Cleta Mitchell Resigns from Foley Firm

Cleta Mitchell, the controversial conservatives lawyer who helped President Donald Trump with his attempt to overturn the legal election of Joe Biden, has resigned from her position with the Milwaukee-based Foley & Lardner law firm. Mitchell’s work with Trump gained national attention after the transcript of his phone call to Georgia election officials was made public, showing the president pressuring Republican officials to “find” enough votes for the state’s officially declared presidential election results to be overturned.

Her resignation was first reported by Business Insider. In its statement on Tuesday, the law firm said: “Cleta Mitchell has informed firm management of her decision to resign from Foley & Lardner effective immediately. Ms. Mitchell concluded that her departure was in the firm’s best interests, as well as in her own personal best interests. We thank her for her contributions to the firm and wish her well.”

Mitchell blamed a “massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups via social media” in the resignation letter, according to Business Insider.

On Monday Foley & Lardner had released a statement distancing itself from Mitchell’s work saying it had “made a policy decision not to take on any representation of any party in connection with matters related to the presidential election results” and is “aware of, and are concerned by, Ms Mitchell’s participation in the January 2 conference call and are working to understand her involvement more thoroughly.”

Meanwhile, the firm was weathering criticism from the Lincoln Project and others, as Urban Milwaukee reported.

The statement suggested that the firm was surprised by Mitchell’s involvement in Trump’s challenge to the election, but On Nov. 7, when the major media organizations declared Biden had won the presidency, Mitchell appeared on Fox News to warn that the Trump administration would be challenging this: “We’re already double checking and finding dead people having voted, we’re going to be finding people have voted across state lines, voted in two states, illegal voting, noncitizens and that sort of thing. So we are building that case,” Mitchell said.

She went on to publish tweets blasting Georgia and its election results, tweeting that the state’s recount was a ‘total sham’ and ‘A FAKE!!!’.”

The Foley firm might have expected that Trump would seek to hire Mitchell as she is known as one of the nation’s top experts on election law, which was the precise reason Foley brought her on as a partner. She and Paul Sullivan were running the Sullivan & Mitchell firm when Foley absorbed the firm in 2001 and made Mitchell and Sullivan partners in its Public Affairs Practice Group based in the Washington D.C. office.

Mitchell’s involvement in politics goes back some five decades, as Urban Milwaukee has reported, as she somehow transformed from a liberal Democratic politician and activist for women’s rights in the 1970s and ’80s, into an increasingly conservative Republican since the 1990s. Nearly 20 years of that career were at the Foley & Lardner firm.

Odds are Mitchell will still get plenty of work from the many conservative groups and politicians looking for an aggressive expert on elections law.