Climate Activists Obtain Hidden Camera Footage of Project 2025 Architect

UPDATE: The subject of this hidden camera footage, Russel Vought, an author of the Project 2025 blueprint for autocracy in a new Trump administration, has just been nominated to become Director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget.
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Hidden camera reporting on Project 2025 – secret video of P2025 author, who is also author of GOP platform – this cut is even more shocking:

-“Getting ready for a year 5 of the Trump administration”
-favors Nationwide abortion ban with no exceptions “I want to get to abolition (of abortion) but we have to win elections” first
– Trump’s disavowals are “just politics”
– P2025 is “based on Trump’s own beliefs”
– Trump “very supportive of what we do”
– “We’re a Christian Nation”
– advocates “the largest deportation in history” to “save the country”
– Loyalty tests for government employees to “take control of Bureaucracies”

Centre for Climate Reporting:

Russell Vought, with his clipped grey beard and glasses, looks more like an accountant than a MAGA radical. He is the founder and president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank he described to his hosts as “the Death Star,” which alongside the Heritage Foundation has been at the heart of Project 2025. The head of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s White House, he is known for his fierce dedication to the former president’s cause. He’s a frequent guest on War Room, a popular podcast for MAGA diehards hosted by Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon. He told the undercover reporters he’d had to miss an appearance on the show to be at the meeting.

For months, CCR has been investigating powerful populist movements, in the US and Europe, that have set themselves against action to tackle climate change. Trump himself has repeatedly dismissed the threat and sent a clear message to the fossil fuel industry should he win in November: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” he said last month. The architects of Project 2025 – which Trump has tried to distance himself from in recent weeks – call for the US to reverse Biden-era green subsidies and “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

But our conversation with Vought covered far more than climate change. Over the course of nearly two hours, he revealed previously unreported details of the next, secretive phase of Project 2025.

Vought said he is overseeing the drafting of hundreds of executive orders, regulations and secretarial memos, to help make the US conservative movement’s radical goals a reality. These include plans for the “largest deportation in history” – a promise also made by Trump – and a proposal to use the military against US citizens to suppress large-scale protests in response. This will, Vought said, help to end multiculturalism in the United States.

Vought, who told the undercover reporters he had a deep relationship with the Trump campaign, even dismissed his former boss’s disavowal of Project 2025. He said his close relationship with Trump means that he can put these transition documents directly into his hands. “There are people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at,” he said. “The relationships will be there. The trust level will be there.”

Vought also pointed to the fact he was recently chosen as the policy director for the Republican National Convention’s Platform Committee, as evidence of the Trump campaign’s trust in him and his ideas.

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The undercover reporter also related his conversation with yet another conservative operative, with the Bond-villain name Micah Meadowcroft.

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Meadowcroft was an official at the Environment Protection Agency during the Trump administration. But more recently he’s been working at Vought’s Center for Renewing America (CRA) as its research director and has been involved in Project 2025.

Meadowcroft and our undercover reporter exchanged stories about their faith and their family. After a while, the conversation turned to Project 2025. The 900-page document – or “book” as Meadowcroft referred to it – published on the group’s website was just phase one of the project. There’s a secretive next phase, he explained. And not only is CRA heavily involved, it’s being led by his boss, Vought.

“The second phase, after the book came out, was to break down actual policy packets and executive orders and agenda items and things like that. And that’s been supervised largely by Russ,” Meadowcroft said. “He’s the team lead behind the scenes, just putting all that together… I have colleagues who officially work for CRA, but like 35 out of their 40 hour work week is Project 2025 stuff.”

But these documents won’t be made public, Meadowcroft said: “It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period, but not as part of the transition. Because obviously, you want as little of it to be FOIA-able… as possible.”

The Freedom of Information Act enables the public to request information from government agencies. Although transition teams are not federal agencies themselves, in 2016 the Trump team operated under the assumption that any transition plans brought into an agency could be requested under FOIA, according to the Center for Presidential Transition.

Instead, the Project 2025 transition plans will be shared with Trump’s transition team clandestinely: “The goal is to familiarize all the transition team people with these plans. But you don’t actually send them to their work emails,” Meadowcroft said.

“You could just give the handbooks to everyone. And be like, ‘This is the game plan for the admin.’ If the press knows that that’s what you’re doing, that they’re going to immediately just say, ‘I request all of your emails from Heritage.’”

Meadowcroft also revealed to our undercover reporter that Vought and other CRA staff are expecting to leave the organisation to go work for Trump if he wins in November: “I’d say probably a quarter to a third of staff, myself included, if there is a second Trump administration, would go in.”