DeMint, Jim Sen 7% CPI

===

lcv score 7demint mafia hub? mentor? CPIhard core right TP? RSCc STREET?
poster for? pension? 
see bak

=DeMint favors eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and Federal income tax. <div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" align="left">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" align="left">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" align="left"><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/166778/cleta-mitchell-trump-lawyer-2022-midterm-elections">https://newrepublic.com/article/166778/cleta-mitchell-trump-lawyer-2022-midterm-elections</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" align="left">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" align="left">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" align="left">no lnx many

Peter Stone/June 29, 2022
Ballot Boxer
This Former Trump Lawyer Wants You to Disrupt the 2022 Midterms
Cleta Mitchell desperately

tried to undo Trump's loss in Georgia in 2020. Now she's using the Big

Lie to recruit conservatives as poll workers for the November elections.

A

spacious ballroom at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix was packed the

weekend of March 11 with scores of Donald Trump loyalists still fuming

about widely debunked claims that Joe Biden won the 2020 election thanks

to rampant fraud. Dubbed an “election integrity summit,” the gathering

was the handiwork of Trump’s former legal adviser, the veteran

conservative activist Cleta Mitchell. And while Mitchell has garnered

national attention for riling up Trumpists with false claims of election

fraud in Georgia after the state was called for Biden, she’s now

quietly channeling that anger into mobilizing activists to aggressively

combat the specter of voting fraud in the next battle: the 2022 midterm

elections.

Mitchell

organized the Arizona summit on behalf of the Conservative Partnership

Institute, a nonprofit that raked in $1 million from Trump’s leadership

PAC last year. Founded in 2017 by former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, CPI has become a hub for the Big Lie in exile, with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows

signing up as senior partner shortly after leaving the White House last

year, and Mitchell joining in March 2021 as senior legal fellow. CPI

boasted revenue of $5.3 million in fiscal 2019, has arranged D.C.

internships for young conservatives, and has worked with other

right-wing groups to push conservative goals.

But central to the institute’s current mission is Mitchell, who leads its self-styled “election integrity network.”

She has engineered a roaming series of summits this year in states

Republicans hope to swing back in 2024: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia,

Michigan, and Nevada—along with the perennial battleground Florida,

which Trump won. Mitchell has sold the network as a way to create state

and local election “infrastructure,” which includes advocating

unorthodox surveillance tactics of election officials and operations to

ferret out any hints of fraud—real, or more often hypothetical.

One

notable speaker at the summit, whom Mitchell interviewed on a stage,

was Karen Fann, the Arizona state Senate president and 2022 national

chairwoman of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council,

a group that promotes model laws for states to adopt, and that Mitchell

has previously advised. Arizona has already passed one anti-voting law

this year, imposing onerous restrictions to prove citizenship before

registering to vote, and the state legislature is currently considering a

raft of other measures that would empower state officials to conduct

further reviews of elections.

One attendee of the Phoenix summit,

who asked for anonymity, told me that “the event definitely used the

false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support

for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” to spur more

robust monitoring of polling sites. The attendee added: “There was a

large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all

of the other processes associated with elections.”

To voting

rights advocates, the campaign looks like a recipe for voter suppression

and intimidation, especially of minorities, and could incite harassment

against election officials. At these summits, the 71-year-old Mitchell,

members of conservative groups such as Tea Party Patriots, GOP

elected officials, and Republican National Committee staffers have

delivered a blunt message: Conservatives ought to expand poll watching

and “clean up” voter rolls—often by working as precinct and poll

officials—in order to curb any voting fraud and bolster their electoral chances in 2022.

Mitchell

hails from Oklahoma, where she began her career as a Democratic member

of the state legislature before moving to D.C. and switching parties in

the 1990s. Since then, she has amassed an extensive résumé of

conservative clients: Mitchell has done legal stints advising the

National Rifle Association (where she was once a board member), numerous

GOP campaigns, and several dark-money nonprofit groups.

Some

veteran conservatives who know Mitchell’s work say that her advice

often pushed the legal envelope. “You tell Cleta where you want to end

up, and she will come up with a way to get you there, whether it’s legal

or not,” one former senior NRA official told me, quipping that she’s

the “fringe of the fringe.” And a GOP election lawyer who has known

Mitchell for years, and requested anonymity, added: “Cleta was sort of a

classic lawyer for Donald Trump because she told Trump what he wanted

to hear, as opposed to what he ought to hear from his lawyer.”

Mitchell started as a volunteer legal adviser to bolster Trump’s fraud claims in Georgia. She

was recruited by Meadows the day after the 2020 election and eventually

emerged as part of the core group of Trump lackeys attempting to

subvert the results. She participated in Trump’s phone call with

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, wherein the president

attempted to coerce the state official to “find” the extra 11,780 votes

he needed to win the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis

is currently conducting a wide-ranging probe into that call, examining

whether Trump and the other participants broke state laws. A special

grand jury was impaneled in early May.

Mitchell has also been

subpoenaed by the House panel probing the January 6 insurrection, as she

was in contact with Trump that day. In response, Mitchell filed a

lawsuit to block the subpoena. When reports of her role on Trump’s call with Raffensperger quickly surfaced in 2021,

Mitchell resigned from her two-decade career with the law firm Foley

& Lardner—as it was conducting an internal review—and joined CPI two months later. (Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Cleta

Mitchell allied herself with Trump’s election conspiracy theories on

the infamous Trump-Raffensperger call,” Dennis Aftergut, a former

federal prosecutor, said, adding acidly: “If that makes one an advocate for election integrity, Charles Ponzi was a champion of investment integrity.”

In

loose alliance with other conservative groups such as Heritage Action,

Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks—where she was tapped in March 2021

to lead a “National Election Protection Initiative” with a

multimillion-dollar budget—Mitchell and CPI have worked with gusto to

tighten voting laws: That campaign helped spur at least 19 states in

2021 to pass more stringent voting measures, including voter

identification mandates and curbs on absentee ballots, according to the

Brennan Center for Justice.

Mitchell’s

cachet among the right’s big donors is considerable: She sits on the

board of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has doled out

hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to conservative

election integrity and legal groups, including the Public Interest Legal

Foundation, where Mitchell chairs the board. To help Trump overturn his

loss in Arizona, Mitchell raised about $1 million in funds for a partisan audit of the state’s largest county—which wound up backfiring when the audit confirmed Trump’s loss there.

The

programming at the CPI summits this year has partly overlapped, and

included participants from an RNC election integrity drive that has

recruited directors in 18 states and thousands of poll watchers, as The

New York Times revealed in late May. To tutor activists at the summits

about how to create local and state task forces, Mitchell and CPI have

distributed a 19-page manual dubbed “The Citizens Guide to Building an

Election Integrity Infrastructure.” The manual suggests some

traditional poll monitor methods, but takes an ominous tone, urging

activists to follow “every step” of vote-by-mail operations and advising

them to “be ever-present” inside election offices.

