In July, not long before President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address questioning the legitimacy of American elections, the pioneering conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell and about two dozen of her associates logged onto a private video briefing with the White House.

Mitchell, who holds no formal position in the Trump administration, had been pivotal to Trump’s bid to challenge his loss in 2020, spearheading efforts to prove his claims of fraud and reverse his defeat in court.

After Joe Biden took office, when others abandoned the fight or scoffed as Trump clung to conspiracy theories, Mitchell doubled down, founding a grassroots organization devoted to rewriting election laws and rules to be more restrictive. Members of her group, the Election Integrity Network, were named to vital election-related positions in swing states and, later, in the second Trump administration.

The pre-speech briefing was an acknowledgment of just how consequential Mitchell and her organization had become. The White House had held similar sessions for key political players, such as governors, members of Congress and major press outlets.

At the appointed time, the screen filled with the faces of EIN leaders and supporters, some sitting in front of digital backgrounds with the group’s logo on them. Mitchell shushed those who’d forgotten to mute and introduced John Solomon, an ally of hers who was helping prepare the speech.

Mitchell and her network hardly needed the run-through, though: Much of the speech was a compendium of allegations and conspiracy theories they had originated or spread.

Her lieutenants were thrilled to hear that the president would assert there were more than 275,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls — a since-debunked claim based on work led by one of her proteges, who occupied a top post at the Department of Homeland Security.

The speech would end with an exhortation for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register, which Mitchell had helped draft.

To Seth Keshel, an EIN adviser on the call, none of it was surprising — Mitchell was in and out of the White House all the time. He’d joined her for one such meeting.

“She’s got an open door with the president,” he said.

“Opposed to Honest Elections”

No one besides Trump himself has done more than Mitchell, 76, to turn the mundane processes of how ballots are cast and counted in American elections into mortal combat.

Since Trump returned to the White House, Mitchell and her acolytes have been deeply entwined in his unprecedented bid to assert federal control over voting, an effort that has increasingly defined his second term.

Friends and enemies alike credit her with providing much of the administration’s election road map. The White House has turned to those close to her to enact the plan, appointing her associates to help lead the hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls and to reinvestigate 2020 voting irregularities.

“She has the president’s ear,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a close ally of Mitchell’s, said in a July interview. “A lot of the momentum things we’ve seen over the last six months or so come directly from Cleta’s involvement.”

To understand how Mitchell became the hand behind this transformational push, ProPublica traced her obsession with politics and elections back to its roots.

From the start, those who knew her told us, she stood out for her willingness to embrace options others wouldn’t and to do whatever it took to win.

Her relentlessness and long-term strategic vision have enabled her to outflank or outlast not only her liberal opponents, but her conservative rivals.

Much of Mitchell’s influence derives from years of groundwork she’s done to put a foundation under the so-called election-integrity movement, once dismissed as a collection of oddballs and fringe actors.

Beyond building the EIN and raising millions of dollars to fund its activities, she’s helped direct tens of millions more to like-minded policy shops, researchers, law firms and advocacy groups.

The net effect has been to make an agreed-upon set of beliefs about elections — that the 2020 presidential vote was stolen, that U.S. voting systems are rigged, that there’s rampant voting by noncitizens — a core part of conservatism.

Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who collaborated with Mitchell before Trump’s election and now heads the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said she had been crucial in building the institutional infrastructure that has sustained Trump’s “big lie.”

“What she found in Trump was less of a client and more of a movement,” he said.

Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica for this article but occasionally answered emails. “Hahahaha!!!” she wrote in response to one email asking for an interview. To another, she replied: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”

She responded in writing to about a quarter of our detailed questions, disputing that her efforts were designed to undermine elections or upend their results.

“Nothing that we do is designed or intended to ‘sway’ any election outcomes,” she wrote. “What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.”

A White House spokesperson didn’t answer specific questions about Mitchell, saying she has no official role in election policy but is an effective private advocate.

