webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

howell, mike oversight pjt

===

pol op bogeyman hit man pow mofo pending

ERIK BLKWATER MASS DEPORT

JOK

MILLER MUSK

hacked furry fury china IP bots?

FOIA FUCKERY SCHED F

Following several months of teasing its social media followers, the group announced that it had obtained data from the Heritage Foundation, and had promised, on its X account, to publish the data on July 10.

“they didnt want us posting the heritage hack tomorrow,” vio wrote on their account.

According to the Daily Dot, SiegedSec leaked about 200 gigabytes of data on their Telegram account, containing information from between 2007 and 2022, focusing primarily around the think tank’s news wing, The Daily Signal.

The data includes commenters’ emails and IP addresses, full names, usernames, and passwords, as well as information about those who posted articles on the site.

Cybersecurity expert Jackie Singh, who reviewed the data from the breach, commented on X that she had “identified very embarrassing data within this dataset,” adding, “Why so many Chinese IP addresses?”

IFrame Content

“Sample geolocations from the first 100 IPs (these are sorted ‘low to high’, and many Asia-based netblocks start with the number 1),” Singh added in a thread, following up on the earlier post.

IFrame Content

Singh also noted that some suspicious IP addresses of commenters on the Heritage Foundation’s website appear to have come from individuals abroad, including Kathmandu, Nepal, and Hong Kong.

“This breach can help shine light on who exactly is supporting Heritage, and also encourage people to fight against them even more than before,” vio told LGBTQ Nation.“I believe it’s also worth noting, this could help show the amount of support Heritage has that’s provided by malicious users or bots from China.”

SiegedSec claims the majority of leaked data is “mostly useless” information that it will not be releasing, although vio did tell LGBTQ Nationthat the user data “has many people of interest,” including members of the U.S. House of Representatives, federal government employees, and Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage Foundation.

The hack of Heritage was part of a campaign known as #OpTransRights, which targets groups opposed to transgender rights, including the right-wing channel “Real America’s Voice” and a Minnesota church whose pastor has made anti-transgender comments.

The Heritage Foundation was reportedly targeted for its creation of Project 2025, a plan that seeks to reshape the United States government in the mold of modern-day right-wing regimes, with a unitary executive at the top and party loyalists installed into various federal agencies in place of longtime government employees.

Project 2025’s policy reforms include erasing protections for LGBTQ individuals, banning LGBTQ-related information, especially in schools, and the full erasure of transgender identity.

SiegedSec posted a transcript of a chat, conducted on the messaging app Signal, between “vio” and Mike Howell, the executive director of the Heritage Oversight Project, the think tank’s investigative arm. In that exchange, vio revealed that the hack was done due to SiegedSec’s opposition to Project 2025.

Howell allegedly threatened to expose members of the hacktivist group, saying they had “turned against nature.”

“We are in the process of identifying and outting (sic) members of your group,” Howell wrote. “Reputations and lives will be destroyed. Closeted Furries will be presented to the world for the degenerate perverts they are. You cannot hide. Your means are miniscule (sic) compared to mine. You now can either turn yourself in or you can cooperate.”

He threatened to place members of SiegedSec in jail.

“Are you aware that you won’t be able to wear a furry tiger costume when you’re getting pounded in the ass in the federal prison I put you in next year?” he wrote.

When vio asked if it was okay to share the transcript, Howell allegedly wrote, “Please share widely. I hope the word spreads as fast as the STDs do in your degenerate furry community.”

Howell also said he was contacting the FBI issuing a “2702 order” on vio’s social media.

“You aren’t that sneaky for your line of work,” he wrote, providing a screenshot of SiegedSec’s bitcoin wallet’s transactions.

“omg you learned how to look up the public history of my bitcoin address!!! good job pal im proud of you :D” vio responded.

A Heritage Foundation spokesperson released the following statement to Metro Weeklyin an email:

“The Heritage Foundation was not hacked,” the spokesperson wrote. “An organized group stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of The Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor. The information obtained was limited to usernames, names, email addresses, and incomplete password information of both Heritage and non-Heritage content contributors, as well as article comments and the IP address of the commenter.

“No Heritage systems were breached at any time, and all Heritage databases and websites remain secure, including Project 2025. The data at issue has been taken down, and additional security steps have since been taken as a precaution. The story of a ‘hack’ is a false narrative and exaggeration by a group of criminal trolls trying to get attention.”

The Heritage spokesperson did not address questions sent by Metro Weeklyregarding Howell’s chat with vio or his threats to involve the FBI.

SiegedSec has since posted a message on its Telegram channels that it plans to disband, saying they were doing so “for our own mental health, the stress of mass publicity, and to avoid the eye of the FBI.”

“I’ve been considering quitting cybercrime lately, and the other members have agreed its time to let SiegedSec rest for good,” the message reads.

“In the past, I have tried quitting cybercrime a few times, and I’ve always been unable to fully quit. This time, hopefully I am able to stay away from it for my own wellbeing. We may not be a cybercriminal group anymore, but we will always [be] hackers and always fighting for the rights of others.

“Within the past week, we have posted the last of our breaches every day,” the message concludes. “We hope you enjoy all of it :3 We also have a couple more private breaches that have been sent to journalists, they’ll handle the rest from there. The channel, all leaks, and our community’s chats will remain open. Feel free to join.”

---

MMA

...A group of Trump allies have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to encourage the administration not to back away from its deportation push. The coalition — which includes the Oversight Project’s Mike Howell, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, former Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan, and conservative groups including The Heritage Foundation — released a playbook urging the White House to continue raiding work sites and deporting migrant workers despite pushback from voters. Politico, [4/1/26]

...

---

pro pub

Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

The Heritage team filed these requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 was promoting a controversial plan to remove job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be identified and fired if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.

All three men who filed the requests — Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski — did so on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, an arm of the conservative group that uses FOIA, lawsuits and undercover videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to call attention to efforts by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to teach staff about gender diversity, which Fox News characterized as the “Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policies within the Department of Defense.” Heritage also used material gathered from a FOIA search to claim that a listening session the Justice Department held with voting rights activists constituted an attempt to “rig” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.

An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Among 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Department of the Interior over the past year are 161 that seek civil servants’ emails and texts as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained terms including “climate change”; “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion; and “GOTV,” an acronym for get out the vote. Many of these FOIAs request the messages of individual employees by name.

Trump has made clear his intentions to overhaul the Department of the Interior, which protects the nation’s natural resources, including hundreds of millions of acres of land. Under President Joe Biden, the department has made tackling climate change a priority.

Hundreds of the requests asked for government employees’ communications with civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; the Native American Rights Fund; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other FOIAs sought communications that mention “Trump” and “Reduction in Force,” a term that refers to layoffs.

Several requests, including some sent to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focus on personnel. Some ask for “all employees who entered into a position at the agency as a Political Appointee since January 20, 2021,” the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other FOIAs seek agencies’ “hierarchy charts.”

“It does ring some alarm bells as to whether this is part of an effort to either intimidate government employees or, ultimately, to fire them and replace them with people who are going to be loyal to a leader that they may prefer,” Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said of the FOIAs.

Asked whether the project gathered the records to facilitate the firing of government workers, Howell said, “Our work is meant to just figure out who the decision-makers are.” He added that his group isn’t focused on simply identifying particular career employees. “It’s more about what the bureaucrats are doing, not who the bureaucrats are,” he said.

Howell said he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Oversight Project. Aamot requested questions in writing, but did not respond further. Jankowski did not reply to a request for comment.

Bookbinder also pointed out that inundating agencies with requests can interfere with the government’s ability to function. “It’s OK to make FOIA requests,” said Bookbinder, who acknowledged that CREW has also submitted its share of requests. “But if you purposely overwhelm the system, you can both cause slower response to FOIAs … and you can gum up other government functions.”

Indeed, a government worker who processes FOIAs for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job. “Sometimes they come in at a rate of one a second,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The worker said they now spend a third of their work time processing requests from Heritage, including some that seek communications that mention the terms “Biden” and “mental” or “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” or “defecate” or “poop.”

“They’re taking time away from FOIA requesters that have legitimate requests,” said the worker. “We have to search people’s accounts for poop. This isn’t a thing. I can’t imagine a real reporter putting in a request like that.”

Asked about the comment, Howell said: “I’m paying them, so they should do their damn job and turn over the documents. Their job is not to decide what they think is worth, you know, releasing or not.” He added that “we’re better journalists by any standard than The New York Times.”

Project 2025, which is led by Heritage, became politically toxic — with Trump disavowing the endeavor and Kamala Harris seeking to tie her opponent to the plan — in part for proposing to identify and fire as many as 50,000 career government employees who are deemed “nonperforming” by a future Trump administration. Trump attempted to do this at the end of his first term, issuing an executive order known as “Schedule F” that would have allowed his administration to reclassify thousands of civil servants, making them easier to fire and replace. Biden then repealed it.

