

It's just incredible that.

Well, how about

my senator, Tom Tillis, calls it, you know, bull, you know what?

That this is all, and Mitch McConnell, I mean, but I'm just telling you, people are aware.

People know this.

They know these things.

And it's just,

you cannot keep all.

It's just like what all of it is coming out about COVID and all the lies and the cover-ups about

COVID.

And so we just, we just have to continue to try to work for truth.

I do a little podcast, Victor.

And you do a big,

I've heard your podcast.

It's very highly recognized.

And we,

who'scounting.us, just go, just W-H-O-S, who'scounting.us.

And it's just, I interview a lot of people around the country who are doing things to help save elections.

And it's very, to me, it's always very inspiring.

And

it is to me too.

But, you know, I was thinking the other day I was talking to my wife and she said we were saying almost everything

that was important in the last three years was a lie and what we were talking it was like we live we're subjects in an empire of lies we were thinking we were told that Donald Trump colluded to with Vladimir Putin to alter the 2016 election when in fact Hillary Clinton through three paywalls hired sources with Russian contacts to create a phony dossier that was planted in the FBI and in the government to effect an election.

We were told that this laptop, 50 people swore that it was Russian.

It was a complete lie.

They knew it was a lie.

We were told that if you mentioned, I wrote a column about the Wuhan likely, the argument that it came out of the lab very early.

And I had a person from the Stanford alumni office contact me, a very nice person, but saying, we've got a lot of angry people that want you and

want to get rid of you.

And I've had a lot of problems.

And that was a lie, that it was a pangolin, that it just jumped from, and we've never found it now.

And it goes on and on.

These are the Mueller invent.

All of these

things are, it's just incredible that we have these narratives that affect our lives that are completely false.

And then we move on to the next one and the next one and the next one.

And there's never any retrospection or apology or we were wrong about collusion.

Yes, Hunter's laptop was authentic.

Oh, you know, there's,

yeah, you're right about Fauci was wrong.

It probably did originate in the lab.

Nothing, nothing.

No,

there's no culpability.

And starting with the first thing you asked me about, with the targeting of these citizens groups,

these little gatherings of citizens, targeting of citizens groups by the IRS.

FBI going into Latin masses.

God, nobody was published.

Yeah, the

Latin masses.

I think I wrote an article.

Is there anything the FBI will not do?

And I went through all of the felonies.

Anyway,

final observations, Cleos.

You're optimistic, more optimistic than, or realistic, optimistic, pessimistic, neutral about 2024.

I am, my daughter once told me, mom, you're not an optimist, you're not a pessimist, you're a realist, and I am a realist.

And I will tell everybody right now that unless we put some resources and some real effort into figuring out and fixing a few counties in the United States, Maricopa and Arizona, Clark County, Nevada, and Fulton and DeKalb County, Georgia, the five cities in Wisconsin.

Say if we can, we've got to figure out how to save the elections in those four states.

We've got to hold North Carolina and we've got to do something about this ranked choice voting in Alaska because Alaska is

absolutely

a big problem.

One of my colleagues at the Hoover Institute.

One of my colleagues at the Hoover Institution, Larry Diamond, was one of the architects.

We saw what it did at the mayor's race in New York.

Oh my God.

Well,

just know this, that

Alaska, which is a pretty conservative place,

now has a Democrat,

you know, at-large member of the U.S.

House and a Democrat state senate.

And for all practical purposes, Lisa Murkowski is a Democrat.

So they do not have representative government.

The people of Alaska do not.

And we need to do something about that ranked choice voting.

And those are things that we need to do.

And every day the clock is ticking.

That's what I've been pushing people to understand.

The clock is ticking.

We need a plan for each of those places.

And otherwise, I think that it's going to be very difficult for whoever we nominate to win, unless that person wins by the margin of cheating.

Someone says, if they just win big enough

to defeat the margin of litigation or the margin of cheating,

then maybe we could overcome it.

But it's

all aside, Lee, from the elephant in the room.

And we're going to have you back because we've got, I'm afraid, I fear, I worry that we're going to have a clash of Titans with the DeSantis-Trump rivalry.

And

we're going to have to decide on a candidate and then achieve unity because we have no margin of error.

We have no margin of error.

But whatever people tell me candidates matter, I'd look at Joe Biden and John Fetterman.

They'd tell me, do candidates really matter that much?

But in this case, we've got to get a candidate that

we can really...

But a candidate who understands that the system itself, the process by which the decision is made, often dictates the outcome.

And that's the part that we haven't on our side paid as much attention to.

Well, thank you very much.

Our guest has been Cleta Mitchell,

our foremost expert on balloting and a strong advocacy for Republican government with the small R.

And I push.

Yes.

Thank you very much, Cleta.

Thank you.

Appreciate it, Victor.