AMAC Action,

a conservative grassroots arm of the Association of Mature American

Citizens that boasts over two million members, has co-sponsored several

CPI summits. “We don’t want to see the kinds of shenanigans in

2020” again, Bob Carlstrom, AMAC Action’s president, told me. Carlstrom,

a veteran D.C. lobbyist who expected to attend his first summit in

North Carolina in June, added that AMAC Action has encouraged its

volunteers to be poll workers, election officials, and poll watchers.

His group also has “been quite active in working on legislation” in

Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, and other states where CPI and allied

groups have spent millions promoting new laws that have curbed voting

rights.

Such multifaceted conservative efforts by Mitchell

and CPI have prompted concern from election watchdogs worried about the

false narrative of major fraud leading to voter suppression and

intimidation targeting Black and other minority voters. “These lies are

then used to justify restrictive policies that make it harder for people

to vote, particularly in communities of color,” said Sean

Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections

program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He added, “It is also

important to remind voters that there are laws prohibiting the

intimidation of voters and election officials. We cannot let the threat

of intimidation alone prevent anyone from participating in our

democracy.”

According to Mitchell’s blog and radio interviews

she’s done this year—including an April one with Trump uber loyalist

Steve Bannon—the CPI summits are building a state-based “movement.”

Mitchell now hosts a podcast, dubbed Who’s Counting, where she speaks

with like-minded conservative activists in states such as Arizona,

Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The podcasts tend to hype allegations of

improper voting and election practices. Mitchell bluntly told Jane Mayer

of The New Yorker last year that the goal of her post-2020 work has

been “to make it harder to cheat,” without a nod to former Attorney

General William Barr’s acknowledgment in late 2020 that there was no

significant fraud in Biden’s win by over seven million votes nationally.

Since

the first meeting in 2021, the summits have drawn several conservative

and political bigwigs, including Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth

Martin and CPI chair DeMint.

Meadows was a keynote speaker at a CPI summit in Georgia, but his

public role has diminished following the disclosure in March that North

Carolina was investigating whether he committed voter fraud. The

inquiry was prompted by a New Yorker report that in 2020 Meadows

registered to vote using an address where he’d never lived—a potential

rare instance of actual voter fraud. Shortly before the probe became

public, Meadows quietly dropped out of CPI’s Phoenix summit, where he

was supposed to be a keynote speaker, and he does not appear to have

been at any other public CPI events.

The “election integrity” agenda advanced by CPI and Mitchell has set off alarm bells for Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

“From Cleta Mitchell’s dark-money group to Heritage Action, we see dark

money crawling everywhere behind voter suppression and election

subversion,” Whitehouse told me.

Looking ahead, the Brennan

Center’s Morales-Doyle is worried that the summits could “increase the

risk that vigilante actors will engage in intimidation and harassment of

voters and election workers. In short, the people promoting these lies

about so-called election integrity are doing serious harm to our

democracy.”

Peter Stone is a Washington-based investigative

journalist who has covered a wide array of lobbying, legal, and campaign

finance issues, working for National Journal, McClatchy newspapers, and

Legal Times, among other publications. As a freelancer, his work has

also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books Daily,

Mother Jones, The Intercept, and many other news outlets. He is the

author of Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and

the Buying of Washington.
Read More: Magazine, July-August 2022,

State Of The Nation, Politics, The Soapbox, Midterm Elections,

Republican Party, Donald Trump, Arizona, Georgia
</div>=
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/10/25/god-trump-closed-door-world-council-national-policy/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/10/25/god-trump-closed-door-world-council-national-policy/</a>
wapoin October 2015, Donald Trump was still a laugh

line for right-wing Christian activists. By their lights he was a failed

casino owner and thrice-married playboy. He had no apparent principles,

no policy blueprint and no grasp of the Bible. He didn’t even

understand free-market theory, something they consider to be a

fountainhead of American liberty. Yet here he was in a conference room

at the Ritz-Carlton in McLean, Va., soliciting support from a

closed-door group of conservative leaders called the Council for

National Policy. <div class="ent-raw-container custom-html"> </div> Trump looked the part. He wore a blue

suit, white shirt and shiny blue tie. But he seemed to lose his way

during the pitch and began riffing about his hair. He turned his head to

various angles for the crowd. “It looks pretty good back here,” Trump

said, as CNP’s president, Bill Walton, would later recall during a

confidential talk captured on video. It was too much for Marjorie

Dannenfelser, an antiabortion activist also in the crowd. “This is

insulting,” Dannenfelser said, according to her recorded recollection.

She pulled on Walton’s sleeve. “Can you believe what is happening here?”

she asked. For

months after the event, Dannenfelser and some other CNP members were

determined to stop Trump. While he solidified his lead as GOP

front-runner, they denounced him as a “charlatan” in the conservative

magazine National Review, blasted his prior support of abortion rights

and implored Republican voters to choose another candidate. “America

will only be a great nation when we have leaders of strong character

who will defend both unborn children and the dignity of women,”

Dannenfelser and other women wrote in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/01/26/antiabortion-activists-to-iowa-voters-support-anyone-but-donald-trump/" target="_blank">an open letter to Iowa voters</a> in January 2016. “We cannot trust Donald Trump to do either.” Then

came a great swerve that would upend politics in America: Millions of

conservatives — Dannenfelser and other CNP members among them — got

firmly behind Trump. Today, the Republican Party has been transformed,

and Trump or one of his ideological heirs is likely to be the GOP

nominee in 2024. [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-trump-hints-at-2024-comeback-democracy-advocates-fear-a-worst-case-scenario-for-the-country/2021/09/28/ee357558-1a47-11ec-914a-99d701398e5a_story.html">As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country</a>] Much

has been written about this turn of conservatives toward Trump. But I

wanted to learn more about the political and communications

infrastructure that converted this support into votes and influence. How

did these leaders and activists — once so critical of Trump — end up

helping shape and advocate for his agenda? And now that he is almost a

year removed from the White House, how are they continuing to serve him

and his cause? Working with fellow Washington Post reporter Shawn

Boburg, I started gathering documents and cultivating sources. We

zeroed in on key figures and groups, making charts of their ties and

timelines of their actions. We identified <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-bannons-multimedia-machine-drove-a-movement-and-paid-him-millions/2017/04/09/203df1ce-197b-11e7-855e-4824bbb5d748_story.html" target="blank">networks of groups </a>that served as a kind of nerve system for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/leonard-leo-federalists-society-courts/" target="blank">conservative influence campaigns</a>. <div data-elm-loc="" class="ent-photo "> <a name="BXHAV4RHXQI6ZBZZLS3KXIYKGA">  The

Council for National Policy provides a window into the conservative

political and communications infrastructure that boosted Donald Trump.

(Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images) </a> </div> Enmeshed in these

efforts was the Council for National Policy. CNP may be the most

unusual, least understood conservative organization in the nation’s

capital. A registered charity, it has served for 40 years as a social,

planning and communications hub for conservative activists in Washington

and nationwide. One of its defining features is its confidentiality. In

a town where people and groups constantly angle for publicity, CNP bars

the press and uninvited outsiders from its events. All members — even

such luminaries as former vice president Mike Pence, Ralph Reed and

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — agree to

remain silent about its activities. Other bastions of

conservative influence — from policy groups like the Heritage Foundation

to media outlets like Breitbart News — generally have clear missions.

By contrast, CNP’s executive director, Bob McEwen, told me that the

organization itself does not “do anything.” He and other CNP leaders

will tell you it is merely an educational venue aimed at uniting its

conservative members. Yet as I began to learn more, I came to see

that it would be a mistake to underestimate the group’s significance. I

also realized that researching CNP represented a rare opportunity: to

get a behind-the-scenes look at the outlook, goals and methods of

activists who have so successfully promoted Trumpism. “I just wanted to

thank you and the Council for National Policy for your support and for

consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump and our

Administration,” Pence wrote to CNP last year. “I know our collaboration

with CNP will only strengthen and deepen this year and beyond.” The

Council for National Policy began taking root on Jan. 22, 1981, when

six religious and social conservatives gathered for dinner at a home in

Dallas. Most American conservatives were still jubilant about the

inauguration of Ronald Reagan two days earlier. They rejoiced at the

prospect that Reagan might make good on one of his campaign slogans:

“Let’s Make America Great Again.” Over dinner, they resolved to bring

together Christian activists, business interests and wealthy donors

under one umbrella to cajole and pressure the new administration. Details

about CNP’s history have emerged periodically over the decades, as

journalists, authors and left-leaning activists pieced together leaked

internal documents and other material. In early June this year, Nick

Surgey, executive director of a progressive watchdog group called

Documented, reached out to say he had obtained a speech from a CNP

meeting in May that celebrated the group’s 40th anniversary. Did I want

it? The speech offered a wealth of new information and context.

And it supplemented dozens of hours of confidential conference

recordings and documents that I obtained from Surgey and other sources.

“I’m not going to crystal-ball-gaze about the way ahead,” speaker Ed

Feulner told the crowd gathered behind closed doors in Naples, Fla., on

May 21. “Rather, I’m focusing on the early days of CNP. How we started,

who did what and how the foundations were laid for us now, four decades

later.” One of the organizers of the initial dinner was Tim

LaHaye, an evangelical minister, writer and political activist. LaHaye

later wrote the popular Left Behind series, books about the end of times

and the Antichrist, using themes derived from the Bible. He thought the

Christian right would have greater force if its components banded more

tightly together. “This new organization could help bring America back

to moral sanity,” he told Feulner, according to the speech. LaHaye

knew the endeavor would need funding, so he reached out to Cullen

Davis, a wealthy Texas oil scion. Davis — who told me recently that the

original organizers thought that communists were going to take over the

U.S. government and that Christianity in America needed staunch

defenders — agreed to host the dinner. He called his pal Nelson Bunker

Hunt, another wealthy oil figure known for trying to corner the global

market in silver. They also tapped Richard Viguerie, a fundraising

pioneer and master of far-right persuasion campaigns who once said he

mailed out 1.5 billion letters for more than 100 public policy groups. During

the dinner they agreed to reach out to a long list of other influential

evangelicals and social conservatives. Several weeks later, more than

two dozen activists gathered around a conference table at a hotel near

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to sketch out CNP’s ambitions.

Together, they made up a formidable force: Paul Weyrich spoke about a

group he was building to help elect conservatives to Congress. Phyllis

Schlafly described her campaign to thwart the Equal Rights Amendment.

For his part, Feulner, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, spoke

about how religious conservatives needed an alternative to the Council

on Foreign Relations. On a rainy evening in May 1981, the group

had a coming-out party in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, or, as

Feulner put it in his speech, “the belly of the beast.” Some 160

activists and politicos ventured to tents set up in the backyard of

Viguerie’s home in McLean. It was a rare exception to the fledgling

group’s rules around confidentiality. Guests found a spread of Peking

duck, lobster, sushi and piña coladas served in coconuts, according to

Feulner’s account. The special guest, David Stockman, Reagan’s

Office of Management and Budget director, received a standing ovation

for his efforts to scale back the government. Optimism and good cheer

wafted through the tents. But even then, CNP members grumbled that the

Reagan administration needed to change how it was selecting political

appointees. “Appointments have been made on the basis of credentials

rather than shared values,” one CNP member complained, according to

Feulner’s speech. “The council hopes to identify people with these

values and put them forward.” <div class="ent-pullquote "> <div class="ent-pullquote-text">In a town where people and groups constantly angle for publicity, CNP bars the press and uninvited outsiders from its events.</div> </div> Feulner

told me recently that CNP has always aimed at providing a forum where

certain conservative elites could socialize and strategize — and raise

money from wealthy donors. “You could let your hair down and just talk

candidly about shared visions,” he said. “You also have a lot of people

who can write significant checks.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2020/biden-appointee-tracker/">The Post's Biden Political Appointee Tracker</a>] From

the start, CNP members cultivated political power at the highest levels

in Washington. In an early letter to the Reagan White House, a CNP

leader wrote that the group included “some of the most influential

business, political and religious leaders in America” who wanted to

“plan together the future of our country.” Their goal was a “moral

rebirth” for our society. CNP’s leaders had much experience in political fundraising, organizing and communication. Among

them was a political operative named Tom Ellis, who had played on White

racial fears as he helped build the career of the late former senator

Jesse Helms of North Carolina. (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070401185.html" target="blank">Helms</a>, who became a revered member of CNP, was once described by The Post’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070602321.html" target="blank">David Broder</a>

as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this

country.”) Others included televangelist Pat Robertson; Ed Meese, the

attorney general under Reagan; Sam Moore, the nation’s largest Bible

publisher; and Rich DeVos, billionaire co-founder of Amway and funder of

conservative causes. CNP members showed they were willing to

participate in behind-the-scenes activity in support of their values.

