256

Doug Bock ClarkOctober 28, 2026 at 3:37 PM EDT

1/ EXCLUSIVE: As the Trump administration seeks to exert unprecedented control over the midterm elections, one woman has shaped its campaign more than any other: Cleta Mitchell. This is the story of how she turned Trump’s “Big Lie” into a national movement 🧵

2/ In fact, @propublica.org found that no one besides Trump himself has done more than Cleta Mitchell to turn the mundane processes of how ballots are cast and counted in American elections into mortal combat. propublica.org

3/ Mitchell’s influence comes in two ways. First, she’s cultivated influence within the administration and Congress. Second, she’s built a grassroots army of election activists nationwide. This gives her an inside-outside game to affect elections at multiple levels. 4/ Mitchell’s influence on the administration stretches from its legislative agenda to shaping a key executive order to getting her allies installed in top administration posts. At least 25 political appointees have had close ties to her. 5/ Mitchell also shaped the 2025 executive order that laid the blueprint for the administration’s current actions, such as its largely futile hunt for noncitizen voters, per sources. propublica.org

6/ And Mitchell orchestrated the creation of the SAVE America Act, which Trump has repeatedly called his top legislative priority and taken extreme actions to push, such as threatening to abolish the filibuster. politico.com

7/ One of Mitchell’s allies is Heather Honey, who now leads DHS’s elections work. A high-ranking official knowledgeable about Honey’s hiring said her “sole qualification was who she worked with … She worked with Cleta.” (DHS called this “false.”). propublica.org

8/ Another close Mitchell ally occupies a top election role at the Justice Department: Dan Bishop, a U.S. Attorney who is leading the department’s reinvestigation of the 2020 election. x.com

9/ Then there’s her Election Integrity Network, an organization she built to rally activists inspired by Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. The EIN has gone from 7 state chapters in 2022 to at least 26 today, with hundreds of active members. propublica.org

10/ The way that participants in Mitchell’s group and the administration work together is illustrated by the unprecedented FBI raid to seize 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, GA. propublica.org

11/ In the years after 2020, EIN participants pushed numerous claims of election fraud to the GA state election board, which investigators largely debunked. Once Trump returned to power, however, these discredited claims were used to justify federal action… 12/ After ProPublica and other news orgs sued to unseal the warrant for the raid, it was revealed that the affidavit included material compiled by a researcher with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and cited network participants as witnesses. propublica.org

13/ The investigation is now overseen by Bishop, the U.S. attorney who is Mitchell’s ally and has pushed aggressive actions, such as trying to subpoena personal information for thousands of GA poll workers. theguardian.com

14/ Not everything that Mitchell champions is a success – the SAVE America Act, for example, has been blocked by moderate GOP senators. wcnc.com

15/ But despite the checks to her agenda, friends and enemies alike say she’s relentless: “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.” 16/ And as the midterms approach, she has been pushing for the administration to take ever more extreme actions, most recently to exert unprecedented powers over voting machines. rumble.com

17/ This is part of a lifelong pattern of her escalating conflicts into winner-take-all battles, according to those who’ve known her for years and even decades. Only now, what’s at stake is the future of American elections. 18/ Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica for this article but occasionally answered emails. “You’re my opponent,” she wrote. “You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.” 19/ Mitchell disputed 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.” 20/ 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. 21/ There’s even more to Mitchell’s story. To understand who she is, I traced her path from a star Democratic legislator, to attorney who joined Trump on a 2020 call where he pressed a Georgia official to “find” him votes, to Trump’s unofficial elections czar: propublica.org

22/ (Mitchell told ProPublica she and Trump merely wanted to provide GA Secretary of State Raffensperger with evidence not to push him “to take any official action to ‘overturn the election.’”) 23/ And thanks to @msweetharris, @JenAFifield, and @ReeseDunklin for their help on this project.

1 / 1