CNP Leadership Releases Letter Urging State Legislators to Reject 25 Million Votes

On December 10, 2020, the Council for National Policy leadership released a letter drafted by CNP board member and attorney Cleta Mitchell calling on legislators in swing states to throw out over 25 million votes based on false claims of electoral fraud.

The letter represented the execution of the strategy CNP had coordinated at its November 12-14 meeting, where members discussed promoting election fraud claims and supporting challenges to electors in Republican-controlled statehouses. Mitchell, who had presented at that meeting, now authored the formal call to action.

The CNP letter urged state legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada to reject the certified election results in their states and either declare Trump the winner or send alternate slates of electors to Congress. This was a direct call for state legislatures to overturn the democratic election based on conspiracy theories.

The letter’s significance extended beyond its content: it demonstrated CNP’s function as a coordination mechanism that could mobilize conservative institutional power behind a unified strategy. The letter carried the weight of CNP’s network, signaling to Republican state legislators that the full force of the conservative movement - Heritage Foundation, ALEC, major donors, religious right organizations - supported overturning the election.

Cleta Mitchell’s authorship was particularly significant given her role across multiple CNP-coordinated efforts. She had presented election fraud theories at CNP’s November meeting, drafted this December letter, and would three weeks later participate in Trump’s January 2, 2021 phone call pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”

The letter represented CNP’s evolution from policy coordination to direct involvement in attempting to overturn a presidential election. The organization founded to coordinate conservative think tanks, donors, and activists was now coordinating an effort to reject the votes of 25 million Americans and install the losing candidate as president.

This marked a turning point where CNP’s coordination infrastructure - designed to capture institutions through legal means - was deployed to execute an attempted coup through state legislature intervention in the Electoral College.