Project 2025’s 887-page policy blueprint proposes that the next conservative president reissue that “Schedule F” executive order. That would mean a future Trump administration would have the ability to replace tens of thousands of career government employees with new staffers of their choosing.

To fill those vacancies, as ProPublica has reported, Project 2025 has also recruited, vetted and trained future government employees for a Republican administration. In one training video obtained by ProPublica, a former Trump White House official named Dan Huff says that future government staffers should prepare to enact drastic policy changes if they join the administration.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

Howell, the head of the Oversight Project and one of the FOIA filers, is a featured speaker in one of Project 2025’s training videos, in which he and two other veteran government investigators discuss different forms of government oversight, such as FOIA requests, inspector general investigations and congressional probes. Another speaker in the video, Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation, offers advice to prospective government employees in a conservative administration about how to avoid having sensitive or embarrassing emails obtained under the FOIA law — the very strategy that the Oversight Project is now using with the Biden administration.

“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” Jones says.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

The records requests are far reaching, seeking “full calendar exports” for hundreds of government employees. One FOIA submitted by Aamot sought the complete browser history for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, “whether exported from Chrome, Safari, Windows Explorer, Mozilla.” The most frequent of the three requesters, Aamot, whose online bio describes him as a former psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command, submitted some FOIAs on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and others for the Daily Signal. The publication spun off from the Heritage Foundation in June, according to an announcement on the think tank’s website, but another page on the site still seeks donations for both the foundation and the Daily Signal.

ProPublica obtained the Department of Interior requests as well as tallies of FOIAs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Health Resources and Services Administration through its own public records requests.

Several of the Heritage Foundation’s requests focus on gender, asking for materials federal agencies presented to employees or contractors “mentioning ‘DEI’, ‘Transgender’, ‘Equity’, or ‘Pronouns.’” Aamot sent similar requests to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget, Americorps and the Chemical Safety Board, among other agencies. Howell said he believes that the group has uncovered evidence that “unpopular and just frankly sexually creepy and sexually disordered ideas are now being translated into government jargon, speak, policies, procedures and guidance documents.”

Heritage’s FOIA blitz has even sought information about what government employees are saying about Heritage and its employees, including the three men filing the thousands of FOIAs. One request sent to the Interior Department asks for any documents to and from the agency’s chief FOIA officer that mention Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, as well as the names of Aamot, Howell and Jankowski.

Irena Hwang contributed data analysis. Kirsten Berg contributed research.

Filed under —

[

Sharon Lerner

Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment. Previously, as an investigative reporter at The Intercept, she focused on failures of the environmental regulatory process as well as biosafety and pandemic profiteering.

[

Andy Kroll

Andy Kroll is a ProPublica reporter covering voting, elections and other democracy issues.

---

Oversight Project Files Lawsuit for DOJ Documents, Communications on Protests Outside Supreme Court Justices’ Homes

Oct 13, 2022 2 min read

WASHINGTON—The Oversight Project announced Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the agency’s failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted earlier this year. The requests sought documents and communications regarding the recent intimidatory protests carried out by radical abortion supporters outside the homes of Supreme Court justices in the wake of the leaked Dobbs draft decision and later the court’s official ruling in the case.

The Oversight Project specially focused on 18 U.S.C. § 1507, a statue which bars certain protests at courthouses and justices’ residences designed to influence their decisions. Individuals have been prosecuted under Section 1507 as recently as several years ago, when the statue was used against protestors who disrupted Supreme Court oral arguments.

The Oversight Project requested records from various offices within the Department of Justice, including the Office of the Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

Following the leak of the draft decision, radical abortion supporters appear to have violated state and federal law by protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, with Maryland police even arresting a man who claimed he was going to attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Administration officials failed to publicly condemn the behavior for days, and still have not prosecuted those who seem to have broken the law.

The Oversight Project requested documents and communications from the DOJ earlier this year. The initial request was ignored by the Biden administration, in violation of the FOIA statute. Plaintiffs filed another request. The department repeatedly missed deadlines on that request, as well. However, they did grant the request “expedited processing,” meaning it is entitled to faster processing than most “regular” requests. Despite this, the Oversight Project has heard nothing from DOJ about either request for well over a month.

Roman Jankowski, senior investigative counsel for the Oversight Project, released the following statement upon filing of the lawsuit:

“The Biden DOJ’s silence on these radical protests and obviously intimidating tactics was, and remains to be, deafening. The American people deserve to know why Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland not only refused to publicly and unequivocally condemn this behavior, but also why they continue not to prosecute or hold accountable those who facially broke the law in an attempt to influence the proceedings of the Supreme Court. We think there are answers to those questions in the documents we have requested, and we have a right by law to those documents.”

To see what these radical protests looked like, check out the Daily Signal’s exclusive coverage here.

Read the Oversight Project’s lawsuit here.

---

comm dr

Group Behind Project 2025 Already Claiming Election Interference by Biden

The Heritage Foundation is "stoking irresponsible inflammatory fear of election fraud," said one journalist.

Julia Conley

Jul 13, 2024

One election law expert warned this week that the right-wing Heritage Foundation is already baselessly claiming that President Joe Biden is likely to respond to the voting results as his predecessor, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, did in 2020: by refusing to accept the will of American voters.

"This is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence," Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles,toldHuffPost Friday.

The Heritage Foundation, the think tank that has spearheaded the drafting of Project 2025—a policy agenda threatening mass deportation and immigrant detention, the dismantling of federal agencies, and the consolidation of power with the president should Trump win a second term—said in a report released Thursday that Biden may try to continue his presidency "by force" even if he loses in November.

The claim has no basis in statements made by Biden, who has said he will accept the election results.

In May, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that Biden "will accept the will of the American people." Trump has not made the same commitment.

Nevertheless, the Heritage Foundation report went on to say that "the lawlessness of the Biden administration—at the border, in staffing considerations, and in routine defiance of court rulings—makes clear that the current president and his administration not only possesses the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president."

Mike Howell, executive director of the group's Oversight Project, saidat a press conference that "as things stand right now, there is a 0% chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America... I'm formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election."

"This is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence."

Such comments show, saidNew York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, that "these people are the insurrectionists. Or election terrorists."

Howell's comments echoed Trump's baseless warningsahead of the 2020 election that voting would be "rigged" by widespread use of mail-in ballots amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump relentlessly attacked voting by mail despite admitting that he had used mail-in ballots to vote in numerous elections.

The Heritage Foundation has conducted "role-playing exercises" that it says show "left-wing efforts to interfere with the election" are possible in 2024, HuffPostreported.

The report said voters should "reflexively disbelieve and challenge the intelligence community's allegations regarding Trump, foreign interference, and Republican efforts to legally win the White House."

Hasen told HuffPost that the group appeared to be trying to create doubt among the electorate about institutions that "give voters truthful information they need to evaluate evidence before them."

Journalist Jane Mayer said the group was "stoking irresponsible inflammatory fear of election fraud."

Political scientist Don Moynihan of Georgetown University added that the Heritage Foundation's baseless accusations against Biden likely preview how the Trump campaign could respond to the election results if he loses, four years after the former president urged his supporters to violently attempt to stop the certification of Biden's victory.

"The end game is to allow men in suits finish what the January 6th rioters started," he said.

===

an oct 4 2024

The voter registration groups helping new prospective voters navigate the bureaucracy of adding their names to the voter rolls are now having to contend with conservative activists harassing them.

That's according to a Friday report in the New York Times, which focused on how Latino voter registration in Arizona is being complicated by the far right ahead of the 2024 election. The Times reported that the Heritage Foundation — which is the organization behind the controversial Project 2025 authoritarian policy blueprint — is now deputizing conservatives to follow and film people helping Hispanic residents of swing states get registered ahead of the November election.

Hector Sanchez-Barba is the executive director of the group Mi Familia en Acción, which is on the ground in eight states including battleground states like Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. He told the Times that he's seen "a lot of intimidation on the front lines."

READ MORE:Project 2025 leader was hoping for Vance VP pick — and got his way

“My canvassers have been filmed, they’ve been yelled at,” Sanchez Barba said. “They’re just coming after us.”

Elsewhere around the country, advocacy groups have also been subjected to intimidation tactics when conducting outreach to Spanish-speaking communities. Latino Community Fund Georgia executive director Gigi Pedraza remarked that one incident in the Atlanta, Georgia area seemed "ethnically motivated" after a conservative activist filmed three women with voter registration forms outside of a butcher shop and spread it with the caption: "ILLEGALS BEING RECRUITED TO REGISTER TO VOTE."

“They were just sitting with the forms,” Pedraza told the Times. “You cannot register anyone to vote who’s not a citizen.”

The incidents may not be isolated, but rather part of a larger, well-funded effort headed by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. Times reporter Jack Healy wrote that Heritage "has sent teams with hidden cameras posing as voter-outreach workers groups into apartment complexes in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia to ask the mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants there if they were citizens and registered to vote."

