Five years after helping President Trump pressure Georgia officials to overturn the 2020 presidential election, conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell is overseeing a nonprofit that has quietly become one of the largest financial backers of the Republican Party's election fights.
A newly public tax filing shows Mitchell's Foundation for Accountability, Integrity & Research in Elections Fund, known as the FAIR Elections Fund, distributed more than $4.5 million during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, nearly tripling its grantmaking from the previous year. The money flowed to organizations involved in election litigation, restrictive voter-registration policy, conservative media, and poll-watcher recruitment, many of them longstanding allies of Mitchell and her movement.
The filing also shows FAIR paid $72,000 to Verity Vote LLC, the consulting firm owned by Heather Honey, Mitchell's longtime collaborator on election-fraud investigations who was listed on the filing as the group’s vice president and director. Honey was appointed deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security last August, where she oversees election integrity for the Trump administration. It was the second year in a row that Mitchel’s group made payments to Honey’s firm.
Mitchell founded FAIR in 2023 under the umbrella of the Trump-aligned Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), where she became a senior legal fellow after leaving her law firm in the aftermath of her involvement with Trump's January 2021 call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to overturn Joe Biden's victory.
Neither FAIR's tax filing nor CPI's discloses who funds them, but CPI's most recent tax filing shows its grants to FAIR jumped from $815,000 in 2023 to more than $6 million in 2024. Its calendar year doesn't line up exactly with FAIR's July-to-June filing cycle, but covers roughly the same period that FAIR's own grantmaking was surging.
Honey had become a prominent figure in election challenges long before joining DHS. In 2020, she misrepresented incomplete Pennsylvania data to claim the state had more votes than voters, a claim Trump repeated in his speech to supporters on January 6, 2021—saying Pennsylvania "had 205,000 more votes than you had voters"—shortly before many of the people listening to Trump’s speech stormed the Capitol. She later participated in the Arizona Senate's partisan review of Maricopa County's 2020 election, a six-month search for fraud that ultimately confirmed Biden's victory while drawing widespread criticism from election experts for its methodology. Stephen Richer, the county's recorder at the time, told the Associated Press that Honey's public records requests during his tenure consumed "scores of hours of staff time" and said plainly that she's "not a serious auditor."
