This evening we all learned something that the Republican Senate had been hoping to keep secret. The GOP was hoping to hire a female prosecutor to handle this Thursday’s questioning of Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, without anyone finding out her identity in advance of the hearings. But the identity of their leading candidate leaked out tonight, and it has Donald Trump’s fingerprints all over it.

The GOP is eyeing Rachel Mitchell to handle this Thursday’s questioning, according to the Washington Post. So who is she? If you’ve never heard of her, that’s because the Republicans had to go all the way to Arizona to find her. More specifically, they had to go to Maricopa County, Arizona. Yeah, you know where this is going. That’s where former Sheriff Joe Arpaio waged a prolonged and deadly terror campaign against Hispanic immigrants before he was finally forced from power. Arpaio’s closest ally is, of course, Donald Trump.

Joe Arpaio was forced out in 2017. But Palmer Report found confirmation that Rachel Mitchell worked with Arpaio for at least five years, thanks to an interview that Mitchell did with the currently offline website proclaimanddefend.org in 2012. The Internet Archive reveals that the website in question listed Mitchell having been the “Sex Crimes Bureau Chief of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office” at the time.

So now we know that the Senate Republicans are bypassing all of the various current and former prosecutors in the Washington DC area, and are going all the way across the country to choose someone who just happens to have spent several years working with Donald Trump’s pal Joe Arpaio. This has Trump’s fingerprints all over it. No wonder the GOP was hoping her identity wouldn’t leak out in advance. Now comes the question of whether the Republicans abandon the plan to use Mitchell now that the cat is out of the bag.



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