Consider the covert campaign run by Oliver North, a member of the

National Security Council staff from 1981 to 1986. In 1984 — apparently

before he became a member — North spoke at a CNP meeting about the

importance of supporting the contra rebels opposing a leftist regime in

Nicaragua. At the time, Congress had imposed a prohibition on government

financial support for the contras. According to an audio

recording of the session, North told CNP members that Nicaragua’s

leaders and their Soviet supporters had more than Central America in

their crosshairs. “The real target is the United States,” he said. “This

country is in great, great jeopardy from these people, who are truly

godless communists.” North sought financial support from CNP

members, including a wealthy elderly woman named Ellen Clayton Garwood,

whom he met at a CNP meeting. “With tears in his eyes,” a Senate report

later recounted, “North explained to her that the Contras were hungry,

poorly clothed, and in need of lethal supplies.” Garwood eventually gave

about $2.5 million to support North’s off-books effort, according to

the Senate report. Using old CNP directories and other documents, I

determined that four CNP founders, members or funders were cited in the

Senate report as contributors to North’s mission. (I reached out to

North, but a spokesman declined my requests for an interview.) In

internal videos, audio and documents, the conservatism of CNP members

often seemed linked to fear — not just of the godless foreign communists

that North invoked but of liberal Americans as well. In September 2017,

a guest of CNP was invited to discuss his efforts to map leftist

organizations. “I almost think we might want to call it tracking and

defeating evil,” an unidentified CNP leader said during the speaker’s

introduction, according to an internal CNP audio recording. “The

activists on the left and the people who fund them are out to destroy

everything you hold dear,” the leader explained. “Your families.

Marriage. Your businesses. Your freedom of speech. Your freedom of

religion. Everything.” <div class="ent-photo-grid ent-photo-grid-2"> <img class="unprocessed _3-to-2 placeholder " src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/resources/img/spacer-gray.png&w=3&h=2" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NRR4AUBINUI6ZHPICVX62PUBX4.jpg&w=750&h=500" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NRR4AUBINUI6ZHPICVX62PUBX4.jpg&w=243&h=162" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NRR4AUBINUI6ZHPICVX62PUBX4.jpg" data-threshold="243" /> <img class="unprocessed _3-to-2 placeholder " src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/resources/img/spacer-gray.png&w=3&h=2" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/XCKTHCRILMI6ZBZZLS3KXIYKGA.jpg&w=750&h=500" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/XCKTHCRILMI6ZBZZLS3KXIYKGA.jpg&w=243&h=162" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/XCKTHCRILMI6ZBZZLS3KXIYKGA.jpg" data-threshold="243" /> </div> <div class="ent-photo-grid-big-caption">LEFT:

An internal CNP directory for 2015 had about 400 members across the

country. They included Kellyanne Conway, who would become a White House

counselor. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) RIGHT: Steve Bannon,

who was chief executive of Trump’s campaign, was also listed as a

member. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP)</div> When

candidate Trump arrived at the CNP meeting in the fall of 2015, many

White conservative evangelicals were still aggrieved about Barack

Obama’s presidency and his promotion of progressive policies, such as

near-universal health care. The presence of a Black man in the White

House served as a reminder of a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/08/12/census-data-race-ethnicity-neighborhoods/" target="_blank">new demographic reality</a>:

They constituted a diminishing proportion of the electorate and were

losing their power to shape America’s culture and politics. [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/08/mixed-race-americans-increase-census/">‘We’re talking about a big, powerful phenomenon’: Multiracial Americans drive change</a>] Trump’s

appearance was part of a weekend-long meeting in suburban Washington;

CNP usually holds these meetings three times a year in posh hotel

conference rooms around the country. All the candidates had been invited

to speak, but only Republicans responded, a CNP official told me. I

obtained an internal CNP directory for 2015 and examined it for

insights about the kinds of people Trump would be courting. There were

about 400 members from across the country, many of them leaders of

relatively small nonprofits focused on social and religious

conservatism. But I also saw some now-familiar names: Leonard Leo, then

of the Federalist Society; Steve Bannon, then leader of Breitbart News

and later chief executive of Trump’s campaign; David Bossie, the head of

the group Citizens United and later Trump’s deputy campaign manager;

and Kellyanne Conway, who would become a White House counselor. On

hand for Trump’s presentation was Ralph Reed, an evangelical political

leader and CNP member. By his own account, he had come to know and

admire Trump. But Reed sensed intense skepticism from other CNP members,

as he writes in his book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1684510570/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1684510570&linkId=e53b1ebe22e78c2fb145bd626c8b3a0b" target="_blank">For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump</a>.”

Then, at the meeting, something unexpected happened. After his

presentation, Trump, like the other Republican candidates, answered

questions and offered to stand with any CNP member for a photo. The line

went clear out of the ballroom. Still, in early 2016, just months before the election, Hillary Clinton

appeared to be ahead in the esteem of most Americans. It was

increasingly clear Trump needed the conservative evangelical vote to

win. “The Trump train kept rolling, and Evangelical leaders were either

going to have to get on board or get out of the way,” Reed writes.
That

March, Trump and Donald McGahn, who would become a White House lawyer,

hosted a meeting with Leo, who was involved with a nonprofit network

that was raising hundreds of millions to fund media campaigns and other

initiatives in support of conservative judges and causes. The three men

focused on the Supreme Court seat left open after the recent death of

Justice Antonin Scalia. McGahn thought Trump could benefit by releasing a

list of nominees to replace Scalia, an unusual move that would reassure

religious and social conservatives who wanted an antiabortion jurist.

Trump expressed support for one of Leo’s long-cherished goals: a federal

court system dominated by judges who would interpret the Constitution

in ways that favored business and conservative views. As

Leo later told members of CNP — where he served on the board of

governors — that was only going to happen through a campaign by the

conservative movement. “We’re going to have to understand that judicial

confirmations these days are more like political campaigns,” Leo said,

according to one of the videos I reviewed. “We’re going to have to be

smart as a movement.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/court-barrett-senate-trump/2020/10/25/d9eed9c0-16bc-11eb-befb-8864259bd2d8_story.html">Trump’s conservative imprint on the federal judiciary gives Democrats a playbook</a>] On May 18, 2016, Trump greatly boosted his prospects when he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/18/donald-trump-releases-list-of-11-potential-supreme-court-nominees/" target="_blank">released the list of judges</a>.

The next month, he convened a faith advisory board of conservative

evangelicals at Trump Tower. Reed and James Dobson, a Christian activist

who had been with CNP from the early days, were on the board, according

to Reed’s book. The meeting was followed by an extraordinary

closed-door conclave at a Times Square hotel for nearly a thousand

conservative Christians. The Religion News Service <a href="https://religionnews.com/2016/06/21/evangelicals-give-trump-much-needed-boost-after-manhattan-summit/" target="_blank">account </a>asked

in a headline: “Could conservative Christian leaders rescue a

Republican presidential candidate whose personal lifestyle and religious

bona fides have been punchlines more than a testimonial?” But something

else in that story popped out at me: It said a chief organizer of the

Times Square conclave was CNP member Bill Dallas. Dallas was an

unusual figure. He had been convicted two decades earlier on felony

embezzlement charges. He was sent to San Quentin State Prison, where a

newfound commitment to Christianity deepened, according to his book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001PVGPUW?ie=UTF8&tag=washpohgg2021-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=B001PVGPUW" target="_blank">Lessons From San Quentin</a>.”

