George John Mitchell is a former Democratic Party politician and United States Senator from Maine who currently serves as chairman of the worldwide law firm DLA Piper and also as the Chancellor of the Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was the U.S. Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995 and chairman of The Walt Disney Company from March 2004 until January 2007.

Mitchell's father, George John Mitchell, was of Irish descent and was a janitor at Colby College and his mother, Mary Saad, was a textile worker who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon at the age of eighteen. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1954. In 1961, Mitchell received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.  He served as a trial attorney for the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, 1960–1962, and then as executive assistant to Senator Edmund S. Muskie 1962–1965. Mitchell practiced law in Portland, Maine, 1965–1977 and was assistant county attorney for Cumberland County, Maine in 1971.

In 1974 he won the Democratic nomination for governor of Maine, but lost in the general election to independent candidate James B. Longley.  He was appointed United States Attorney for Maine by President Jimmy Carter in 197, and served in that capacity from 1977 to 1979 when he was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Maine. Mitchell served as a federal judge until he was appointed to the United States Senate in May 1980 by the governor of Maine, Joseph Brennan, when Edmund Muskie resigned to become U.S. Secretary of State.

He was elected to a full term in 1982, reelected in 1988 and did not run for reelection in 1994. He rose quickly in the Senate Democratic leadership, serving as Deputy President pro tempore from 1987 to 1988. He then served as Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995. In 1994, President Bill Clinton offered him a seat on the Supreme Court. He declined, citing his desire to focus on the health care plan that was then before the Senate.

Since 1995, he has been active in the Northern Ireland peace process as U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland. Mitchell first led a commission that established the principles on non-violence to which all parties in Northern Ireland had to adhere and subsequently chaired the all-party peace negotiations, which led to the Belfast Peace Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998 (known since as the Good Friday Agreement).

He has frequently been mentioned in the past in conjunction with potential appointment for the position of Commissioner of Baseball, but nothing to accomplish this has ever been effected. He also has been mentioned in both 2000 and in 2004 as a potential Secretary of State for a Democratic administration, due to his role as Senate Leader and the Good Friday agreements.