Cleta Deatherage Mitchell is an American lawyer, politician and conservative activist. Elected in 1976, Mitchell served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives until 1984, representing District 44 as member of the Democratic Party..
Early life and education
Cleta Mitchell was born as Cleta B. Deatherage in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1950. She attended Classen High School her junior and senior year. She received a B.A. in 1973 and a J.D. in 1975, both from the University of Oklahoma. Mitchell also has an honorary degree in Home Economics from Oklahoma State University due to her work with former dean, Beverly Crabtree. In 1971, Mitchell was one of the five original conveners of the Oklahoma Women's Political Caucus.
Married life
She married Duane Draper, a fellow Oklahoman from Norman, in 1973. In 1980, Draper moved to Massachusetts to take a teaching fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The couple divorced two years later in July 1982 on grounds of "incompatibility." Draper later came out as a gay man and became director of AIDS programming at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In 1984, Cleta Deatherage married Dale Mitchell, who was the son of all-star Brooklyn Dodgers left-fielder Dale Mitchell. In the early 1980s, the FBI began investigating Dale Mitchell for banking malpractice, and in 1992 he was convicted of five felony counts of conspiracy to defraud, misapplying bank funds and making false statements to banks, and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution. According to Mitchell, this is what convinced her that government had grown too big.
Mitchell served as a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976 to 1984, as member of the Democratic Party. She was the first woman in the United States to chair a House Appropriations and Budget Committee. She served on the executive committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Committees
Chair of the House Appropriations and Budget committee
National Rifle Association and congressional investigation
In 2018, The McClatchy Company reported that Mitchell, as a long time lawyer for the NRA, had previously expressed concerns about the NRA's close ties to Russia and the possibility that Russia had been funneling cash through the NRA into Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential Campaign. Mitchell's name was included in a list of individuals that Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee sought to interview in connection with the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Upon learning of the report, Mitchell denied ever having expressed such concerns
