A prominent ally of former President Donald Trump says God gave her a mission to target a supposed epidemic of noncitizens illegally voting in U.S. elections, according to newly obtained video footage reviewed by the New York Times.
Cleta Mitchell's comment during a conversation in May 2024 is part of a trove of videos showing the former president's legal team plotting on how to overturn elections, according to the Times report.
"I think God put this on my heart," Mitchell said in the recording. "So I really needed to pay attention to this situation and to learn as much as I could about what actually is happening with regard to citizen and noncitizens getting on the voter rolls and voting."
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There remains no evidence that noncitizens are registering to vote in large numbers, which is already a criminal offense and generally easy to spot when it happens, according to election experts.
GOP lawsuits and gubernatorial executive actions seeking to remove noncitizens from voting rolls have been smacked down by courts, and often found to be in violation of federal law or based on already debunked misinterpretations of registration data.
Mitchell, who participated on Trump's notorious 2020 phone call with Georgia's Secretary of State in which the former president demanded Brad Raffensperger "find" extra votes, was pushed for an appointment to an election oversight board by Trump.
The pro-Trump attorney has since been trying to recruit a new "army" of poll-watchers to harass and intimidate voters, reports show.
While Mitchell now describes her mission as divinely ordained, previous reporting indicated that her radicalization to the far-right went a little differently.
Mitchell got her start in politics as an Oklahoma Democratic lawmaker, fighting for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment — but turned to the right after she entered the banking business with her husband and he was slapped with a $3 million bank fraud conviction.
