AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a new undercover video that shows the co-author of Project 2025 bragging about his ties to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — even as Trump is trying to distance himself from the right-wing blueprint for his potential second term.

The video features Russell Vought, who was director of the Trump White House Office of Management and Budget. It shows Vought meeting in a five-star Washington, D.C., hotel with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. But Vought was actually talking to two undercover reporters with the Centre for Climate Reporting, an independent British news outlet. They were secretly recording him.

In a minute one of those reporters will join us. But first, this is the video report accompanying their new investigation. It’s called “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive 'second phase' and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

NARRATOR: Two undercover reporters, posing as donors, are about to meet one of the key architects of Project 2025, the radical plan for Trump’s second term, in a hotel suite rigged with hidden cameras.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Nice to meet you. Would you like a coffee or something?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I’d love coffee, yeah.

NARRATOR: Meet Russ Vought.

NEWS ANCHOR: Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

NARRATOR: He’s been called “the most dangerous MAGA diehard you’ve never heard of.”

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I am opposed to the Department of Education because I think it’s the Department of Critical Race Theory.

STEVE BANNON: The Russ Vought. … We’re comrades in arms.

NARRATOR: Formerly a Cabinet member and chief lieutenant in the first Trump admin.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I want to thank Russ for doing an incredible job.

NARRATOR: He now runs a group called Center for Renewing America.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: An organization that I helped turn into the Death Star that is accomplishing all the debates that you are reading about. … I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism. … You have the largest deportation in history. … Block funding for Planned Parenthood. … I want to be the person that crushes the deep state.

NARRATOR: Vought is one of the key authors of the blueprint for a second Trump administration.

WEIJIA JIANG: Project 2025.

ALI VELSHI: It’s an ambitious 920-page blueprint.

SARA HAINES: Like eliminating the Department of Education.

ABBY PHILLIP: The mass firings of civil servants.

JONATHAN KARL: Banning access to the abortion pill and further restricting abortion rights.

NARRATOR: In recent weeks the plans have become so controversial that Trump has been forced to distance himself.

DONALD TRUMP: They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left, OK? You have the radical left, and you have the radical right. And they come up with this plan. I don’t know what the hell it is. It’s Project '25. … Are you ready? I know nothing about Project ’25. I haven't seen the document. I don’t intend to really see the document.

NARRATOR: But behind closed doors, Vought tells us not to take Trump’s disavowal seriously.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I expect to hear 10 more times from the rally the president, you know, distancing himself from the left’s bogeyman of Project 2025.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah. And you’re not worried about that?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I’m not worried about it.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: He’s running against the brand. He is not running against any people.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: He is not running against any institutions. It’s interesting. He is in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy. He’s been at our organization. He’s raised money for our organization. He’s blessed it from the — you know, I remember walking into our last day in office and told him what I was going to do. So, he’s very supportive of what we do.

NARRATOR: Our investigation into Project 2025 began two weeks before the meeting with Vought at a conference for religious nationalists in D.C.

SEN. JOSH HAWLEY: The truth is, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy.

NARRATOR: Journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting have come posing as potential donors looking to meet those involved in Project 2025. They’re not hard to find. The Heritage Foundation, the group running the project, are here. So is Vought’s think tank. We make the acquaintance of Micah Meadowcroft, an author on Project 2025 and a close aide to Vought. He tells us that Vought is running the secretive second phase of Project 2025.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: And the second phase, after the book came out, was to break down like actual sort of policy packets and executive orders and agenda items and things like that. And that’s been supervised largely by Russ.

NARRATOR: The first phase of Project 2025 was a 922-page policy book published openly. The second phase is “a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency.” These much more detailed plans are confidential.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Because, obviously, you want as little of it to be FOIA-able, if you’re familiar with the FOIA process, as possible. Freedom of Information Act, yeah.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Freedom of Information Act, yeah.

NARRATOR: The Freedom of Information Act allows the public to request government communications. But Meadowcroft reveals they plan to avoid these rules.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yeah, the goal is to familiarize all the transition team people with these plans.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: But you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails, because then, you know…

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Right.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: You know, you could just give the handbooks to everyone, be like, “This is the game plan for the admin.”

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: If the press knows that that’s what you’re doing, then they’re going to immediately just say, like, “I request all of your emails from Heritage.”