READ MORE:[Revealed: JD Vance once praised Project 2025 org's anti-woman essays as 'admirable'

Conservatives have seized on the videos — which show some of the apartment residents telling Heritage's undercover videographers that they are registered to vote while not being U.S. citizens — to justify false claims that undocumented immigrants are being added to voter rolls in major battleground states. The people who were surreptitiously filmed have since said they misspoke and that they were not actually registered voters.

"[The videos show] somebody admitting on camera to a crime. It’s basically the best evidence that you can get," Oversight Project executive director Mike Howell told Healy.

However, the Times reported that in Georgia, election officials say there is no evidence of any non-citizens being added to the Peach State's database of registered voters. Now, groups like Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA (Spanish for "struggle) are training their organizers in de-escalation tactics in the event they're confronted by conservative activists.

"Canvassers are out there doing really hard work, and to be harassed and accosted by people believing these conspiracies — it’s just disappointing. They’re just doing their job," LUCHA spokesman César Fierros said.

READ MORE:[Trump again denies Project 2025 — despite Vance writing foreword for chief architect's book

===

===

an july 24

Election law expert and Democracy Docket publisher Marc Elias has been warning that if President Joe Biden or another Democratic candidate wins the 2024 election, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and his allies will do everything they can to overturn the election results — only they will be better equipped this year than in 2020.

Now, the Heritage Foundation is claiming, without evidence, that Democrats are planning to steal the election.

The Washington Post's Isaac Arnsdorf reports that Heritage made that claim during a "war game" presentation at their headquarters on Thursday, July 11.

READ MORE: Christian nationalist behind MAGA’s Project 2025 blasted for 'threatening violence'

"Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas, Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility, the FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election — these were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased on Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation," Arnsdorf explains. "The presentation, delivered at the Foundation's Washington headquarters, stated as a given that the Biden Administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence."

Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage's Oversight Project, claimed, "As things stand right now, there's a zero percent chance of a free and fair election. I'm formally accusing the Biden Administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election."

Arnsdorf notes that the July 11 simulation, billed as the "2024 Transition Integrity Project," is "technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees."

Heritage has recently been drawing a great deal of scrutiny over Project 2025, its 900-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. The proposals range from severe abortion restrictions to giving the U.S. federal government's executive branch considerably more power, and Project 2025 is so controversial that even Trump himself is trying to distance himself from it.

READ MORE:['Toxic': Experts mock Trump’s sudden and strident Project 2025 denial

Kevin Roberts, the far-right Chrisitan nationalist who heads the Heritage Foundation, is also being criticized for some recent remarks that his detractors say were promoting violence.

During an appearance on Real America's Voice, Roberts said, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

In response, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argued, on X (formerly Twitter), "The author of Project 2025 is calling for revolution and suggesting bloodshed if liberals dare oppose them."

Conservative/libertarian former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Virginia) warned, "Kevin Roberts is threatening violence to anyone not following his dear leader. Every network should cover this. All of this happening while Dems whinge and play new candidate lotto."

READ MORE:Beware: Trump is Project 2025 — and he cannot escape it

*Read the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

===

---

DIRTY TRICKS

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/democratic-strategists-launch-war-room-00065498

group of top Democratic strategists are launching a multi-million-dollar hub to counter an expected investigative onslaught by the likely incoming House GOP majority — digging into President Joe Biden, his administration and his son, on top of potential Cabinet impeachments.

The newly relaunchedCongressional Integrity Project initiative, details of which were shared first with POLITICO, will include rapid response teams, investigative researchers, pollsters and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” founder Kyle Herrig said in an interview.

It’s designed to serve as the party’s “leading war room” to push back on House Republican investigations, Herrig said in an interview. He added that the project would “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans." [vid]

a team of researchers has already begun scouring public records, press clippings and other documents in a bid to immediately undercut House GOP leaders, from Minority Leader — now speakership hopeful — Kevin McCarthy to the likely committee chairs expected to manage probes of Biden and his network.

The House GOP views investigations as a key piece of its agenda for the next Congress once it takes the narrow majority that’s now expected, particularly as much of its legislative wish list is on track to stall thanks to the Senate filibuster and Democratic president. McCarthy has privately talked with committee chairs-in-waiting to coordinate plans, making the swift launch of the outside-group pushback plan a potential godsend to Democrats.

Democratic leadership on the Hill has been briefed about the project’s relaunch, according to a person familiar with its plans.

Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist who is part of the project’s new leadership team, called the House GOP’s looming investigations a “vendetta” after two impeachments of and investigations into former President Donald Trump while Democrats controlled Congress, including the bipartisan select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The project “will exploit every tactic available,” Woodhouse said, adding: “It’s not enough to wait and see what they’re going to do and how far they’re going to go.”

Republicans wouldn’t formally take the House until January, but its leaders are already vowing to cut a broad investigative swath. As McCarthy put it during his conference’s recent agenda rollout: “Every committee has responsibilities for oversight.”

“They’ve virtually outlined no substantive agenda for governing,” Herrig said of House Republicans. “This is what they’re going to do ... so you really need a concentrated effort that’s doing this every day.”

In addition to Herrig and Woodhouse, the project’s leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades, served in the Obama administration and advised the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

In a sign of the important role the initiative will play over the next two years — and its proximity to the White House — other senior advisers include Jeff Peck, a former Biden aide during the president’s time in the Senate who served as treasurer and vice chair of the Biden Foundation as well as a senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition.

The Congressional Integrity Project leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Protect Our Care

For the final two years of Biden’s term, Republicans will be aided in their oversight push by a coalition of outside conservative research groups that have already mapped out potential targets and started digging into issues ranging from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to immigration policy.

And GOP lawmakers have left their own investigative breadcrumbs that make it clear where they intend to go. Likely Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the Hunter Biden investigation, with Republicans already preparing to elevate the probe to Joe Biden although no evidence has publicly emerged that his decisions were affected by his son’s business dealings. Comer recently told POLITICO that he and likely Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would provide a public update this week.

Jordan, meanwhile, is preparing to use the gavel he’s poised to take for conduct a sweeping investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, two frequent targets of Trump’s ire. That probe is likely to touch on everything from the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to tracking threats against local school officials, which the GOP slams as an effort to target parents despite denials from the bureau. [vid]

other GOP areas of interest include the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine aid and a coronavirus probe that is likely to sweep up longtime public health adviser Anthony Fauci.

McCarthy and his allies are under pressure from their base and some members of their own conference to pair their investigations with impeachment articles; some in the party are clearly itching for payback after then-President Trump was impeached twice. Though impeaching Biden is likely a heavy lift — and a step that McCarthy isn’t endorsing for now — Republicans see Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a more likely target for attempted removal from office.

congressional Democrats and others close to the administration view Republicans’ vows to investigate Mayorkas’ department and the border as the latest sign that they aren’t serious about trying to pass immigration legislation. And they slam Republican investigative plans writ large as thinly veiled attempts to help Trump, pointing to Jordan’s public remarks earlier this year that characterized GOP probes as helping “frame up the 2024 race.”

The Congressional Integrity Project is also aiming to raise funds for a paid media campaign, including dedicated websites, digital ads, mobile billboards, newspaper ads and, occasionally, TV ad buys. Its public opinion research will be shared with like-minded organizations and congressional allies to contrast GOP investigations with issues the American public cares most about, project leaders said.

Their goal is to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential campaign when Republicans also controlled the House and created a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. That GOP select panel ended up zeroing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to ascend to the Democratic nomination, culminating in an 11-hour grilling of Clinton.

Republicans’ two-year Benghazi investigation spent $7 million in taxpayer money and dogged Clinton on the campaign trail before finally producing an 800-page report that didn’t focus on the former secretary of state.

Then-Majority Leader McCarthy quipped in 2015 to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Benghazi committee had successfully driven down Clinton’s poll numbers. “He took a lot of crap for it, but in the end, it was true” that the investigation hurt Clinton politically, recalled Woodhouse.

Rather, Democrats hope the flood of investigations will lead to a repeat of the 1998 midterm elections, held amid the GOP push to impeach then-President Bill Clinton. Voter backlash against that move helped Democrats defy historical trends in House races that favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House gaining seats.

POLITICO

---

ref

axios

gop Republican congressional aides huddled this month with conservative think-tank leaders on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hone tactics and messaging for Biden administration probes, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.

Details: The retreat was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the American Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work.

The big picture: With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers around high-profile issues such as a southern border immigration surge, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and economic shocks that threaten a U.S. recession.

Behind the scenes: Over two days, congressional aides at the retreat got briefings from prominent conservative activists and organizations on a host of investigative tactics.

What they're saying: "We are pleased we brought together senior staff and leading outside researchers to focus on enhancing oversight skills, particularly since we're expecting increased oversight opportunities in the future," Jones said in an emailed statement.

Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project, t0ld Axios the goal of the event was to ensure congressional staff members are equipped to kick-start investigations as soon as the new Congress is gaveled in.

Between the lines: The event provides a glimpse of where Republicans see potentially fruitful oversight avenues.

Republican oversight won't be confined to federal agencies or the White House, Howell said.

---

0ff bs

mike is the Executive Director of the Heritage Oversight Project. Launched in January 2022, the Oversight Project is Heritage’s investigative and oversight arm. The Oversight Project utilizes Heritage’s world-class issue area experts to inform strategic records requests, targeted litigation, and innovative investigations utilizing cutting-edge resources and contacts. The work is primarily intended to drive successful federal, state, and local oversight and accountability of the destructive work of the radical, progressive Left. Successful oversight means shaping successful policy victories.

Mike joined The Heritage Foundation in October 2018 from the Department of Homeland Security, Office of the General Counsel, where he was the Chief Legal Point of Contact for the department’s 3,000-lawyer office for all congressional oversight and investigations. Prior to joining the Trump administration, he was on Capitol Hill for five years as an attorney for both the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Oversight Committee. During this time, he worked under Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of House Oversight Jason Chaffetz, and Subcommittee for National Security Chairman Ron DeSantis.

While on the Hill, he led national security investigations into various Obama administration controversies, including security failures at the U.S. Secret Service, corruption at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (which resulted in the resignations of two Acting Inspector Generals, on two separate occasions), and the handling of overseas terrorism incidents. Prior to this, he worked in Atlanta Immigration Court, for both Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys and then Immigration Judges from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

At Heritage, Mike previously served as the liaison to the Trump Administration and later as a Senior Advisor for Government Relations in the 117th Congress. He is frequently quoted and writes on matters of immigration, border security, and congressional oversight. He is a graduate of Duke University and Emory Law School and an Alexandria, Virginia native.

===

nyt

no lnx

Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos About Noncitizen Voters

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

Once a staid think tank, the Heritage Foundation has recently made its mark seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Ken BensingerRichard Fausset

By Ken Bensinger and Richard Fausset

Sept. 7, 2024

In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote.

Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote.

Although the two men claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system, they were actually working with the Heritage Foundation and carrying a hidden camera. Days later, the conservative think tank posted a video on the social media platform X containing some of the footage the men had captured, calling it “staggering” evidence that 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia — which Heritage said extrapolated to more than 47,000 people — were registered to vote.

“Based on our findings,” the video concluded, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

The video was reposted by Elon Musk, X’s owner, who called it “extremely disturbing.” It quickly went viral.

But under scrutiny, those claims do not hold up. Three of the seven people Heritage filmed later said they had misspoken. State investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on the tape had ever registered to vote. A spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the video “a stunt.”

It was one of several misleading videos that the Heritage Foundation has pumped into social media feeds this year. While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.

At the center of that effort is the Oversight Project, an arm of Heritage that conducts what it describes as investigations into immigration policy, among other topics. Borrowing from covert tactics used by the group Project Veritas, the Oversight Project has published videos about the supposed threat of migrant voting in shelters on the Texas border, in New York City and in North Carolina.

The project says it is preparing to release investigations of other states, including what its executive director, Mike Howell, recently described in a livestream on X as “a pretty big thing” targeting voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We view our role in this cause as breaking the bombshell news,” said Mr. Howell. The recording of the livestream appears to have been deleted after The New York Times contacted Heritage for this article, and the Oversight Project has so far not posted any videos about alleged noncitizen voting in Virginia.

Image

An open doorway into a room with a table and chairs. A large “Vote” sign in on the table.

An Atlanta polling location in March. There is no evidence to support Heritage’s findings in Georgia, a critical swing state with a large immigrant population.Credit...Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times

Few groups have done more to propel the false, but snowballing, theory that noncitizens are preparing to vote in droves in November, threatening the integrity of the election.

Heritage’s most recent effort, the Georgia video, tallied more than 56 million views, according to X’s statistics, and has become fodder for discussion on dozens of right-wing talk shows and podcasts, as well as on Fox News. The day after it was posted, both Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, released statements, apparently in response to the video, pledging to investigate “specific” claims of voter fraud.

But there is no evidence to support Heritage’s findings in Georgia, a critical swing state with a large immigrant population, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the country.

Voting by noncitizens is illegal in almost all jurisdictions except for a few scattered municipalities that allow residents who are not citizens to vote in local elections. Any noncitizen convicted of trying to vote in a federal election faces stiff fines, prison time and potential deportation.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy group that focuses on voting and criminal justice issues, found that one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of votes in the 2016 election were cast by noncitizens. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has said that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” The Heritage Foundation’s own analysis found just 23 documented cases of noncitizen voting across the country between 2003 and 2023.

Regardless of the evidence, critics say efforts like the Heritage investigation in Georgia could be used by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to try to discredit the election results if he loses.

“The immigrant becomes the boogeyman,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on elections law at U.C.L.A. law school. “It provides a means of delegitimizing Democratic victories and creates a path for challenging them.”

Several election experts derided the Oversight Project’s methodology as deeply flawed. The group’s figures suggest it spoke to a total of 50 people — statistically, a tiny sampling — before coming to a determination that one in seven noncitizen residents of Georgia may be illegally registered to vote.

In an email to The Times last week, Mr. Howell stood by the group’s work in Georgia. “I am not surprised that when an individual admits to a crime on camera that they would later retract it when that video is made public,” he said.

Asked about research — including Heritage’s own data — showing how rare noncitizen voting is, he said: “The monumental number of noncitizens that have poured over our borders since 2021 have made any previous ‘study’ of noncitizens’ voting irrelevant.”

In a July interview on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing podcast network, Mr. Howell said that out of 40 people his investigators spoke to at an apartment complex in Charlotte, N.C., four said they were both registered to vote and not citizens. That led the Oversight Project to conclude that 10 percent of noncitizens in that state were most likely registered to vote.

Mr. Howell claimed the Biden administration was planning to “refuse a peaceful transition of power by relying on illegal aliens to vote for them, and that’s clear as day.”

In Georgia, Mr. Raffensperger's investigation into Heritage’s claims is continuing, according to Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office. Mr. Hassinger said investigators had found no records suggesting that the people who appeared in the video had registered or voted, and “no pending or rejected voter applications from 2024” from the apartment complex.

The state investigators went to the apartment complex and spoke to two of those interviewed by the Oversight Project. One said she purposely gave the men at her door a fake name, and told them what she thought they wanted to hear “to get them away.”

Mr. Hassinger described the Heritage effort as “a stunt,” adding, “There’s no better word for it.”

The Times also spoke with a woman interviewed in the video. The woman, an immigrant from Honduras who asked that she be identified only by her first name, Marta, because she feared being deported, confirmed to the Times that she was not registered to vote and had never tried to register in the nine years that she had lived in the United States.

She had been surprised to see two strangers appear at her door and feared that if she told them the truth — that she was not registered to vote — they might try to register her and ask her to sign documents, potentially putting her at risk with immigration authorities.

Marta said that she had no idea she was being filmed until she was shown the video online and that the two men did not ask for her full name or address. “I just wanted them to go away,” she said.

The woman was first identified by Lead Stories, a private fact-checking group hired by social media platforms to verify content. The group also tracked down two other women who were shown in the video. Both denied having registered to vote.

On social media, the Oversight Project said it had tried to locate the seven people on state voter rolls but was “unable to find them,” adding that “non-citizens have shoddy address history records and often use fake documents and names.”

Founded in 1973, Heritage was long known as a policy shop, focused on promoting conservative, pro-business policies in Washington. In recent years, it has taken a sharp turn under the leadership of Kevin Roberts, an academic who said his goal for Heritage was “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

Mr. Roberts started the Oversight Project just a few months after arriving at Heritage, asking it to provide “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration and “institutional support” to the conservative movement.

The Oversight Project partnered with an outside group, Muckraker, to produce both the Georgia and North Carolina videos. In April, they also teamed up to produce a video about a flier encouraging migrants to vote for President Biden. The groups said the paper was found in a shelter in Matamoros, Mexico, but the founder of the shelter denied being behind it. She said she had received death threats after the video was posted.

In March, the two groups used a hidden camera to film employees of a migrant aid group, La Jornada, that was providing documentation they said could enable noncitizens to register to vote. The executive director of that organization, which is based in Queens, N.Y., later said the document they had provided was not identification that could be used to register to vote.

Anthony Rubin, the founder of Muckraker, in a recent interview on InfoWars, the conspiracy spreading podcast hosted by Alex Jones, said that “anybody who claims this isn’t happening, they’re just burying their head in the sand.”

In March 2022, Mr. Raffensperger announced the results of a statewide audit that determined that 1,634 noncitizens had tried to register to vote among all of Georgia’s registered voters at the time, and had been blocked from doing so by existing state verification procedures. He also noted that none of them had cast ballots.

