Democracy dies in darkness and two main progenitors of darkness in politics these days are Ginni Thomas and her pal Cleta Mitchell. As usual, we’ll start out with a game of Connect The Dots and you will see how our other favorite game here, Follow The Money, is closely aligned. Cleta Mitchell met Ginni Thomas when they both worked on the Council for National Policy, which is touted as either a think tank or national coordinating group for conservative leaders.
Add to that, Cleta Mitchell has represented the NRA and she’s also on the board of the American Conservative Union. If you are feeling the hair stand up on the back of your neck, yes, it should. The stolen election crazies are no longer restricted to the Gateway Pundit, they’re everywhere, including the Republican National Committee. Cleta Mitchell is a key figure among them and has been since early on. New York Times:
In August 2020, Mr. Trump tapped her to prepare for postelection litigation. She enlisted John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted specious legal theories claiming Vice President Mike Pence could keep Mr. Trump in power. “A movement is stirring,” Ms. Mitchell wrote to Mr. Eastman just two days after Election Day. “But needs constitutional support.”
Ms. Mitchell helped the president argue his case to state officials. She was on the phone with Mr. Trump when he asked Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” that could reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat there.
Her latest effort is organized through the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit organization where she serves as a senior legal fellow and where Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, is a senior partner. Mr. Trump’s political action committee, Save America PAC, donated $1 million to the group last year.
Ms. Mitchell has described herself as a key conduit between activists and Republican Party leadership.
“We are trying to bridge the gap between the grass-roots and some of the issues we’ve had with the party,” she told trainees at the event outside Harrisburg.
Ms. Mitchell is no doubt connecting with some of the fringe groups and ideas some in the party once avoided.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum in the GOP. That’s something that happens cyclically, but on this go round — we’re talking since 2016 — the ascension of the fringe to power has never been so pervasive. And, as Mitchell says, she sees herself as the linchpin between the fringe and “traditional” GOP leadership, what’s left of it.
In Virginia, for example, Ms. Mitchell helped a nonprofit organize a coalition that includes Virginians for America First, a group advocating for hand-counting ballots. It’s a position popular among some of those who believe conspiracy theories about foreign hacking in the 2020 election. The group was funded by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who is now a major benefactor of the election denial movement.
In Michigan, Ms. Mitchell’s group held a training session in May that was sponsored in part by a coalition of grass-roots groups called the Michigan Election Protection Team. The R.N.C.’s state election integrity director brought together the coalition to recruit poll workers. According to its website, the coalition includes LaRouchePAC, a committee dedicated to Lyndon LaRouche, the deceased conspiracy theorist, and Let’s Fix Stuff, an outfit run by a former Republican state senator who has promoted a theory about the 2020 election that Republican Michigan Senate leaders denounced as “indefensible.”
The R.N.C. sent both its national and state election integrity directors to Ms. Mitchell’s training near Harrisburg. The state director, Andrea Raffle, had worked alongside Ms. Mitchell for months on the event, one of the speakers told the attendees. Ms. Raffle, as well as an organizer from Heritage Action, would be joining a new coalition of election activists led by Toni Shuppe, a fast-rising state activist, organizers announced.
Ms. Shuppe’s group, Audit the Vote PA, has become a leading peddler of misleading data about the election in Pennsylvania. Last year, the group set out to find evidence of fraud by canvassing neighborhoods in search of discrepancies between election results and information collected from residents, a method that election experts dismiss as invalid.
This isn’t surprising in the least that Lyndon LaRouche is alive and well with these people. He used to talk the crazy talk. That was in a day and age when everyone knew it was crazy. It was a side show. No longer. Not since the side show that came down the escalator in 2015 actually made it to the White House.
Lyndon LaRouche was a serial presidential candidate, a convicted fraudster who spent the early 1990s behind bars, and a onetime management consultant who became the head of a Marxist sect and then a sort of proto-fascist. But he was best known for his byzantine conspiracy theories, which he and his followers expressed in terms that sounded like an abstruse treatise crossed with a diss track. Bertrand Russell was a “high priest of Isis.” George Soros was “the Queen’s favorite dope-pusher.” Walter Mondale was “jointly owned by the left wing of the Socialist International and the grain cartel.” Jimmy Carter had been compelled by a “systematic behavior modification program” into serving “a small group of preeminent Wall Street financiers.” Henry Kissinger was both “an agent of the British foreign service” and “the kind of homosexual personality who ordinarily makes a potential professional assassin.”
The problem is, these people just won’t quit.
Ms. Shuppe has admitted to flaws in her data but stands by the conclusions of her analysis. Earlier this year, she circulated a petition that declared citizens’ right “to throw off such government that intends to keep the truth behind the 2020 election hidden.”
Now, Ms. Shuppe is recruiting election activists, using what she learned at Ms. Mitchell’s and other training sessions, she said in an interview. So far, around 200 people have signed up, she said.
“Just know that we have a plan,” she wrote the day after the Harrisburg seminar to her 15,000 Telegram subscribers. “We’ll never quit. This must be fixed. There is no going back to sleep. And 2020 still needs decertified.”
They’ll never quit. That’s the problem. There’s no reasoning with these people. This is what we’re up against in 2022. Doug Mastriano made no bones about it and neither are these people. They intend to destroy all faith and confidence in elections, which are the cornerstone of democracy. They’re attacking democracy at its grass roots and that’s where we need to meet them and fight back.
I really hope they find a way to indict her.