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yeah, you government worker.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: I see.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: So, we’ll see how that goes.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: How interesting.

NARRATOR: Meadowcroft offers to set up a meeting with his boss, Russ Vought.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: You could, like, put me in touch with somebody who looks after his diary or whatever?

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yes, I can put you in touch with his scheduler, yeah.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Amazing.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: So, yeah.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Great.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yeah, so just tell me when to do that.

NARRATOR: We want to meet the man writing the game plan for Trump’s second administration. Vought believes that in his first term Trump’s agenda was frustrated by what he calls the “deep state.” So Vought is planning a radical centralization of government power under the president, firing civil servants and ending the independence of agencies like the FBI and DOJ.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their — an agency’s notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.

NARRATOR: Vought has also been preparing documents based on fringe legal theories, arguing the president has the power to use the military against protesters.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: You know, George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Right.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military. And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.

NARRATOR: With loyalists installed in key government agencies and armed with his playbook, Vought believes a radical Christian nationalist agenda can be realized under a second Trump presidency. For example, on abortion.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So, I think the president has actually come up with a strategy that works, so long as you are giving people like me in the government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research. So, what I’ve told people is, he had the most pro-life record ever. I’ve never seen him take — to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real politically and with momentum.

NARRATOR: And for Vought, Trump’s pick for vice president shows he’s serious about pushing this ideological agenda when in power.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So I am very happy with the JD pick. I think it’s transformative, for sure. And he’s — you know, think of him as a member version of what we do.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So, there’s no think tank, no policy organization, no battle plan creator other than us for the worldview that I think Donald Trump has and that JD has.

NARRATOR: But as public backlash against these plans builds, the Trump campaign has been scrambling to distance themselves from Project 2025’s authors.

CHRIS LACIVITA: It’s complete and utter bull [bleep] for any reporter to write that this is the way it is. … The president has made it clear, these people do not speak for him, they do not speak for the campaign.

NARRATOR: But Vought tells us that behind the scenes, things are much friendlier. The Trump campaign recently picked him to write the Republicans’ policy platform, making him essentially Project 2025’s man on the inside.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I think the best example is like the campaign selecting me to be the platform because of their views on my policy ideas, and they’re not running from all the negativity that I get from the press.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: I see. So they haven’t been spooked on you as a person, you don’t think?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: No. I mean, no. I don’t think I’m going to be their transition pick, because then they have all these kinds of stories.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: But, no, the relationship is great.

NARRATOR: The head of the Trump transition team has not yet been appointed, but Vought says that no matter who is named, he’ll be able to hand over his Project 2025 battle plans directly.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: If it’s someone like Stephen Miller or Bob Lighthizer, then all this stuff gets plugged right in. If it’s not, we’ll figure it out.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: But all of it will be designed for a theory of the case that president — if a battle plan is out there that will do what he wants, there are the people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at. Or, I could be at Center for Renewing America, but the relationships will be there, the trust level will be there.

NARRATOR: Project 2025’s radical phase one policy book turned into a PR disaster.

KAITLAN COLLINS: The director of Project 2025 has stepped down after facing criticism from both Democrats and the Trump campaign.

NARRATOR: But Vought’s phase two battle plans, top secret and handed directly to the transition team, remain unburdened by the brand.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: And are you going to, like, rebrand that second phase at all?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: For what I do, the brand is not important.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: And you’re not worried that if it has Project 2025 on, he’s going to go, like…

RUSSELL VOUGHT: No.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: And you’re not going to publish those?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: No, no.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: They go straight to…

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Yeah, they’re very, very close hold.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Brilliant. Brilliant. It’s been an education.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah, thank you so much.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Anytime.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Thank you very much. You can show yourself out, I guess.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the full video report that accompanies a major new investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting. It’s called “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive 'second phase' and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

For more, we’re joined by Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting. He is joining us via audio only from the West Midlands in the U.K. because he’s an undercover journalist and needs to remain anonymous for his work.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Lawrence. If you can start off by talking about the significance of what you found and more on who Vought is and their response?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Hi, Amy, and thanks for having me.