Now he was a data entrepreneur who headed a nonprofit called United in

Purpose, which gathered and parsed information about Christian voters. Among the board members was CNP executive director Bob McEwen, who is also a former House member from Ohio. United

in Purpose’s network of allies and clients included other CNP members

from groups such as the American Family Association, the Family Research

Council and Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, according to Anne

Nelson, a research scholar at Columbia University and author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/163557319X/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=163557319X&linkId=5006bffe8b62e59cf0db7f091a506f6b" target="_blank">Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right</a>,”

a book that examines CNP. Dallas’s operation seemed a perfect

complement to other initiatives by groups affiliated with CNP members.

“What the CNP has done is convene these forces in a highly strategic way

and create an environment in which they can collaborate and leverage

each other’s work off the radar,” Nelson told me. “It’s a well-oiled

machine.” In a chat with me, Dallas said he is no longer a member

of CNP and is stepping back from political activism. He expressed pride

about the 2016 Times Square event and recalled one remark there that he

believes won over the Christian activists. It was when Trump told them

not to be ashamed of their own religious culture and beliefs. “He said,

‘Christians should not be afraid to say Merry Christmas at

Christmastime,’ ” Dallas told me. “I think that was a turning point.” In

the summer of 2016, Trump made another strategic move that would seal

the deal with Dannenfelser, the antiabortion activist, and other CNP

members. He pledged to oppose abortion and put the promises onto paper

in September. “Dear Pro-Life Leader,” Trump’s letter began. “I am

writing to invite you to join my campaign’s Pro-Life Coalition, which is

being spearheaded by longtime leader Marjorie Dannenfelser.” Trump said

he would nominate “pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court,” defund

Planned Parenthood and take other measures that the antiabortion

activists had demanded. Dannenfelser was thrilled. “Before that

we were still stomping our feet,” she said last year at a CNP meeting,

according to one of the internal videos. “Little did we know that this

man, who was a performer and can incite audiences in ways we never even

thought could be, would galvanize audiences in battleground states all

over the country and put life at the center of the project.” The CNP

crowd whooped and hollered at her remarks. In Reed’s book, he writes

that Dannenfelser told him: “Trump was my last choice until he was my first.” (A spokeswoman for Dannenfelser declined my request for an interview.) <div class="ent-pullquote "> <div class="ent-pullquote-text">In an early letter to the Reagan White House, a CNP leader wrote that the group’s goal was a “moral rebirth” for our society.</div> </div> Pence

acknowledged CNP’s support in his letter last year: “We are grateful

for CNP’s timely counsel and unique capacity to rapidly garner support

for the difficult decisions the President and I are making each day.”

And CNP meetings reflected the group’s standing with the administration.

In May 2017, for instance, Environmental Protection Agency

Administrator Scott Pruitt appeared at a CNP meeting and crowed about

the rollback of regulations, with an emphasis on Obama administration

measures aimed at climate change. “With respect to the EPA, the future

ain’t what it used to be,” he said, drawing cheers. Surgey, the

director of Documented, who first obtained the internal CNP videos I

reviewed for this story, said he “started studying CNP because it seemed

like its members were becoming a power base, in terms of their public

support of the Trump administration.” He added, “I was surprised by just

how many leading Trump advocates appear on the videos.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/climate-environment/biden-climate-environment-actions/">Tracking Biden’s unwinding of Trump’s energy and environmental policies, and new ones of his own</a>] Activist

David Horowitz spoke at a CNP meeting later in 2017. Horowitz, leader

of a nonprofit group called the David Horowitz Freedom Center, captured

the sense of desperation expressed by many on the right — a feeling

that had drawn them to Trump. “For all of Donald’s faults, and everybody

knows them, he stood on the right side. We are in a civil war,” he

said. “This is the standard-bearer for us in this war.” I

met Bob McEwen at the small suite of offices CNP maintains in the Hall

of the States building, just down the hill from the U.S. Capitol, a

remarkably tiny space for a group with such a large reach. Joining us

was lawyer Alan Dye, a CNP member and nonprofit specialist. Meeting

with someone like me was a departure for a group that has spent decades

trying to avoid attention from the mainstream media. McEwen emphasized

that CNP was not involved in political campaigns and exists only to

educate its members, leaders of allied nonprofit groups across the

country who are invited to join. Like all tax-exempt charities, CNP may

not under Internal Revenue Service rules engage in political activity or

support particular candidates for office. An affiliated group called

CNP Action — another type of nonprofit — is permitted by the IRS to

focus more on political activity. McEwen, also president of CNP

Action, told me he would not discuss the conservative movement in

general or the activity or advocacy of CNP members. When I asked about

his group’s efforts to operate in secret, he rejected the premise of the

question. “It’s not secret,” McEwen said. “It’s just private. And

anything that we want to elevate is going to be elevated by the

members.” He said CNP and its members have privacy rights, and

confidentiality helps create an atmosphere where participants can freely

exchange ideas without unwanted judgment. “Quite frankly, in a

nonpolitical sense, this is like a Rotary Club,” McEwen said. “CNP is a

convening organization of patriotic Americans that love their country

and have increasingly been of the opinion that the information they

receive is unreliable. And there’s not very many places they could get

the truth. And CNP seeks to deliver the truth.” I asked about the

influence campaigns — the advertisements, social media and such — run

by various networks of people and groups linked through CNP. As an

example, I mentioned the concerted efforts of interlocking nonprofit

groups allied with Leonard Leo. “What you’re really talking about

is a whole bunch of different networks. You could do a Venn diagram, I

suppose,” Dye said. “So there’d be pro-life. There’d be this and that.

All the various issues, and in every place they overlap would be a

network. And clearly there’s a network of people supporting conservative

judicial nominees. And Leonard, of course, would be in that network. It

might not encompass the entire CNP membership, but it might encompass a

fair number of them.” Both men asserted the networks on the left

are far larger and better funded than those on the right, and that some

are financed by billionaire philanthropist George Soros. “They’re much

bigger,” Dye told me. McEwen said, chuckling, “We’re a gnat.” <div data-elm-loc="" class="ent-photo ent-photo-fullwidth "> <a name="5DDIX6BNAYI6ZGC5GFIPPYIGWI" /><a name="5DDIX6BNAYI6ZGC5GFIPPYIGWI"></a><a name="5DDIX6BNAYI6ZGC5GFIPPYIGWI"> </a></div><a name="5DDIX6BNAYI6ZGC5GFIPPYIGWI"> </a><a name="5DDIX6BNAYI6ZGC5GFIPPYIGWI">I

learned about another dimension of CNP through a video featuring Jim

DeMint, a former senator and tea party favorite. It was 2018, and he was

telling CNP members about an initiative called the Conservative Action

Project, which had been launched years earlier by CNP leaders.</a>

<a name="5DDIX6BNAYI6ZGC5GFIPPYIGWI">CAP

claims to include more than 100 groups “representing all major elements

of the conservative movement — economic, social, and national

security.” Its website publishes policy memos signed by the leaders of

its member groups. It turns out that, according to documents, CAP shares

an address with CNP, and many CAP activists are members of both groups.