To tell Mitchell’s story, ProPublica interviewed more than 35 people who have worked with her or know her personally, including participants in her network, Republican election lawyers, current and former Trump administration officials, family members and friends. Many, especially conservatives who’ve fallen out with her, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

We examined thousands of emails related to her work obtained from public records requests and sources, as well as court filings and an oral history she gave in 2007.

We also reviewed hundreds of hours of recordings of her network’s organizing calls spanning a four-year period, many of which were shared exclusively with ProPublica, as well as numerous speeches she’s given at private events for conservatives.

On a call earlier this year, she emphasized that Democrats “only win when they cheat” and that people who resist EIN’s agenda are “opposed to honest elections” and “depraved.”

As much as Mitchell has been able to achieve with Trump in the White House, several people we spoke with noted she hasn’t been able to push important parts of her agenda over the finish line.

Her signature legislation — the SAVE Act and its successor, the SAVE America Act — have been blocked by moderate Republicans in the Senate. Election changes she’d hoped the president could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts. And Trump’s mid-July address on elections drew shrugs even from some conservative media.

Critics, including some inside the election-integrity movement, told ProPublica they are worried that Mitchell’s growing frustration is prompting her to press Trump and his allies toward ever more extreme actions. Her lifelong pattern, ProPublica’s reporting shows, has been to escalate conflicts into winner-take-all battles — a pattern playing out now as she tries to shape the midterms.

Hours after Trump’s speech, Mitchell appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, sounding openly exasperated at the dismissive coverage, her lips pressed into a thin line.

Bannon suggested the evidence of election fraud cited by the president justified declaring a national emergency, which he argued would enable Trump to immediately force states to implement parts of the SAVE America Act.

Mitchell went even further, one-upping the right-wing provocateur. Trump needn’t bother with this step, she said, which would inevitably be met with court challenges. He already had authority under a law empowering the government to protect critical infrastructure to unilaterally enforce the bill’s requirements, she insisted.

“We’ve got the blueprint. We’ll help,” she said. “We just need someone in authority to say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

“I Was Always Interested in Politics”

Mitchell’s fascination with politics and voting began at an early age.

One of her first memories, she would recount in the 2007 oral history, was begging her mother “please not to go vote” until she got home from school and could accompany her. Later, she recalled, “I would study all the voter guides and tell my mother who I thought she ought to vote for.”

Mitchell grew up poor in Oklahoma City, the third of six children born to Jack Deatherage and Modean Lane. She’s often credited her mother, a secretary, for pushing her relentlessly to excel. About her father, she’s said much less, telling The Wall Street Journal only that he was “kind of a no-account.”

According to court records, their home life was highly volatile. Her mother initiated divorce proceedings at least five times, citing her father’s chronic unemployment, drinking, cruelty and violence. The couple split up for good in 1962, when Cleta was 11.

She hid the family’s struggles behind a peppy disposition, piling up accolades at school. At 15, she was runner-up in the Oklahoma City Junior Miss pageant. (Asked about these events, Mitchell replied: “I am peppy. I was also named Miss Congeniality in that pageant.”)

At the University of Oklahoma, which she attended on a journalism scholarship, Cleta was known as a “good girl, sorority girl, untouched by the sexual revolution,” one contemporary said.

Before long, she found a seemingly perfect consort: Duane Draper, who’d been the university’s student body president. While friends believed their shared interest in politics brought them together, they had another bond: He, too, had grown up with an abusive father.

“They were mirror images,” said Conrad Draper, Duane’s brother. “They both felt powerless in their childhood, so in their adulthood they constantly pursued power.”

They married in 1971, when Cleta was a junior. When she ran to be student body president, he served as her unofficial campaign manager.

She lost, a setback she blamed mostly on misogyny. Still, she emerged as ambitious as ever. She spearheaded voter drives to defeat Republicans, worked to expand students’ access to voting and helped launch the Oklahoma chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as a delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

As soon as she graduated from law school, Cleta ran for a seat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, taking on an incumbent Republican. She knocked on every door in her district, prospecting for votes........

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