Yeah, I think, for us, the investigation really crystallized around the time that you started to see these big disavowals from the Trump campaign on Project 2025. Previously, it kind of seemed like an unspoken kind of collaboration almost, where Trump went to the Heritage Foundation in the month that they launched Project 2025 and seemed to sort of give it his blessing. Obviously, then it became this huge political issue, very unpopular proposals in the big policy book that they produced. And recently you’ve seen Trump’s campaign managers really, as you saw in the film, really aggressively attacking Project 2025. But our kind of hypothesis was that that was kind of window dressing and actually the relationships are there.

And so, we went undercover, and, you know, that was borne out by our investigation, that there’s this secretive second phase of Project 2025 that Russ Vought is overseeing as a pipeline of 350 detailed blueprints, that’s executive orders, secretarial memos, all designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one. They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around, and they’re really able to sort of upend the way in which the United States is governed.

There are some, like, specifically shocking findings of the investigation in terms of the policy proposals that are put forward. And these are kind of things that are in the book, but which, when you kind of speak about them in detail, become kind of all the more important from a kind of public interest perspective. And that’s largely around the way in which he talked about the mass deportations that they want to carry out, and which is actually in the GOP platform, which the Trump campaign actually asked Mr. Vought to oversee. So, the largest deportation in history, as he calls it, has kind of come from the conservative movement via Project 2025. It’s also a key campaign promise of the Trump campaign. And he talked about the deportations, which are these mass — like, millions of people being deported, as a way in which to achieve a goal, which is to end multiculturalism in the United States. We asked him, you know, “What’s going to happen when there’s protests against that?” And he said, “Well, we’ve been preparing kind of legal arguments for bringing in the military to quell protest by U.S. citizens.”

So, those are a few of the findings that we thought were most important. But, obviously, overall, you’ve got this kind of quite radical agenda, and then you’ve got a man who’s very much on the inside of Trump world who is kind of very adept at getting things done and kind of said he can get these plans directly into the hands of Donald Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: And why you, a British news organization, the Centre for Climate Reporting, why you’re so interested in Project 2025, and why you felt, your team felt it was essential to be undercover, as you continue to, even you, as head of the organization, not wanting to show your face?

LAWRENCE CARTER: So, yeah, we’re a global organization. Like, we’re registered in the U.K., but we’ve got reporters in New York, Berlin and London. And this really was part of a project that we’ve started a few months ago looking at populist movements around the world. And this investigation actually started by looking at the populist movements in Europe. There’s just been some big European elections, and the populist parties in Europe have really kind of come to power and have kind of gotten much more influence in the European Union at the moment. And so our investigation actually started there. But these are international movements. There’s huge transatlantic links. And so, the leads that we were following from Europe actually led to Washington, D.C., and Project 2025. And it’s at that point that it became — the project has become more focused on Project 2025.

Now, in terms of the undercover aspect, you know, undercover has got a very long and respected history, actually, including in the U.S. You know, you can go back to the Golden Age of investigative journalism with Nellie Bly, who went undercover in a New York sanatorium to expose the brutal conditions there. More recently, Shane Bauer from Mother Jones went undercover a max-security prison to expose the conditions there. You know, even CNN has done undercover reporting in recent years, a brilliant report on people smuggling in Nigeria. Sometimes it’s the only way to get the story.

And that was the case here. You know, they’re going to great lengths to keep this aspect of Project 2025 secret. You know, you could see from Micah Meadowcroft’s comments that they don’t want the American public to see what they’re doing. That’s why they’re trying to — they’re avoiding work emails, for example, in how they intend to distribute these plans. And so, sometimes, you know, you could get a whistleblower maybe. But kind of in this case, we felt that going undercover was the only way in which we were going to get this story. And so, we weighted out the kind of — the public interest arguments in favor of doing so with the kind of — you know, the reasonable expectation of privacy that an individual has. And in this case, we felt that there was an overwhelming public interest in going undercover and kind of revealing the way in which a kind of largely dark money-funded network of organizations, with kind of quite radical plans that are unpopular, if you poll them, are seeking to end that into the agenda.

