Andrea Mitchell was born to Jewish parents in New Rochelle, New York on October 30, 1946. After earning a BA degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, she was hired by KYW radio in Philadelphia, first as a reporter, and then as the station’s City Hall correspondent. In 1976 Mitchell went to work for the Washington-based CBS affiliate WTOP, and in 1978 she became a general correspondent for NBC News, where she has worked ever since. She has been the network’s chief foreign affairs correspondent since 1994.

Portraying Republicans and Conservatives as Racists

Mitchell has long viewed white Republicans and conservatives as being particularly inclined toward racism. During a June 2008 appearance on MSNBC, for instance, she referred to a heavily pro-Republican area of southwestern Virginia where then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was campaigning, as “real redneck, sort of, bordering on Appalachia country.”

In a December 2015 discussion about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for a temporary halt on Muslim immigration to the United States, Mitchell said: “I will tell you that the [Obama] White House views the Trump Muslim ban as pure racism … My first campaign, 1968 as a young reporter, was [that of segregationist] George Wallace. I have seen this before.”

Mitchell objected strongly in June 2016 when Donald Trump said he was being treated unfairly by U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, an Indiana-born American citizen whose parents originally hailed from Mexico. Trump described Curiel, who was presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University, as “a member of a club or society [La Raza Lawyers of San Diego] very strongly pro-Mexican,” and said that it was “just common sense” that Curiel’s connections to Mexico, and his disagreement with Trump’s past calls for stricter border controls, were responsible for his anti-Trump rulings. According to Mitchell, Trump’s remarks were “blatantly racist.”

In November 2016, Mitchell covered the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that promotes white nationalism. Though the gathering consisted of scarcely 200 attendees, Mitchell tried to emphasize its significance as a barometer of anti-black racism among Donald Trump’s political backers: “Supporters of Donald Trump’s election and the alt-right gathered in Washington this weekend at the Reagan Building … to celebrate with white supremacist speech and echoes of signature language from Nazi Germany.” Later in that segment, Mitchell related an anecdote she had heard about a four-year-old black girl in Harlem who, by Mitchell’s telling, “said she wants to be white” because of her fear “that black people are going to be shot under [President] Trump.” Trump’s election victory, said the news woman, was having a profound “effect on children in minority, in communities of color.”

Mitchell’s Affinity for Leftist Democrats and Their Policies

Over the course of her broadcasting career, Mitchell has made plain her affinity for leftist Democrats.

For example, in an April 2016 interview in which Senator Harry Reid said that “Hillary Clinton’s qualifications” for being president were more impressive than those of anyone “since the Founding Fathers,” Mitchell responded by saying that only “John Quincy Adams, maybe,” had compiled a résumé equal to that of Clinton. Just before the election that November, Mitchell characterized a Clinton campaign rally that featured appearances by such notables as Lebron James and James Taylor as “extraordinary” and “magical.”

In a similar spirit, Mitchell lauded outgoing President Barack Obama‘s “extraordinary” July 2016 speech at the Democratic National Convention as “the most optimistic speech, the most generous speech, politically,” that anyone could have expected to hear. She marveled at “the genuine affection” that Obama expressed for Hillary Clinton “when he said there’s never been anyone, not man or woman, not me, not Bill [Clinton], as qualified to be president of the United States.” Extolling also “the creativity” of Obama’s “own brilliant speech writing,” Mitchell said: “His gift is unique. I don’t think we’ve ever had a President save Lincoln, who is as great a speechwriter as this man.”

A few weeks after Mrs. Clinton had lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Mitchell told her NBC colleague Matt Lauer that members of the Clinton campaign team “do blame the media, frankly” for having contributed heavily to their candidate’s defeat. A Media Research Center study, however, found that 91% of all the network news coverage of Trump during the weeks leading up to the election was hostile and negative, and that Trump’s controversies received significantly more airtime than Clinton’s controversies on NBC, ABC, and CBS broadcasts.

When Trump was elected president in 2016, Mitchell feared that he would recklessly undo many of the supposedly vital achievements of President Obama. For example, when the Trump administration announced in April 2017 that it would be reviewing the Iran nuclear deal in light of Tehran’s ongoing support for Islamic terrorism, Mitchell lamented that “the new administration appears to be ready to rip up” the “landmark” agreement which had been structured to “stop Iran from getting a bomb.” Further, she suggested that if the United States were to “break out of that deal,” it would “send a signal to North Korea and other rogue nations that the U.S. can’t be trusted to keep its end of the bargain.” (For details about the actual terms of the Iran nuclear deal, click here.)

