Lawyer Cleta Mitchell participated in Trump's Georgia phone call

Free advice for all Biglaw firms: you will be held accountable in the court of public opinion for the work you and your partners do. That’s a lesson Jones Day is well acquainted with. As is Porter Wright. And King & Spalding. And Hogan Lovells. You get the point. So if a partner at your firm plays a prominent role in one of the most shocking phone calls in American history, well, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do.

Of course I’m talking about Foley & Lardner partner Cleta Mitchell’s participation in Donald Trump’s harassing of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to just “find 11,780 votes.” It seems that the never-Trump PAC The Lincoln Project has turned their attention to Biglaw over the incident.

Link to tweet

There are already murmurs of Foley losing business over Mitchell’s involvement in the debacle, and tweets like these from The Lincoln Project only ups the pressure.

And they aren’t the only PAC paying attention to Biglaw. MeidasTouch — remember they are the ones that actually drew first blood in the campaign against Jones Day — has turned their attention to Foley & Lardner. One the the PAC’s founders, Ben Meiselas, partner at Geragos & Geragos, has been very vocal about the firm’s involvement, specifically when Foley attorney Jason Villalba tweeted (though he’s since deleted it) about the now infamous phone call without condemning Mitchell’s involvement.

Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who advised President Trump during his Saturday phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state in an effort to overturn the election, resigned on Tuesday as a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Foley & Lardner.

Mitchell’s resignation came after the law firm on Monday issued a statement saying it was “concerned by” her role in the call. The firm noted that as a matter of policy, its attorneys do not represent “any parties seeking to contest the results of the election.”

The Washington Post on Sunday published audio and a transcript of the hour-long call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the election results. During the call, Mitchell complained that she had not been given access to certain information from Raffensperger’s office, and Trump relied on her to an extraordinary degree during the call.,....

In its statement on Tuesday, the law firm said: “Cleta Mitchell has informed firm management of her decision to resign from Foley & Lardner effective immediately. Ms. Mitchell concluded that her departure was in the firm’s best interests, as well as in her own personal best interests. We thank her for her contributions to the firm and wish her well.”