And why is a climate organization doing all this? Well, you know, the fossil fuel industry is kind of, obviously, a major focus of investigative organizations like mine that work on climate. But if you look at, actually, the sort of key threats to much-needed kind of action on climate change, the rise of the populist right around the world is just as important, in our view. And so, that kind of was the genesis of this project, where we start kind of looking at those movements and the threat that they pose.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your response to the statement issued Thursday by Russell Vought’s nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, which downplayed your undercover video and said it didn’t reveal anything new. Spokesperson Rachel Cauley said, quote, “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,” she said. Your response, Lawrence Carter?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Yeah, they would say that, wouldn’t they? It’s clear from the recordings that they are actively seeking to keep this stuff secret. So, again, going back to the comments from their research director, Micah Meadowcroft, they don’t want people to know what’s in these plans. They don’t want them to know what they’re working on.

And so, what we found was, A, that, you know, that they’re seeking to keep it secret from the American public ahead of the election. They don’t want people to see this before they vote. But, crucially, the actual details of how they’re going to go about doing these things, you know, we now know that there’s 350 documents. Micah Meadowcroft said there’s a big stack of them waiting to be handed into transition teams.

The other crucial thing that we’ve kind of established, which is kind of very much not what they’re saying publicly, is that there’s this very strong relationship with both the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself. You know, Project 2025 has insisted it’s separate from the Trump operation. The Trump campaign has disavowed Project 2025. But here we have Russell Vought. He oversaw the GOP platform. He’s a former Trump Cabinet member. He told us he speaks with Trump regularly. He’s writing the party platform for this year’s election whilst at the same time overseeing this kind of pipeline of documents, blueprints for the next administration as part of Project 2025. And that’s certainly not something that they would talk about in public. So, yeah —

AMY GOODMAN: Very interesting that —

LAWRENCE CARTER: — my kind of response — yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, has this new book coming out, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, with a foreword by none other than President Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance. Politico writes, JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has written the foreword to the forthcoming book. In March, Roberts told Politico Senator Vance was, quote, “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.” After Vance was named as Trump’s running mate, Roberts said the Heritage Foundation had been privately, quote, “really rooting” for him to be the pick, even though Trump’s campaign, of course, has disavowed any connection to Project 2025. Lawrence?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Yeah, I mean, that was kind of also borne out by our conversations with Russell Vought and Micah Meadowcroft. You know, they’re very excited about the JD Vance pick, and it’s because they see him as one of them. And so, yeah, they’ve got — like, Vought’s got a very good relationship with Trump. He’s got a great relationship with the Trump campaign. You know, he’s been actively collaborating with the Trump campaign on — and media heads, for example, which the Trump campaign sought — in which the Trump campaign sought to convey what a second Trump term would look like. They had Russell Vought speak to the media for them to articulate that. And he spoke to Time magazine, for example, about his work on Project 2025. So, the fact that those Trump relationships are already there, but then you have, you know, the JD Vance pick. He’s literally one of them, as far as they see it, and they’re excited about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And the views of Project 2025 when it comes to, and Vought’s views, on abortion, on marriage equality, Lawrence Carter?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Yeah, so, again, the findings were that, for example, on abortion, they saw that — their goal is ultimately a national ban. But they’re very — they’re pragmatic. Like, Russell Vought is a pragmatic member of Project 2025. And he sees that, in his words, that would mean electoral annihilation for Trump if he committed to that. So, actually, their strategy is to kind of go after abortion by kind of more executive powers, like, for example, if he was reappointed to the Office for Management and Budget, blocking funding for Planned Parenthood.

Again, like, he talked about marriage equality in terms of this is kind of a fight that we need to start having, but it’s one that they’re further behind in compared to abortion. But the goal, again, is to kind of end marriage equality. Similarly, kind of they’re pursuing various strategies to try and ban pornography.

So, yeah, it’s kind of — it’s quite a kind of radical agenda from their kind of social conservatism point of view, but Russell Vought is certainly on the end of the spectrum of kind of what is politically possible, rather than kind of, I guess, the more Heritage Foundation approach, which is kind of, you know, more absolutist.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Carter, I want to thank you for being with us, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting. We’ll link to your new investigation, “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive 'second phase' and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

Next up, the World Health Organization declares mpox a global public health emergency as the first cases of mpox outside Africa are confirmed. We’ll get an update from Nigeria. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “You’re the Inspiration” by Chicago. Tune in all next week as Democracy Now! does a special two-hour daily broadcast August 19th to the 23rd from the convention, called “Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency.”