CAP also works hand-in-hand with yet another group that DeMint had

started not long before called the Conservative Partnership Institute.

(“The Conservative Partnership Institute arms, trains, and unites

conservative leaders in Washington ready to fight,” its </a><a href="https://www.cpi.org/">website until recently stated.</a>) “The

whole point was to support people on the inside,” explained DeMint,

listed on the 2018 video as a CNP executive committee member. “But that

doesn’t work unless we’ve got people like the folks here tonight with

the Council of National Policy on the outside building public support

for the right ideas to get things done. We’ve got an outside game. We’ve

got an inside game. And it’s the only way to win.” DeMint said

CAP’s efforts were coming to fruition under the Trump administration.

“Folks, there are more of us than there are of them. There is no reason

for conservatives to be losing,” he said. “We got the power in our

hands.” At

one point in the video, DeMint praised Trump. “We’ve got an amazing

opportunity here,” DeMint told them. “And it’s incredible with this

president, who is the last person I ever thought would promote religious

freedom, pro-life. I mean, the Lord confuses things!” He grinned and

paused while the CNP crowd broke into laughter and applause. “But this

guy’s more genuine than anybody I’ve ever known,” he said. “I mean, I

don’t know, I’m just really confused. But then, he seems willing to work

for us because he’s confused, too.” I recalled another internal

CNP video where others described how a delegation of CNP and CAP

officials met most every week with Trump administration officials, often

at the White House. “It’s kind of this little secretive huddle that

meets every Wednesday morning,” Paul Teller, director of strategic

initiatives for Pence when he was vice president, said on the video. Yet

another video included Rachel Bovard, a conservative activist who works

closely with DeMint at CPI. She said CAP people worked behind the

scenes with the White House and allies in Congress to maintain public

support for Trump during <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/impeachment/" target="_blank">impeachment </a>proceedings.

“We worked a lot to coordinate messaging,” Bovard said. Throughout the

Trump administration, she explained, CAP leaders also collaborated with

White House officials to select political appointees. “We work very

closely — CAP does and then we at CPI also — with the Office of

Presidential Personnel at the White House to try and get good

conservatives in the positions, because we see what happens when we

don’t vet these people,” she said, adding: “All these people that led

the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the

first place.” Last

year, in the months before the election, there was a new air of

desperation in some of the rhetoric of CNP members. L. Brent Bozell III,

a CNP executive committee member, claimed in a closed-door meeting that

“evidence is pouring out of an attempt by the far left to steal the

election,” an internal video shows. “Today we’re as close to

losing this nation as we ever have been,” Kay Coles James, then

president of the Heritage Foundation, said at another CNP session,

according to an internal video. “And make no mistake about it: This

November is not about winning or losing an election. It’s about winning

or losing our country.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/durbin-report-trump-pressure-justice/2021/10/07/b51712d4-2769-11ec-8d53-67cfb452aa60_story.html">Senate report gives new details of Trump efforts to use Justice Dept. to overturn election</a>] The integrity of elections has been a preoccupation on the right for years. In 2017, Trump announced a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/04/trumps-controversial-election-integrity-commission-is-gone-heres-what-comes-next/" target="_blank">Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity</a>,

which included two CNP members: Kenneth Blackwell, the former secretary

of state in Ohio, and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal

Foundation. In August 2019, Lisa Nelson, a CNP member and chief

executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council, launched an

initiative called “ALEC Political Process Working Group,” according to

an internal email. Among other things, the group was going to focus on

“election law and ballot integrity.” (In a letter to funders defending

that effort this year, Nelson said the group “connected legislators with

each other as well as federal officials to discuss process and

governance issues including the census, redistricting and other issues

related to how state governments work.”) Among those working with

her was a CNP board of governors member named Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer

who often speaks in the closed-door meetings about issues around

election integrity. Mitchell has described herself jokingly as

“consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.” She was a driving force

behind the allegations a decade ago that the IRS and Obama White House

engaged in a political witch hunt against tea party groups — and later

worked closely with Trump as he disputed the 2020 election results. <div class="ent-pullquote "> <div class="ent-pullquote-text">[“We’ve

got an amazing opportunity here,” Jim DeMint told CNP members about

Trump in one video. “This guy’s more genuine than anybody I’ve ever

known.”</div> </div> In February 2020, Nelson told a CNP Action

session that ALEC, in collaboration with Mitchell and other CNP members,

had begun prepping state lawmakers on rules they could invoke during an

election dispute. “And I think we’ve identified a few,” she said

in the meeting. “They can write a letter to the secretary of state

questioning the validity of an election and saying, ‘What did happen

that night?’ So we are drafting a lot of those things. If you have ideas

in that area, let us know and we’ll get those to the state legislators,

and they can start to kind of exercise their political muscle in that

area.” That spring, the election preparations coincided with

efforts by CNP members to push back against pandemic restrictions.

Working through newly formed coalitions, the members pumped out messages

aimed at opposing face masks, business closures and other measures to

contain the coronavirus. The campaigns received attention in

mainstream media. But the fact that CNP members played leading roles was

not generally understood. One new push was called the <a href="https://www.freedomworks.org/content/conservative-groups-launch-save-our-country-coalition">Save Our Country Coalition</a>.

It was announced by FreedomWorks, whose leader is a CNP member. Other

participants included Nelson from ALEC and Jenny Beth Martin, a CNP

member and leader of Tea Party Patriots. Nearly two dozen participants

in all were CNP members. The group called for a resumption of normal

economic activity, an end to federal control of the nation’s pandemic

response and protection of “individual liberties of our citizens from

unconstitutional power grabs by the federal, state and local

governments.” Weeks later, McEwen and other members hosted a

confidential conference call for activists that included Trump campaign

officials. Their goal was to make recommendations to the campaign and

coordinate efforts to pressure state and federal officials to reopen the

country. According to a recording of the call obtained by the Center

for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning group, McEwen opened with a

prayer: “We would give you the praise in Christ’s name.” He described

government efforts to contain the pandemic as “tyranny.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/27/grim-reality-partisan-pandemic/">Analysis: The grim reality of a partisan pandemic</a>] CNP

member Nancy Schulze told the campaign officials about “a doctors

coalition who are extremely pro-Trump that have been preparing and

coming together for the war ahead in the campaign, on health care.” A

campaign official expressed enthusiasm. “Those are the type of guys that

we should want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the

message,” the official said. The

next few months became a whirlwind for CNP members. At a CNP meeting in

August, the organizers of the health-care initiatives offered more

details on what they were up to, internal videos show: It was an

advertising campaign crafted or promoted by several nonprofits and CNP

allies, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Tom Price,

former health and human services secretary under Trump. In a video

of the session, organizers showed examples of ads featuring doctors in

white lab coats. “And so I remind people that what we’re trying to do is

put on theater here,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president of a group called

Job Creators Network and chief executive of its affiliated foundation.