“So, my fellow Georgians asked me, ‘Are noncitizens voting in Georgia?’” Mr. Raffensperger said in May on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I can say, ‘No, they aren’t,’ because we’ve checked it.”

Ken Bensinger covers right wing media and national political campaigns for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger

Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. More about Richard Fausset

===

Project 2025's Pro-Corruption & Anti-Democracy Agenda - Public Citizen

Project 2025’s Pro-Corruption & Anti-Democracy Agenda
By Jon Golinger, Democracy Advocate
INTRODUCTION

The Heritage Foundation led the creation of Project 2025, a policy agenda and implementation playbook for a right-wing presidential administration. Project 2025’s plans are outlined in the 920 page “Mandate For Leadership” briefing book and a series of 23 policy seminars and training videos created by the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 leaders as a “Masterclass” for a “Presidential Administration Academy.”

A careful review of Project 2025’s plans reveals, among other things, a series of pro-corruption, anti-democracy schemes to fire independent Inspectors General, rollback voting rights, gut anti-corruption law enforcement, replace qualified experts with political cronies, and weaponize the Department of Justice to target local officials and election administrators for partisan political reasons.

Cover of Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” policy documentScreenshot from Project 2025 “Presidential Administration Academy” video

I. Project 2025 Would Eliminate Independent Government Oversight and Accountability

a. Fire Independent Inspectors General

b. Terminate public corruption investigations

c. Replace Qualified Experts with Political Cronies

===

ggl 10 24

[### Mike Howell

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › staff › mike-howell](https://www.heritage.org/staff/mike-howell)

Mike is the Executive Director of the Heritage Oversight Project. Launched in January 2022, the Oversight Project is Heritage's investigative and oversight arm.

[### Project 2025 co-author spotted in photo with friend in drag

Advocate.com

https://www.advocate.com › news › mike-howell-herita...](https://www.advocate.com/news/mike-howell-heritage-drag-photo)

Jul 26, 2024 — A younger Mike Howell, Heritage's executive director of the Oversight Project, smiling alongside a friend in full drag attire.

[### Mike Howell (@MHowellTweets) / ...

X · MHowellTweets

14.4K+ followers](https://twitter.com/mhowelltweets?lang=en)

Americans are right to view with suspicion the taxpayer funded efforts to get out the international vote in concert with partisan politics Here, the @PeaceCorps ...

[### Project 2025 co-author Mike Howell accused of hypocrisy ...

Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › project-2025-co-auth...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/project-2025-co-author-mike-142446206.html)

Jul 26, 2024 — Howell has condemned drag before. He confirmed to The Advocate that the photo is authentic.

[### Project 2025, Explained

American Civil Liberties Union

https://www.aclu.org › project-2025-explained](https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained)

Learn more about the Heritage Project initiative that threatens to erode our democracy — and how to fight it at ACLU.org.

[### Heritage Foundation Staffers Flood Federal Agencies With ...

ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org › article › have-governmen...](https://www.propublica.org/article/have-government-employees-mentioned-climate-change-voting-or-gender-identity-the-heritage-foundation-wants-to-know)

Oct 1, 2024 — The conservative think tank's requests are clogging the pipeline at federal agencies in an apparent attempt to find employees a potential ...

[### Project 2025's Pro-Corruption & Anti-Democracy Agenda

Public Citizen

https://www.citizen.org › Articles](https://www.citizen.org/article/project-2025s-pro-corruption-anti-democracy-agenda/)

Sep 9, 2024 — ... Mike Howell, Heritage Foundation [4]. b. Terminate public corruption investigations. Project 2025 says the President should direct a political ...

[### Group Behind Project 2025 Already Claiming Election ...

Common Dreams

https://www.commondreams.org › news › the-heritage-...](https://www.commondreams.org/news/the-heritage-foundation-project-2025)

Jul 13, 2024 — The right-wing Heritage Foundation is already baselessly claiming that President Joe Biden is likely to respond to the voting results as his predecessor.

[### Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos About ...

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2024-campaign-immigration.html)

Sep 7, 2024 — The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state's office ...

[### 3 months ago

YouTube

https://m.youtube.com › post](https://m.youtube.com/post/UgkxPFhMbkrJkSsTNsoJ4aPbZEeGNNHTVOWo)

... MESSAGES BETWEEN Mike Howell(Executive Director of the Heritage Oversight Project/Project 2025) AND Vio(Furry that helped hack proj. 2025). 1/2. 2/2. 29.

---

ggl 8 24 crooks assassin

[### The Oversight Project

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › oversight](https://www.heritage.org/oversight)

Apr 5, 2023 — The Oversight Project works for government that is responsible and accountable to its citizens. We use Freedom of Information Act requests ...

Missing: crooks ‎| Show results with: crooks

[### Heritage Foundation

X

https://x.com › Heritage › status](https://x.com/Heritage/status/1815447620044943422?lang=en)

Jul 22, 2024 — ASSASINATION INFO DROP We found the assassin's connections through our in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks ...

[### Right-Wing Group Makes Questionable Claims About Man ...

Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › wing-group-makes-q...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/wing-group-makes-questionable-claims-200323600.html)

Jul 26, 2024 — The Heritage Foundation used mobile ad data to imply a conspiracy theory about Thomas Crooks, signifying a new era of political groups ...

Free 1-day delivery over $298 · ‎14-day returns

[### Assassination Attempt: An Uncanny Repetition of Political ...

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › commentary › assassination-...](https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/assassination-attempt-uncanny-repetition-political-history)

Jul 18, 2024 — Like all of America, I was shocked to hear about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump—although, unfortunately, ...

Missing: oversight ‎project ‎crooks

[### Trump Assassination Project 2025: Think Tank on the Case

The Daily Dot

https://www.dailydot.com › debug › project-2025-trum...](https://www.dailydot.com/debug/project-2025-trump-assassination-thomas-crooks-cell-phone-dump/)

Jul 26, 2024 — The project also highlighted a device “linked to Crooks” visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts in early March, and a device “linked to Crook's work” ...

[### Bombshell Investigative Report Claims to Link Would-Be ...

MSN

https://www.msn.com › en-us › news › bombshell-inves...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/bombshell-investigative-report-claims-to-link-would-be-trump-assassin-with-fbi-office-in-dc/ar-BB1qu1DQ)

The details remain elusive for now, but the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project ... The Oversight Project said that a “phone linked to Crooks” flew to ...

[### @amuse on X: "The Heritage Foundation's Oversight ...

X

https://x.com › amuse › status](https://x.com/amuse/status/1815489670815580324?lang=en)

Jul 22, 2024 — The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project (@OversightPR) has tracked devices related to Thomas Matthew Crooks' home and work and ...

[### Get to Know the Oversight Project, the Heritage ...

Esquire

https://www.esquire.com › news-politics › politics › ove...](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a61689137/oversight-project-heritage-foundation/)

Jul 24, 2024 — Now, it seems, it has turned its attention to developing “data” indicating that Thomas Crooks did not act alone in his attempt to assassinate ...

[### Heritage Foundation Claims to Use Location Data to Track ...

404 Media

https://www.404media.co › heritage-foundation-claims-t...](https://www.404media.co/heritage-foundation-claims-to-use-location-data-to-track-trump-shooters-movements/)

Jul 23, 2024 — ... Crooks in the lead up to his attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump earlier this month. The organization, which also ...

[### Trump Shooter Mobile Tracking Data Shows Devices ... The Maine Wire

https://www.themainewire.com › News › News](https://www.themainewire.com/2024/07/trump-shooter-mobile-tracking-data-shows-devices-traveling-to-washington-dc-massachusetts/)

Jul 22, 2024 — Analysis of the mobile ad location data, according to the Oversight Project, shows that someone who regularly visited both Crooks' home and ...

=--

ggl 8 24

[### Mike Howell

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › staff › mike-howell](https://www.heritage.org/staff/mike-howell)

Mike is the Executive Director of the Heritage Oversight Project. Launched in January 2022, the Oversight Project is Heritage's investigative and oversight ...

[### Mike Howell - The Heritage Foundation

LinkedIn · Mike Howell

1.4K+ followers](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehowelllaw)

Washington, District of Columbia, United States · The Heritage Foundation

Executive Director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation · Experience: The Heritage Foundation · Education: Emory University School of Law ...

[### Mike Howell (@MHowellTweets) / X

X · MHowellTweets

13.5K+ followers](https://twitter.com/mhowelltweets?lang=en)

NEW: I resigned in protest from Chairman McCaul's House Foreign Affairs investigation into the Biden-Harris Admin's disastrous & deadly Afghanistan ...

[### H

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › staff › directors](https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/staff/directors/H)

Meet our Leaders and Experts. Heritage's staff pursues its mission by performing timely, accurate research on key policy issues and effectively marketing ...

