Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies

In the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020, one of his election lawyers set out to keep the lies about his loss alive.

The lawyer, a well-connected conservative named Cleta Mitchell, knit together grass-roots activists, Republican lawyers, party officials and deep-pocketed advocacy groups into a vast national network. The aim was nothing less than remaking American elections.

Over the past four years, Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action.

Its participants have propelled specious theories from corners of the internet into the halls of Congress. They successfully lobbied for new state election laws and procedures, diving deep into the intricacies of election regulations. They have fanned out in neighborhoods on the hunt for evidence of election fraud.

And they have huddled in private, weekly meetings, methodically laying the groundwork that could be used to contest a Trump defeat.

The New York Times has obtained recordings of more than 400 of those meetings, over 400 hours of conversations, along with additional documents and training materials. It is a trove that provides an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at how misinformation is used to manufacture a movement.

Even as it claims to be nonpartisan and grass-roots, Ms. Mitchell’s network has closely coordinated with the Trump-controlled Republican National Committee. It found an audience with several election officials, including four Republican secretaries of state, as well as more than a dozen state legislators.

Pillars of the conservative movement — groups funded by the megadonors Rebecca Dunn, Richard Uihlein, as well as the Bradley Impact Foundation and others — provided organizational and financial backing. The network was initially a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group associated with Mark Meadows, a chief of staff in the Trump White House. Citizens for Renewing America, a related group founded by Russell T. Vought, a close Trump ally, also contributed money early on, according to public records.

Ms. Mitchell and others who played pivotal roles in Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, including the former law professor John Eastman, the architect of the fake electors scheme, advised the ranks of activists as they sought to remove thousands of voters from the rolls and pushed to reimagine how elections are certified.

Right-wing media outlets, including Gateway Pundit and the Federalist, joined the calls and later publicized the activists’ work to sympathetic readers across the internet.

All of this coordination allowed debunked theories to jump from state to state. The network was instrumental in prompting state officials, in rapid succession, to abandon a widely regarded election data system, for example.

Earlier this year, Ms. Mitchell said she was called by God to shift her attention to the possibility that noncitizens were voting. Now, in the final weeks of the campaign, Republicans across the country, chief among them Mr. Trump, are wholly convinced of the baseless claims that Democrats are registering undocumented immigrants in droves in a plot to steal the election.

Ms. Mitchell’s network nurtured a cast of amateur election sleuths and armchair experts who often see evidence of election fraud in processes that they misinterpret. In Nevada, they tried to have dozens of voters tossed off the rolls because they did not live in the state, only to learn some of the voters were members of the military posted overseas.

When a retired family doctor in Georgia claimed to have designed new software that could identify ineligible voters, the Texas attorney general called and asked how he could help, the records show. Experts said the methodology was fundamentally flawed.

These activists are now embedded in the nation’s election system. Some sit on election boards, where they will be tasked with certifying results. Thousands will serve as poll monitors and workers posted at precincts across swing states where they will document what they say are signs of malfeasance or fraud.

Asked for comment, Ms. Mitchell said the activists “are dedicated to reclaiming our election systems to help ensure that the elections are conducted in accordance with applicable law, that the process is fully transparent and that election officials count the votes accurately.”

While it’s impossible to know precisely what will happen after next week’s election, if Mr. Trump loses and contests the results, members of Ms. Mitchell’s network are standing at the ready.

‘God Put This On My Heart’

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and scores of subsequent recounts, audits and studies, some conducted by Republicans, turned up no evidence of widespread problems with the vote. Similarly, there is no research to support the claim that people who are not citizens vote in large numbers in the United States. Voter fraud is extremely rare.

Ms. Mitchell had been a prominent Republican election lawyer for decades, a veteran of the long-running debates over tightening voter ID requirements and cleaning up voter rolls.

But in 2020, working as a lawyer for Mr. Trump, she took her work in a different direction. She supported the plan to send Trump electors to Congress from states where he lost the vote. She was on the call with Mr. Trump as he badgered Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to win.

After these efforts failed, she mobilized in a new way. She brought together veterans of the Tea Party movement, G.O.P. stalwarts and some new faces. She helped create some 30 state chapters and set up the weekly phone calls. Ms. Mitchell embraced a list of far-fetched and unfounded theories about election corruption and sold her new network as the vehicle to “save the country.”

In one meeting in May, she told Michigan activists, “this hijacking of our elections by illegals” was one of the ways the “left is thinking they’re going to control the outcome of the 2024 election.”

“But we’re onto them,” Ms. Mitchell said.

“That’s right, your army’s onto them, Cleta,” Patrice Johnson, the leader of the Michigan offshoot group, responded.

One of her first moves after what she described as her revelation about noncitizens casting ballots was to start clamoring for a federal bill that would require all voters to submit proof of citizenship, Ms. Mitchell said. She worked on the legislation and personally urged the House speaker, Mike Johnson, to make it a priority, she told activists on a call.

The bill failed. But Representative Chip Roy of Texas noted that the theories about noncitizen voting still served a political purpose. They joined together two issues that energize Republicans — worry about election integrity and border policy.

“It smashes those into one that puts Democrats on the defensive,” he said at a meeting in September, adding: “It should stay front and center as long as we can make it front and center.”