“It’s the stage. It’s the script and the actors.” During another

CNP session that August, various members also discussed the upcoming

election in breathless terms. Some zeroed in on the proliferation of

mail-in balloting as an ominous trend, claiming it made the system ripe

for fraud. “We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the

lawyers here to tell us what to do,” said Tom Fitton, CNP’s new

president and the leader of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog

group. J. Christian Adams, the former Justice Department official

who served on Trump’s election integrity commission, described mail-in

voting in the video as “the number one left-wing agenda.” He urged CNP

members not to be cowed by criticism about efforts to stop such voting.

“Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re

a racist and so forth,” Adams said. (Fitton and Adams did not respond

to requests for comment for this article. In a previous email, Adams

stood by his remarks. In an interview last fall, Fitton told me: “The

left has war-gamed this out. … And it could cause civil war.”) As

I watched the video of these men and other CNP members describing the

election with such passion, I wondered: Were they trying to outdo one

another in the zeal department in a play to wealthy donors? I knew from

tax filings that donations to some groups led by CNP members had soared

during the Trump years. Donations to Judicial Watch, for example, rose

to $104 million last year from $44 million four years earlier, tax

filings show. In October 2020, I wrote a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/council-national-policy-video/2020/10/14/367f24c2-f793-11ea-a510-f57d8ce76e11_story.html" target="_blank">Post story</a>

about those and other election-related discussions at the group’s

meetings. But of course, I learned later that much more was in play.

Multiple people from far-right groups were promoting a movement to “Stop

the Steal” that included specious claims that Trump won. One of the

most prominent leaders was a former CNP fellow named Ali Alexander,

formerly Ali Akbar. “We will not go quietly. We’ll shut down this

country if we have to,” Alexander said at a Phoenix rally in December,

later leading the crowd in a chant of “1776.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/06/trumps-brazen-attempt-overturn-2020-election-timeline/">Timeline: Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election</a>] At least five other CNP members and their groups worked with other Trump supporters to amplify the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2020/election-integrity/" target="_blank">Stop the Steal claims</a>.

On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark

Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to

support claims of election fraud, according to an email included in a

report this month by Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Three days later, Mitchell joined Trump on a call <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/d45acb92-4dc4-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html" target="_blank">aimed at pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state</a> “to find 11,780 votes,” the report said. <div class="ent-raw-container custom-html"><div class="ent-note"> <div class="ent-note-title">[Read more</div> <div class="ent-note-body"> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/02/25/this-rural-liberal-set-out-talk-his-pro-trump-neighbors/"> This rural liberal set out to talk to his pro-Trump neighbors. It didn’t go well — until it did. </a> </div> <div class="ent-note-body"> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/03/22/latino-men-trump-2020/"> Why did Latino men shift toward Trump in 2020? I looked to my dad for answers.</a>] </div> </div></div> Several CNP members were involved in the organization or promotion of the rallies preceding the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Jenny

Beth Martin was listed as a speaker in promotional materials (though

she did not speak, in the end) and Tea Party Patriots was listed as a

“coalition partner.” CNP member Charlie Kirk — the leader of <a href="https://www.tpusa.com/LIVE?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Grant%20TPUSA&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5561yNig7gIVGvLjBx3ysggmEAAYAiAAEgJ8APD_BwE">Turning Point USA</a>,

a group oriented to conservative students, and Turning Point Action,

its political advocacy arm — offered to transport and house student

protesters. Months earlier, Turning Point Action was behind a secretive

campaign that relied on teenagers to pump out social media postings in

favor of Trump. Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, then a CNP Action board member, praised rallygoers in tweets: “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/ginni-thomas-apology-clarence-thomas-clerks-trump-rally/2021/02/02/a9818cce-6496-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.html" target="_blank">LOVE MAGA people!!!!</a>”

Ultimately, Stop the Steal organizers urged protesters to “take to” the

Capitol steps “to make sure that Congress does not certify the botched

Electoral College” on Jan. 6, according to webpages that have since been

removed. Thomas did not respond to a request for comment. She <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/ginni-thomas-apology-clarence-thomas-clerks-trump-rally/2021/02/02/a9818cce-6496-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.html">wrote a note on social media</a>

stressing that her encouragement came before the violence. Kirk, Martin

and other CNP members who helped the rallies condemned the subsequent

events at the Capitol. “We are shocked, outraged, and saddened,” Martin

told me in an e-mail in January. McEwen also condemned the

insurrection, saying CNP had no role in the events or its members’

activity. “What they do on their own time — I won’t say I don’t care —

we have no interest or capacity to monitor,” McEwen told me earlier this

year. [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/capitol-rally-organizers-before-riots/2021/01/16/c5b40250-552d-11eb-a931-5b162d0d033d_story.html">Rallies ahead of Capitol riot were planned by established Washington insiders</a>] That

reminded me of something he told me last year: CNP itself “doesn’t do

ad campaigns. It doesn’t do brochures. It is a meeting of leaders,” he

said. “Anything that’s done is done by the membership, not by the

Council for National Policy.” <div class="ent-photo-grid ent-photo-grid-2"> <img class="unprocessed _3-to-2 placeholder " src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/resources/img/spacer-gray.png&w=3&h=2" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/OGKIKPA4LMI6ZPVIGCHKCNCZJ4.jpg&w=750&h=500" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/OGKIKPA4LMI6ZPVIGCHKCNCZJ4.jpg&w=243&h=162" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/OGKIKPA4LMI6ZPVIGCHKCNCZJ4.jpg" data-threshold="243" /> </div> <div class="ent-photo-grid-big-caption">[LEFT:

Former vice president Mike Pence recently became a “dues-paying CNP

member,” according to one speaker at a CNP event. (Attila

Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images) RIGHT: Charlie Kirk, center, listens as

President Donald Trump speaks at the 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit

in the East Room of the White House. Kirk, a member of the Council for

National Policy, is leader of Turning Point USA, a group oriented to

conservative students. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)]</div> After

it was clear that Biden was the next president — and nothing was going

to undo that — CNP members and their allies dove headlong into new

initiatives. Much of their activism now seems focused on state

legislatures and election rules. And once again, groups with ties to CNP

appear to be closely coordinating with one another. In March,

two months after Biden’s inauguration, a CNP leader named Kelly

Shackelford hosted a private Zoom session organized by CNP Action.

