Project 2025 Co-Author Caught on Camera Saying Trump ‘Blessed’ Their Efforts

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After weeks of former president Donald Trump claiming despite all evidence that he’s got nothing to do with Project 2025, a policy blueprint written for the next conservative president, one of its co-authors was caught on camera saying that, actually, Trump loves it.

Russell Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and wrote a chapter on executive power in the Project 2025 playbook. He was also on the committee that wrote the GOP’s 2024 campaign platform.

In late July, Vought met with two men he thought were relatives of a conservative New Mexico donor in a Washington, D.C., hotel suite and spoke with them for close to two hours about how he’s working behind the scenes to write policies for Trump. Except the GOP megadonor was fake and the men were working for a British journalism nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting. They filmed the whole thing on a hidden camera and published the video on YouTube on Thursday; the ruse was first reported by CNN.

Vought told the men that Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 were “graduate-level politics” and that he was all in. Just read this paragraph:

Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”

He also said: “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Vought said his group is working on “about 350” draft regulations and executive orders to hand to Trump if he wins in November. And one of Vought’s staffers separately told the undercover journalist that they wouldn’t send the documents to any government email addresses in order to prevent reporters from obtaining them through records requests:

A Centre for Climate Reporting journalist, under the guise of the fake donor’s relative, also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides, who went into more detail about the process. Micah Meadowcroft, the research director for CRA, said the drafts the group was preparing would be provided to an incoming Trump administration in a way that would protect them from ever being publicly disclosed.

“It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video – while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

Hilariously, Vought’s organization tried to downplay the video. In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America said, “It would have been easier to just do a google search to ‘uncover’ what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews. But thank you for airing our perfect conversation emphasizing our policy work is totally separate from the Trump campaign, as we have been saying.” Ah yes, a “perfect conversation” just like Trump’s multiple perfect phone calls.

I just know this guy is in big trouble!

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• Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss the possibility of serving in her administration in exchange for his endorsement. [Washington Post]
• After Trump’s Boeing 757 plane had mechanical issues en route to a campaign stop, a charter company put him on a jet once owned by deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. [New York Times]
• It’s not just Celine Dion telling the Trump campaign to knock it off: The family of Isaac Hayes has asked the campaign to stop playing the Hayes-written song “Hold On, I’m Comin’” and to pay $3 million in licensing fees for its use of the song since 2022. [The Guardian]
• West Virginia state Sen. Mike Maroney (R) was removed from his committee chair after he was charged with indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. Authorities said Maroney was caught on video surveillance “committing an act of sexual gratification” at around 1 p.m. on August 4 inside a place called Gumby’s Cigarette & Beer World. [Associated Press]

This has been your weekly Barf Bag, thanks for reading!