In February 2015 Mitchell backed President Barack Obama‘s opposition to Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on March 3rd regarding the gravity of the growing Iranian nuclear threat and his (Netanyahu’s) “profound disagreement” with the nuclear-power deal that the Obama Administration was pursuing with Iran. Speaking with The New York Times‘s Mark Landler shortly after a press conference in which Obama had laid out his opposition, Mitchell said:

“[T]he other point here was that he was asked about this very controversial visit by Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks before an Israeli election. A gathering of Democrats, House and Senate, are now saying they’re going to boycott this speech. They see it as a political invitation by John Boehner. The Israelis are now saying, ‘Well, Boehner told us the Democrats were behind it, we didn’t realize it would be this toxic.’ But no sign, yet, that Netanyahu is backing off of it. And the president very pointedly said, ‘We have this protocol. We don’t invite leaders. If Angela Merkel had an election in two weeks, she wouldn’t be here right now and my bet is that she wouldn’t have asked to come.’ Take that, Bibi.”

On November 3, 2016, Mitchell propped up a key Hillary Clinton talking point, falsely claiming that Clinton — who had used a private, unsecured email server throughout her tenure as Secretary of State, in direct violation of the Espionage Act — was “not under criminal investigation” by the FBI. Specifically, Mitchell interrupted her station’s coverage of a Donald Trump campaign rally to “fact check” the Republican candidate for citing FBI Director James Comey’s recent announcement that he (Comey) was re-opening the Bureau’s investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. Said Mitchell: “Just a lot of fact-checking to do. She’s not under criminal investigation. In fact, it’s not an investigation. It’s just a review of the e-mails. She did not lie to the FBI, according to James Comey. There was no grounds to prosecute her. So there are no lies, there’s no criminality.”

Views on America’s Refugee Policy

In a November 2015 interview with Mitchell, Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii stated that she intended to vote for a Republican bill that called for creating a stricter vetting process to determine which refugees are allowed into the United States – a bill that President Obama had vowed to veto. Said Gabbard: “[I]t’s actually a very short and simple bill … It requires that, through the current vetting process that refugees need to go through, that the agencies responsible for that vetting will certify that the refugees who are being allowed to come here do not pose a threat to the American people or the United States.” Mitchell replied: “But in fact what it boils down to though, Congresswoman, is an individual certification, because no cabinet secretary is going to say these people are okay, without having all of the data. You would have [Secretary of Homeland Security] Jeh Johnson and [FBI Director] Jim Comey and [Director of National Intelligence] General [James] Clapper spending all of their time going over, individually, each Syrian refugee.”

As TruthRevolt.org pointed out, Mitchell’s argument was essentially this: “[E]ach of the three cabinet members would have to check each Syrian individually, because they would not be comfortable signing their name to a document certifying that the refugee was not a threat. They would not be comfortable because they had not done the vetting personally.” In other words, Mitchell was conceding that no vetting process by any U.S. agency could confidently ensure that it was capable of weeding out all terrorists from the refugees seeking entry to the United States. Nonetheless, she was still in favor of allowing large numbers of refugees into the country.

Views on Planned Parenthood and Abortion Rights

Mitchell is a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and wide-ranging abortion rights. When President Trump signed a bill in April 2017 undoing an Obama-era regulation that had prohibited states from withholding money from Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics, Mitchell said: “This is a killer decision, this Title X decision … and Planned Parenthood says it’s really devastating.” The following month, Mitchell invited her friend, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, onto her program to denounce an upcoming vote in which House Republicans would seek to amend the Affordable Care Act of 2010 Obamacare. Said Mitchell: “[T]he winds are not blowing well for Planned Parenthood. This vote is likely to pass the House and it does defund Planned Parenthood, which means all of your clinics around the country for women’s health.”

Views Regarding Fidel Castro

In her reports about Cuba’s longtime Communist dictator Fidel Castro, Mitchell commonly issued words of praise or admiration to counterbalance any references to Castro’s abuses. In a December 15, 1999 report from Cuba, for instance, she described Castro as an “old-fashioned, courtly – even paternal” man and said: “He’s not just the country’s head of state, he’s the CEO.” After Castro’s death in November 2016, Mitchell reported that many Cubans were “overcome with grief,” as exemplified by one young person who allegedly said: “It’s painful for our country. This is the president we all loved.” “Leaders around the world” were “praising Castro,” Mitchell added, noting that “Cuban TV paid tributes all day and all night to the founder of the revolution, still a towering figure in the nation’s imagination.” Emphasizing Castro’s keen intelligence, Mitchell described him as “a voracious reader [who was] very, very aware of everything that was going on, very, very smart and very wedded to his revolutionary ideology.” In a separate report, Mitchell noted that Castro was “a declared socialist” who had “dramatically improved healthcare and literacy” in Cuba, and who, over time, had grown to “sho[w] a new tolerance for religion, welcoming Pope John Paul II in 1998.” She also suggested that Castro’s mass arrests of dissidents were sometimes carried out in response to American policies, such as after “the Bush administration tightened sanctions, cutting off most travel to the island.”

Additional Information

For additional information on Andrea Mitchell, click here.