[### Heritage Foundation Launches Oversight Project

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › press › heritage-foundation-l...](https://www.heritage.org/press/heritage-foundation-launches-oversight-project)

Jan 20, 2022 — WASHINGTON—The Heritage Foundation today announced the launch of a new initiative aimed at increasing aggressive oversight of the Biden ...

[### Mike Howell - Heritage Foundation (Sept. 2022 ... LegiStorm

https://www.legistorm.com › bio › Michael_L_Howell](https://www.legistorm.com/person/bio/210626/Michael_L_Howell.html)

See more about Mike Howell including contact information, congressional salary, employment history, education and other biographical information.

People also ask

Who is the CEO of the Heritage Foundation?

Feedback

[### Rightwing claim of '0% chance' of fair US election previews ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › article › jul](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/12/heritage-foundation-mike-howell-election)

Jul 12, 2024 — Mike Howell makes comment at Heritage Foundation event where implausible post-election scenarios were shared.

[### NPR's interview with the Heritage Foundation's Oversight ...

NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2024/05/10 › transcript-npr-inter...](https://www.npr.org/2024/05/10/1250252668/transcript-npr-interview-heritage-foundation-oversight-project)

May 10, 2024 — Read the transcript. JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR): I'm gonna also start recording on my end. ELLEN WITTMAN (HERITAGE FOUNDATION): And then we ...

[### How should we interpret comments made by Mike Howell ...

Quora

https://www.quora.com › How-should-we-interpret-co...](https://www.quora.com/How-should-we-interpret-comments-made-by-Mike-Howell-executive-director-of-the-Oversight-Project-at-the-Heritage-Foundation-that-there-was-zero-per-cent-chance-of-a-free-and-fair-election)

What do you think about Mike Howell of Heritage's Oversight Project declaring “I'm formally accusing the Biden administration of creating ...

2 answers · 52 votes: The Heritage Foundation is doing a bang-up job of getting itself labeled an extremist organization.

[### Transition Integrity Project

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › election-integrity › transition...](https://www.heritage.org/the-oversight-project/election-integrity/transition-integrity-project)

Jul 10, 2024 — TIP 2024 conducted a variety of scenario-based exercises aimed at identifying potential risks to the integrity of the 2024 election and the ...

---

Transcript: NPR's interview with Muckracker and The Heritage Foundation : NPR

RANSCRIPT: NPR's interview with the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project

May 10, 2024

NPR Staff

This interview was part of NPR's reporting for this story.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I'm gonna also start recording on my end.

ELLEN WITTMAN (HERITAGE FOUNDATION):And then we have like this free floating mic, Jude, so you want to just, does Mike just need to talk directly into the mic for best audio quality or what?

lnk]

Untangling Disinformation

A flyer in her name told migrants to vote for Biden. But she says she didn't write it

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Sure. Yeah. We can, Mike do you want to just do a little soundcheck? Give us your name and title.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Yeah. 1-2-3-4-5. I'm Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I think that's sounding pretty good. What do you think, Audrey?

AUDREY NGUYEN (NPR):Sounds good.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay, great.

AUDREY NGUYEN (NPR):Anthony, could we get a couple? Could you just tell us your name and title as well, so we can make sure that you're sounding good?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Sure. My name is Anthony Rubin, and I'm the founder of Muckraker.com.

AUDREY NGUYEN (NPR):You both sound great. Thank you so much.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Great. Thank you again for for joining. So I wanted to start by asking you guys about, um, well, about the relationship between Oversight Project and Muckraker. And so you guys have been working together on this thread and, and other projects. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Yeah, absolutely. I'd just like to start by saying thanks for taking the time to sit down with us. This is the first time I've ever paid with my taxpayer funds for a hit piece on us. But, uh, the relationship between Muckraker and Heritage is a very, very powerful one. It's not one we go into great detail because, as you well know, we're going up against some very powerful and dangerous people to include the cartels, weaponized Biden administration, etc. and we're not interested in giving an org chart out. Uh, the proof is in the pudding with the bombshell reporting we've, we've put out, and we're glad to work with the great patriots at Muckraker, and for that matter, anybody across any ideological spectrum who's willing to to fight the invasion of the United States.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay. And. When, when it comes to this flyer, can you walk me through, what was your process to verify the flyer that appears in that thread?

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Right. So it's, we have a copy of it, it's real. I have it. It's on camera there. We have an affidavit about how it was, you know, come about. Uh, Gaby did not respond to comment from the Daily Signal. That's our process. The flyer is very real. It's telling illegal aliens to vote for Joe Biden at an invasion staging camp south of the border.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Yeah. Um, I mean, but if, oh so, so you, reached out to to Gaby before you published?

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):No, no, we published it. It was in the immediate public interest to know about the invasion in the United States. We had very little confidence that somebody who says their goal is to fight U.S. policy and is running an invasion camp would be willing to play ball. And so we we wanted the public to know about, you know, the political elements of this invasion as soon as possible. And, you know, as expected, she declined comment. She really has only been talking to, you know, regime media throughout.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):So you mentioned there, you, and you are alluding to running, a camp. And so our reporting has shown that there is a a camp in Matamoros that has had many different iterations with different waves of immigration, and it's gone through different cycles and looked different ways. There was a time when RCM did have a leadership role, it was staffing that camp from my understanding. But that, that is not the case right now. That it, it is kind of no one organization is in charge of it and that the local government is emptying it out and moving migrants to a different place and that there's very few people there right now. And so one of the things I'm trying to understand is, is if, if they if this organization does not have a direct connection to that camp, how does that how does that square with with what you're alleging about the flyer and its dissemination?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Well, let me say this, okay. I was down there. I'm sure if you saw the New York Times hit piece, uh, they, you know, so graciously included a video of my brother and I when we were in front of the Matamoros Resource Center. And while we were there, we met a man by the name of Hugo Abraham. Whether or not that's his real name, I'm not sure, but that's what he went by. And, um, he is apparently allegedly, the, uh, director of the Matamoros Resource Center, right there in Matamoros, so he's running that compound. And he gave me a firsthand tour of the camp. Right? And he actually walked us through. He knew everybody in the camp, and he was showing, hey, that, these people live over there. The Russians live back in back here in the back of the camp. And he was so familiar with it that he was, you know, letting himself into these different tents. And he was poking around and seeing if the Russians were there because he wanted to introduce us. So this idea that they don't have, um, any tie ins with that camp is, is total nonsense.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):My understanding is that some of the individuals who have been there have been there for quite a long time. Um, and so and they are just right across the street. So we did also talk to to Hugo as well. And he said that he was showing you around because at that point you had said that you were wanting to volunteer, that you had said that you had previously worked with migrants, that you had previously worked or currently worked with HIAS, and he was under the understanding that you were looking to volunteer. Is that accurate?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):That he was under the impression. Well, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, we were we were down there and we were inquiring whether or not it would be possible to volunteer. I'm not sure if you've done your background, any background research on myself. I'm sure you have. I mean, I'm well acquainted with the situation. I've followed the whole trail from Quito, Ecuador to the United States, crossed the Darien Gap. You know, I rode the train of death, been smuggled into Mexico by the Sinaloa cartel. I got kidnaped by the Gulf Cartel. The point is, I know the ins and outs of this thing. I've studied these NGOs that hand out all the maps. So, yeah, of course, we were inquiring whether or not it would be possible to, uh, volunteer. But the point is, the reason why I brought up Hugo or Hugo as you, as you call him, is because you had mentioned that Matamoros Resource Center is not affiliated with the camp. What I'm saying is, if the director of Matamoros Resource Center is giving me a firsthand tour, and knows these people by name and knows exactly where the Russians are, and is so comfortable in that camp that he's letting himself into their tents without knocking. I mean, to me, that shows that there's, uh, some sort of connection going on there.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Um, the. When, when one of the conversations you had with Hugo is that you asked, he said that you asked about if he knew of any organizations in the U.S. that were helping migrants to vote. Is that is that something you were asking about?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Excuse me, there's somebody, I have, I have room service knocking on my door. I'm on the road right now. Um. Hey, I'm okay. Thank you very much. Can you repeat the question?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Yeah. I was just wondering if, if it's accurate that among the questions you asked Hugo was whether he knew of organizations in the U.S. that help migrants vote?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):I don't know if I asked that exact question. I'm sure you do. I'm sure that you have some audio recording of the entire conversation, though.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Um, no, I was not there for for that conversation. But I -

