Cleta Mitchell ‘Praying’ DOJ Seizes Georgia Ballots in Probe of Debunked 2020 Election Claims

Far-right lawyer and anti-voting activist Cleta Mitchel is cheering on President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) as it probes debunked allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election in Georgia. 

“[DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon] has served notice she is coming for the Fulton County ballots,” Mitchell posted on X Thursday. “Praying it happens today. DOJ must act to protect the voters of GA.”

In July, Georgia’s GOP- controlled elections board passed a resolution calling on state authorities to ask the department for assistance in probing 2020 voter fraud claims in Fulton County. In October, DOJ demanded Fulton election officials to hand over records related to the 2020 election.

That same month, Ed Martin — DOJ’s pardon attorney and head of the department’s vague weaponization task force — acknowledged on social media that the department was looking into claims of voter fraud in Fulton County, the state’s largest county. In August, Martin allegedly sent a letter to a Fulton County judge demanding to “immediately access” 148,000 absentee ballots being stored in a ballot warehouse.

Mark Davis, a right-wing political consultant and member of the Georgia GOP’s Election Confidence Task Force, reportedly said he received a call from a DOJ investigator to follow up on his recent claims that hundreds of voters illegally voted in previous jurisdictions in the 2020 election.

Trump escalated demands in recent months for his administration to probe the 2020 election — keying in on false claims of mass voter fraud that led to Trump losing to former President Joe Biden. Georgia is at the center of 2020 election conspiracy theories, with far-right conspiracists and election deniers claiming there was voter fraud in Fulton County, the state’s most populous county.

Mitchell played a key role in Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election results. She was a part of Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) where he asked the state election leader to “find 11,780 votes.”

In her post, Mitchell claimed that her legal team had found “way more than 12,000” votes, but that Raffensperger refused to look at the data. 

“Once [Raffensperger] was featured on [sic] front page of the Atlanta paper, had Wolf Blitzer fawning over him, there wasn’t a chance he would conduct an honest review of the issues,” she wrote. “And now he’s running for governor. What a complete idiot.”

Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s claims to “find” the president votes and certified the 2020 election, and repeatedly debunked claims from Trump, Mitchell and their far-right allies that there was widespread voter fraud in the Peach State.