Cleta Mitchell, Attorney On Trump's Troubling Georgia Call, Resigns From Law Firm

The prominent Republican lawyer helped push Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Georgia's presidential election during the call.
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Cleta Mitchell, the prominent Republican lawyer who was involved in President Donald Trump’s troubling weekend phone call with Georgia election officials, has reportedly resigned from her law firm.

Foley & Lardner, where Mitchell had been a partner, confirmed her resignation to CNN on Tuesday. Mitchell “concluded that her departure was in the firm’s best interests, as well as in her own personal best interests,” a firm spokesman said.

Mitchell was among several lawyers on the Saturday conference call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president demanded that votes be “recalculated” in Georgia in his favor. Trump lost the state to President-elect Joe Biden by almost 12,000 votes.

During the call — a recording of which was first obtained by The Washington Post — Mitchell can be heard interjecting frequently to push Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in Georgia, even as Raffensperger repeatedly refutes those claims.

In the aftermath of the call, Foley & Lardner, a Milwaukee-based national law firm with over 1,000 lawyers, said it was “concerned” about Mitchell’s participation in the call.

The firm said in a Monday statement that it had made an earlier policy decision not to engage in any legal work challenging the presidential election results. Its attorneys were allowed to observe election recounts and “similar actions on a voluntary basis ... as private citizens so long as they did not act as legal advisers,” the firm said.

According to The New York Times, Mitchell has been advising Trump for weeks. She has also been working behind the scenes with the American Legislative Exchange Council to challenge the results of the presidential election and to end the electing of U.S. senators by popular vote.

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