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):I don't recall exactly what I said, so I'm not going to go on record and say exactly what I may or may not have said. I do not recall exactly the words that came out of my mouth.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Hey Jude, I know some organizations in the US who are trying to help illegal aliens vote, they would include the Biden administration. We just put out some shocking evidence on that today about their plans for it. The D.C. state government, we put out evidence yesterday about their plans to get illegals to vote, uh the Democrat National Committee and their associated lawyers, who are keeping all the vulnerabilities wide open for them to vote. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a former board member of HIAS, who is as you know, the architect of this invasion, to uh, change the country to more preferential voting terms for them. So if you want to talk about organizations that are trying to get illegal aliens to vote, I got, I can go all day about that.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Well, you know, I, I am really curious about that, and I would like to learn more. I think the scope of this story, um, I have, like, a, a pretty long draft right now, so I can't add, sort of stuff outside of the flyer and Matamoros to this particular piece. But I'll be looking at what you posted for sure.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Please do, retweet and share.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay. And, um. When we had some folks we work with as stringers go down to Matamoros um, to to try to report out this story, um, we've had, we have struck out finding anyone who has seen this flyer. Um and I just wonder if, I mean, we've talked to NGOs that are not RCM. We have talked to migrants who have no affiliation with RCM, and we have talked to migrants who have spent time inside RCM's office. We have tried to really cover our bases, talking with people who would be the most likely to have seen this document. But we have come up empty handed, and I wonder if you have an explanation of something we might be missing here about why why this flyer wouldn't, wouldn't be visible.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Well, I, I can't comment on that because I have no idea, uh, what your means and methods are for uh, questioning these people. I mean, I'm not sure you might be, you might be spooking them. I can tell you firsthand, having been on the ground talking to these illegal aliens for years now, in you know, many different countries throughout the entire trail, you know, if you know, if you approach these people a certain way, uh you will not get information out of them. So I can't comment on that. But what I will say is that the reason that we were tipped off to this story to begin with, it wasn't just, ah, mere coincidence that we just happened to be down there, "Wow, we found these flyers." No, we were tipped off to this by a worker in New York who's working at one of these illegal alien compounds. Um, and this guy called us up, and he said, listen, you know, I saw a flyer that this illegal alien who was living in this compound that I'm working at obtained, and, uh, he said, it says on the flyer to vote for Biden. He says, here's where you need to go. It's it's right there in Matamoros. And so we went and it checked out. So that's how we got this lead to begin with. Just so you are aware.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned that because I was wondering how it all fits, how, how it all fits together. So you got the lead and that brought you to Matamoros. And then it was it in Matamoros that you found the individual who is, who authored the affidavit?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Was it in Matamoros that we found the individual. The individual who authored the affidavit um is somebody that that we have a close connection with. This isn't some random individual.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay and so then.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):And obviously we're protecting our sources and methods on this. They're up against some very dangerous, dangerous people.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Right.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):And so this, are there dates that you allege, that because the, the uh, the affidavit is dated, after the thread came out. And so I'm wondering if there are dates that pertain to when this individual, ah, alleges that they saw these flyers inside the office and when they recorded the video.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):So I'll answer that one. Yeah, of course, we have more information in the affidavit that we're keeping closely held until it's absolutely necessary. But the reason why the affidavit stated after the fact is because there is a uh pretty coordinated misinformation campaign after we posted the international breaking news story that we did. Uh there's individuals associated with Gaby who claimed that two poseurs placed the flyers and that unfortunately, you know how disinformation spreads on the internet, gained a little bit of a viralness to it. And then later, Gaby came out of hiding and changed her story to the Associated Press and said she had no idea how the flyers got there. And then some Soros activist lawyers, uh, were out there basically alleging that they think they could have been planted. And so we wanted to end with, you know, out of shadow of a doubt with a sworn affidavit under the penalty of perjury, that that was not the case. And so that's why we released it. Obviously, this is an ongoing investigation, and we're not, uh, releasing all of our things to the opposition right now, the opposition being those who were staging the invasion into the United States via these camps and running cover for them in the media and elsewhere.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Are we meant to understand that the video that appeared on, on, um, on X was recorded by the same person who authored the affidavit, or was the video that we saw on the X thread recorded by, by Muckraker or by Anthony or um somebody else on the team?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Well, there were multiple videos in the thread.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Sorry. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm talking specifically about the one of the flyers in the porta-potties.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Was that filmed by the, that was filmed by the individual who, uh, who was, you know, who gave the affidavit. Yes.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay. So the individual who gave the affidavit. Okay, so did you when you were in Matamoros, did you see this flyer in the wild, like, besides the besides the the way that you have disclosed seeing it, is there anything more we should understand about how, how you are have encountered this flyer?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):No, I think that the Twitter thread speaks for itself. All the information that you need is right there.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay, um. One of the things that has come up with this is that Gaby has denied authoring the flyer. There are signs that she did not. I mean, the-

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Signs that she did not? What are the signs that she did not? Other than her denying it, which I don't think that she would ever do anything other than deny it. So what are the signs that she did not? Other than her denial, which we could expect?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Well, I mean, if you if your interest was to promote, uh, an idea and your organization, it seemed unusual to, with a flyer to a specific audience in Spanish, it seems unusual that you would use a phone number that you know is, is disconnected and not, no longer working or copy and paste from a website that you haven't updated in that communication. Um, and so-

:{:{MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):That doesn't seem unusual to me, by the way. If she's the author of the website, that makes perfect sense as to why it's on the flyer. And I think there's a degree, if you were going to do something so outrageous, plausible deniability built in. And also, she's, you know, not a native Spanish speaker as we understand. So all these reasons have been proffered, but none of them go one direction or or the other. You have somebody who says it's their goal to, oppose U.S. policy, openly subverting the United States or staging invasion camps into the U.S. with something that meets up with the political activity history of that camp. }:

We posted numerous pictures of that area with "Bye Trump" balloon signs. Can you believe that? It's like they went to Party City and got balloon signs. They have other photos of Kamala and Joe. These are these are very, very radical people. And I think, you know, the fact that the mainstream media and legacy media are taking this person who's subverting the U.S. at their word, is the most laughable part of this whole thing. And that's why we put out so much evidence. And the counterattack has provided absolutely zero evidence. Our international bombshell reporting has stood the the test of all scrutiny and will withstand some more.}:

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Yeah. And I am just very curious. I mean, have you guys encountered any definitive evidence that refutes what we've put out, other than hearsay, other than her claim that she didn't do it, which again, it is expected, of course.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Well, I think what, I think the issue here is that if the allegation is that these flyers were distributed for the purpose of convincing people to see them, like with the purpose of having them be seen, and having, um, migrants see them and act on them, it would, one would expect there to be some evidence of of them being around, of, of other people having seen them, of people hearing of the organization promoting voting in other contexts. And we haven't been able to find that.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Yeah. That's where I think you take a jump and a skip there. There's no allegation of that. What we provided is evidence that the flyer was at the camp. But go ahead, Anthony.

:{:{ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Well, you know, let me just say this with without divulging too much, because this is ongoing. But I think that I could safely say this without jeopardizing any sources right now. You know, I had an individual reach out to me. Okay, who's. Here's what you need to understand, okay? And um, maybe you already know this. I'm not sure how much investigation you've already done into this matter and affiliated organizations, uh, you know, in Matamoros and then there in Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley at large. But there's a whole ecosystem there in the Rio Grande Valley, and right across the border, of these different NGOs. }:

Okay. I had an insider, who I'm not gonna, I'm not going to name names. We're still working with this person. But I had an insider reach out to me. Um, who told me flat out, he says, "Hey, listen, uh, they are passing photos around of you, and of myself and my brother, in these, in these, groups, in these group chats that have the heads of all these Rio Grande Valley migrant, illegal alien NGOs. Okay, but that's not the point. My point in saying this, so I continue to talk to this guy, and then he tells me more about some of these NGOs down there, and then he says, yeah, just so you are aware, like, um, these organizations down there, I'm not going to name names right now. We will report on this in the future. But he says these organizations openly tell these illegals to uh go to blue states to avoid red states because they are not as friendly and your, your asylum case may not go the way you want it to go, um and to support the Democratic Party. This is told to me by an individual who has direct tie ins with some of the giant, some of the biggest illegal alien NGOs there in South Texas. So just so you're aware. So when you're telling me that there is no, uh, evidence of these people, you know, trying to get these illegal aliens to vote, I mean, that that's just simply not true. They certainly do encourage them. You know, but the flyer was a bit damning, and that was actually in writing.}:

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I'm sorry I missed. Can you repeat, what, wait, what so I...I was following with the, these organizations are in the chat thread. But what was the part about promoting voting?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):So what I'm telling you is that this individual who reached out to us, who told me that, who told me that we were essentially being doxxed, doxxed, myself and my brother, in a group chat that contains the heads of these various South Texas illegal alien NGOs. Um, then goes on to tell me that these same NGOs, the names I will not mention, uh, openly tell these illegals to vote a certain — not not to vote a certain way — but to support a certain side of the political spectrum. To support a certain party, the Democratic Party, for various reasons that he listed. So just so you're aware, I mean, it's not as if these people are not being told this information.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):OK.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):And Jill Biden went down to this camp. I mean, I don't know what else people need to understand about this being a partisan, uh, you know, center for activity. "Bye Trump" balloon signs, Jill Biden going down there. All of this connected together I think leaves most people, and this is why the story, you know, went so viral is because they understand this is what the invasion is for.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Not only that, let me, let me just add this. You know, I have interviewed these people, again, for years. And I could send you, you know, I'm actually, you know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm actually going to do this. Um, I've been putting it off for way too long. I probably have like an hour in total of the footage just interviewing these people. "Hey, who do you support, Biden or Trump?" And they all say Biden, every. I've never found one that says they support Trump. And they know why, because he supports the migrantes, right? I have videos down in, uh, Southern Mexico, um, of a giant caravan as they they've been stopped by the police and they're all very angry and agitated, and they all start chanting for Biden. Okay, that's on my Twitter page. You guys go find it. So this idea that you know, that this is not for political purposes and that this would not be then weaponized once they cross the border, is pretty ridiculous.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I think I'm still failing to find the leap between what you're saying and somebody casting a ballot and committing a crime.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):You're, you're, you don't see the connect. Well, that's. I , I, I don't know what to say. I mean, maybe.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I mean if-

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):I mean, maybe if I had a whiteboard we could, like, actually draw it out. I don't really know what to say. I mean, there have been, it it's on record that illegal aliens have fraudulently voted in our election. Now, to what degree? I suppose you could debate that, but it's not up for debate that that's happened. Unless you, unless you disagree with that.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):No. I've seen studies that show that it is incredibly rare.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Whoa who whoa. Incredibly rare or not. I mean, that's a serious crime.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Yeah.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Would you agree?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Oh, yeah. No, no, no, but I mean, I'm just saying that if if, a migrant who says that they, when you say, "Do you like Biden or Trump?" And if they answer, "Biden," to me, I'm not going to assume that that person is going to attempt to vote in the next election.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):You know, I would encourage you to look at all the lawfare efforts designed to make sure the elections can be voted in by by illegal aliens, you know, the resistance to the basic citizenship question, the bombshell report we just released about a White House meeting saying that we should trust illegals to act within the bounds of the law. All these things in concert, I mean, it's pretty obvious to the everyday American, maybe not in the newsrooms at NPR, but that this invasion is political in name.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):To be honest with you, Jude, I, I don't believe, if that is who I am talking to I can't see your face, but I'm assuming that's who I'm talking to here.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Yes, it is.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Okay. I, I truly don't believe that that you don't see the danger here. But I think that you may be toeing a certain line. I mean do you truly, based off everything we've told you here, and I'm sure that you you're a smart person. I mean, you got a job at NPR. I don't think that they hire morons. Um, do you, do you really not see the danger with what we're talking about here?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Well, I think that you guys have hit on an incredibly hot button issue. Um, I think there are a lot of people who are concerned about election integrity. There's a lot of people who are concerned about immigration. And your, um, the thread that you've worked on has gotten a lot of attention. Um, and that is why we are trying to report out the facts to make sure that we understand what is going on here. I mean, that, I mean, that is. There, the stakes are incredibly high for the themes that you guys are, are touching on.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):They are. We could have a president elected by illegal aliens in this country after we just had a very, uh questionable election last go around. I don't think the public can withstand uh more trust uh being broken down in their election system. And that's why this invasion and the loosening of voting restrictions and the protection, I will say, of the illegal aliens' ability to vote is, is so paramount.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I'm wondering if you can explain, um, I, I appreciate that you, um have, um, decided to not disclose everything about um, all of the partnerships and arrangements. But I mean, is it fair to say that that Muckraker was paid for this investigation?

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):No, it's not fair to say that all because we haven't said that. We don't go into our sources and methods. We're the most prestigious international investigative body. Along with Muckraker, we have plenty of relationships, worldwide. And I'm not going to put out an org chart for the cartels or NPR.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay? No, I and I said that just because I saw the Oversight Project stamp on the video. And so normally there would be a financial transaction to obtain video, but we can leave it at that.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):We'd be happy to partner with NPR on one of these as well. I'll throw that out there. We will work across the ideological spectrum. Anyone who's willing to fight the invasion.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I'm wondering if...

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):We won't charge you for the stamp either.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay. Um, I'm wondering about. I mean, so this issue that we've talked a little bit about, but I mean, this issue about whether or not Gaby Zavala authored this flyer, she says she did not. Your position is that there's no evidence that she did not do it, and that your investigation still stands, because the point is that this flyer exists and was seen in a place where migrants could see it. Is that is that accurate?

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):That's a lot of words to say there is a flyer in a porta potty in an invasion camp encouraging illegals to vote for Biden. But.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):But I'm trying to understand if like...

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):But nobody, nobody ever alleged that she was the author. Nobody ever alleged that. I have not seen that alleged by Muckraker or by, uh, Heritage.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Right. But I think by circulating a document that has somebody's name on it, then by extension, it's it's promoting, it's circulating, that piece of information. And so she's been, this is somebody who says she has not authored a document who is now in the public sphere associated with the document. And so I just wonder, like, in a situation like that with if, you know, if Oversight Project's name was on a document and other people promoted it and, uh, insisted there was a link, like, would you have an expectation of some kind of verification process?

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Well, I have zero expectations that the media is going to be, uh, anything other than that already have been in this country and that's, you know, very partisan and slanted. And I'm sure the hit pieces have already come in on, on us, just like I'm sure this one will end up. So no, I have zero expectations of that. I know that a lot of people will treat us very, very unfairly. We just ask that you treat everyone else nicely. We've got to be people of character.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I mean, because, Anthony, you were at the you were at the RCM facility. Did did it occur to you to ask for their perspective on the flyer, if they knew where it came from or had any relationship to it?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Did it occur? It it certainly occurred to me. Yeah. It's not as if that thought did not pass through my head. Ah, but you know what also passed through my head is the uh, thought of me getting kidnaped not very far from there before. I mean, I was literally kidnaped with my brother by the Gulf Cartel that operates right there. After they kidnaped us, they dropped us off at the port of entry, that's right by that Matamoros Resource Center. Okay. They operate right there. So if you think that thought didn't pass through my head, you'd be incorrect. Of course it did. But, you know, the other thought is, well, I need to maintain a low profile here because I am in enemy territory. The cartel literally told me, never come back here again. And there I am, standing there. So, you know, I kind of have to, you know, pick and choose what I'm going to say and try to maintain a low profile. And I would think that saying, showing up there and saying, "Hey, check out this flyer." You know was, I mean, that might, you know, uh, bring unnecessary attention, shall we say, upon myself and my brother, in enemy territory.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Yeah. I'll add this is an invasion into the United States. Would the United States reach out to the CCP to verify intelligence about them flooding fentanyl into this country? Of course not. This is an invasion into the US. We aren't going to get into, uh, running things up through, you know, connective tissues to cartel chains and org charts. We put the flyer out. The flyer was accurate. It remains accurate.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Okay. Well, I'm. I'm really grateful to you guys for, um, for your time. I, you know, always want to hear, uh, the perspectives of everybody that we're reporting on whenever they touch a story. And it's so important to be able to to talk and get to listen. Do you have, um, anything else that you would like to add?

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Well, I would like to add a question, perhaps. Um, did you happen to read the New York Times article, the hit piece?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Um,yes, I did.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):I'm just curious if you guys are considering just, you know, not that you have any obligation to, but I'm curious if you guys are considering taking a different approach to this article or if it's going to be the same sort of line of, ah, you know, writing. It's going to be just another similar hit piece. Like, do you guys have a different angle here or or how are you guys approaching this? I'm just very curious.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Well, I'm grateful to you guys for giving us the time. I wanted to find out if there was more evidence that we were not aware of, so that we could frame our story. And we'll go back over this interview and evaluate what you've said and take it from there.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):I do have one more question.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):I have a final question. Are you familiar with the organization ACORN?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I am, yes.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION):Do you have any previous association with them?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I mean. I am not here to discuss, um.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Is that a yes or a no? I'm struggling to understand. You work for us at NPR. Did you previously have an association with the far-left group ACORN?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I did voter registration the summer that I graduated from college, and I, but this is not going to be a conversation about, um, about me. I, I'm going to end the interview there. Thank you.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):You are going to end the interview. Hold on a second. I got one more question. Unrelated to ACORN.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Did you register any illegals?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Of course not.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):Okay.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Last question, you know, it would be, it would be great if you could answer this. Are you concerned at all with illegal aliens possibly voting in our upcoming election?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):I am not answering any more questions.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):You can't? That should be a simple answer, should it not? You're not concerned about that?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):We're going to end the interview there. Thank you.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):We're going to end the interview?

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK (NPR):Yeah. Thank you.

MIKE HOWELL (HERITAGE FOUNDATION OVERSIGHT PROJECT):We gotta shut NPR down pretty soon.

ANTHONY RUBIN (MUCKRAKER):Oh my God.

---

---