Forging an Alliance

From the beginning, they were strange bedfellows.

There were throngs of activists angry at party leaders for what they saw as insufficient support for Mr. Trump, people still holding on to wild, repeatedly debunked notions about hacked election machines.

And there was a Republican Party that had taken a cautious and pragmatic approach, still not entirely beholden to Mr. Trump but wanting to use the activists to win elections.

Joining them together wasn’t easy.

On one call last year, Richard Silvestri, an activist in Michigan, railed against the party as being “for the same old same old” before realizing a party official, Matthew Seifried, was on the call. Mr. Seifried then defended the R.N.C.’s efforts to protect elections.

“This has been an uneasy alliance for us all over the country between the grass roots and the Republican Party,” Ms. Mitchell said on a call right after the 2022 midterms.

A spokeswoman for the R.N.C., Claire Zunk, said in a statement that the party had assembled an “unprecedented election integrity operation,” but did not comment on the Election Integrity Network.

The R.N.C. had played a critical role from the start. Its staff members helped organize kickoff events. It recruited the activists to be poll workers and poll watchers, helping the party fulfill its ambitions to have eyes on precincts across the country.

To comply with the tax code, the network presented itself as a nonpartisan group focused only on “election integrity.”

Members who accidentally slipped into partisanship were occasionally chided. During a July meeting shortly after Mr. Trump was shot, Janine Iyer, a volunteer leader with Michigan Fair Elections, praised the former president for trying to “save our country” and displayed an image of him raising his fist.

Almost instantly, Elizabeth Ayoub, the communications director for Michigan Fair Elections, chimed in: “Janine! We need to get this off the screen, and we need to stop talking about one candidate.”

More recently, overtly Trump-aligned groups have joined on the calls. One, Turning Point Action, is running get-out-the-vote operations on behalf of the Trump campaign. When a representative from the group joined a call with Michigan activists in April, he urged them to help with Republican voter turnout.

Ms. Johnson, who leads the network’s Michigan affiliate and a related political nonprofit, said the groups were not affiliated with a party and did not help Republican candidates. “It is hardly a conspiracy theory to point out the vulnerabilities in our elections system and to ask penetrating questions,” Ms. Johnson said in a statement.

The activists’ political views were unmistakable. Ms. Mitchell and other leaders within the network discussed their belief that “the left” rigged elections — either through policies that make it easier to vote, such as mail ballots or early voting, or through outright fraud and cheating. The only way that Republicans can have a shot, the activists said, was to change the system.

Planning for November

Republican losses in the midterm elections left the network looking for a new, more aggressive strategy for 2024. It settled on a mass effort to rid the voter rolls of people believed to be ineligible.

John Richards Jr., the doctor from Georgia, developed a software system he said could be used to identify suspicious voter registrations. On conference calls, leaders instructed activists to pore over records and go searching for evidence that voters’ addresses were wrong.

They knocked on doors, drove by parking lots, looked up utility records and took photos. They discussed searching for voters with “ethnic names,” even as Ms. Mitchell cautioned against intimidating voters. Their material ended up in affidavits delivered to election offices as activists in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and other states petitioned officials to have tens of thousands of voters removed. Election officials rejected most of their challenges.

Still, network leaders have not given up. They plan to use this mass data collection to arm local activists with names of voters to challenge if they cast ballots.

The Republican National Committee and other conservative groups have piggybacked on this work, filing lawsuits that claimed the voter rolls were larded with illegal voters, including large numbers of noncitizens.

The network’s leaders don’t often discuss the endgame of this work. But some have suggested the data could be used to challenge the results.

On a call in September, an activist working with United Sovereign Americans, an election-denial organization, said the supposed errors in the voter rolls “are all reason to say that the election certification process is not valid.”

Until 2020, certification was largely viewed as the ceremonial process of recording the official election results. But Mr. Trump’s allies, many affiliated with the Election Integrity Network, have pushed to redefine the role.

Local election officials can and should refuse to certify if they believe there was something wrong with the election — or if they want more time to investigate, they have argued. In Michigan, the network’s affiliate wrote and distributed a guidebook for county canvass board members that suggests they can conduct investigations before voting to certify.

“There’s a real push to certify quickly, and I think this is, I hate conspiracies, but I think this is a strategy,” Mr. Jones said during a July meeting. “That’s why we need to get people on these electoral boards who resist the pressure, and do it right.”

The network has put activists in position to do just that, encouraging members to run for local posts or work their way into the system through county and state parties.

Now, three women associated with the network hold key positions in the state. They were involved in recent attempts to make it easier for State Election Board members to hold up certification while they conduct inquiries into the vote. The effort failed in court.

But the network is looking beyond this election — with broader ambitions.

Working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, the network has written model legislation about noncitizen voting for state legislatures. Ms. Mitchell has talked about a federal elections overhaul should Republicans win the White House and Congress.

For Ms. Mitchell, it was never just about one election. It was about starting a movement.

“And we just have to keep remembering, we’re about the business of saving our country. And this wasn’t necessarily a great outcome for a battle, but I’m not prepared to throw in the towel and say that we’ve lost the war to save the country,” she said on a call after Republicans lost key races in the 2022 midterms. “I don’t think that any of us can even think that. I can’t think that. I’ll do it as long as I have breath in me.”