Shackelford is president of First Liberty Institute, a legal

organization that promotes religious liberties. The call focused on H.R.

1, sweeping reform legislation that Democrats promised would, among

other things, make it far easier for Americans to vote. Shackelford said

the bill represented “the existential threat for our country.” “The

number one priority of the Nancy Pelosi Democrats was to change the

rules for our elections to ensure that the Democrats would never, ever,

ever lose again,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), according to someone

participating on the call. “This bill is a partisan power grab at an

order of magnitude we have never seen.” For nearly an hour,

speakers urged CNP members and their allies to coordinate their efforts

to pressure Congress and sway regular Americans. They recommended the

use of billboards, websites, social media, Internet memes and “on the

street” videos of people opposed to H.R. 1. They suggested organizing

protests at the homes of certain Democratic lawmakers. “Urban art

is another really exceptional strategy, both for the media and for

actually awakening the American people with a visceral campaign,” one

official on the call said. Instead of a Stop the Steal movement, “we

want to establish ‘Stop the Pigs’ or ‘Stop the Corrupt Politicians,’ ”

as social media themes. It was vital, the official said, to “kill this

bill” without getting “trapped in a voter suppression conversation.” In

an interview, Shackelford defended the call. “I’ve looked at that bill.

It’s just crazy stuff,” he told me. He also defended the persuasion

tactics. “I mean, I’m sure everybody on every side does that, right?” At

the same time, CNP members have expanded related campaigns regarding

voter laws. An effort called the Election Transparency Initiative was started with the endorsement of Dannenfelser, who has continued to make <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/11/trumps-fusillade-falsehoods-mail-voting/" target="_blank">dubious claims</a>

about the election. “The integrity of our electoral system was severely

compromised in 2020 when pro-abortion Democrats — utilizing the

COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse — weakened state laws that ensure free

and fair elections,” she said in a Feb. 23 news release. Leonard

Leo and a former Heritage Foundation official have ties to a group

launched last year called the Honest Elections Project. Kenneth

Blackwell took the lead of a group called the <a href="https://americafirstpolicy.com/latest/afpi-announces-chair-and-director-of-the-center-for-election-integrity/">Center for Election Integrity</a>.

He told me election-rule changes during the pandemic to encourage

mail-in balloting created significant vulnerabilities in the electoral

system. He said that allied groups would collaborate to become “force

multipliers” on the issue. Cleta Mitchell and FreedomWorks,

meanwhile, are teaming up for the National Election Protection

Initiative. “What is urgently needed today is the involvement by

conservative and patriotic Americans in the election process at the

local and state levels, challenging the vast resources of the leftist

groups who have dominated election activism for too long,” Mitchell told

Newsmax. By early October, 19 statehouses had passed 33 laws curbing

voting access, according to the <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-october-2021">Brennan Center for Justice</a> in New York. (Mitchell declined to comment for this story.) CNP

members have also joined Advancing American Freedom, a new group

co-founded by Mike Pence. About half of the 40-some people on the

group’s advisory board and its board of directors have been CNP members

or guests in recent years, a review of internal directories and videos

shows. And Pence himself recently became a “dues-paying CNP member,”

according to Feulner’s speech. [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-weighing-2024-run-pence-tests-whether-there-is-political-life-after-trump/2021/10/06/523a1df2-2217-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html">In weighing 2024 run, Pence tests whether there is political life after Trump</a>] Marc

Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, told me that, for AAF, Pence

wanted a combination of people who served in the Trump administration

and those “who represent the more traditional elements of the

conservative movement.” “I think we can marry them together to sort of

build a winning coalition,” Short added. That will be a tall

order. Some conservatives I interviewed for this story said that Trump

had effectively fractured the movement. Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at

the Ethics & Public Policy Center who was previously a speechwriter

for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, said the

conservative movement was in a long decline by the time Trump was

elected. “The conservative movement, I think it was already sort of

stuck in a time warp,” he said. “It was like every day was January 20th,

1981.” That remark stuck with me. It captured a feeling I had

about CNP throughout my efforts to understand the group. In their quest

to remake our country — to purge it of the cultural and political decay

they believe has sapped it of virtue — CNP members are looking backward

to receding triumphs. But it’s clear they’re also looking forward — and

they are as determined as ever to shape the nation’s future. Late

this month CNP leaders and the Conservative Action Project are slated

to host a strategy summit in the nation’s capital for the leaders of

more than 100 conservative groups. They want to seek ways “to slow the

Administration’s left wing policies” and advance a conservative agenda

in Congress and the states, according to an invitation obtained by

American Oversight, a left-leaning group in Washington. The title of the

meeting? “Saving the Country: The Pathway Forward.” Robert O’Harrow Jr. is an investigative reporter at The Post.
=<div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html</a></div><div style="font-size: small;"><div style="">
</div><div style="">How One Conservative Think Tank Is Stocking Trump’s Government</div><div style="">By placing its people throughout the administration, the Heritage Foundation has succeeded in furthering its right-wing agenda.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By Jonathan Mahler</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">June 20, 2018</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On the day after Thanksgiving in 2016, Ed Corrigan, then the vice president for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, was summoned to Trump Tower in New York to join the senior leadership team of the Trump transition. From inside the building where the climactic personnel decisions of “The Apprentice” were once taped, Corrigan oversaw the staffing of 10 different domestic agencies. Donald Trump, the former reality-TV star, was now the president-elect of the United States, and he had an administration to fill.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The job of staffing the government is the first, and in many ways defining, challenge faced by every president. As the size of the government has grown to accommodate the nation’s economy, frequent military interventions and increasingly complex geopolitical obligations, so have the scale and gravity of the task. In 1933, there were just over 200 presidential appointees in the executive and legislative branches. At the end of the Barack Obama’s second term, there were 4,100.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Filling enough of these jobs in time to get the government off the ground on Jan. 20 is difficult in the best of circumstances, which is to say when the president-elect has some sort of pre-existing political infrastructure to draw upon. Even Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, campaigned as a Washington outsider, relied on both his inner circle from the California Statehouse and a kitchen cabinet of mostly self-made millionaires who helped finance his political rise. Trump would be coming to the White House with little more than the remnants of a campaign staff that included his daughter and son-in-law, a contestant from his reality-TV show and his longtime bodyguard. What is more, in the days after his election, Donald Trump replaced the head of his preliminary transition operation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and purged Christie’s allies from the team, throwing away months’ worth of their work recruiting and vetting personnel; a senior Trump aide, Stephen K. Bannon, made a show of gleefully dumping binders filled with résumés into the trash.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In some ways, Trump and Heritage were an unlikely match. Trump had no personal connection to the think tank and had fared poorly on a “Presidential Platform Review” from its sister lobbying shop, Heritage Action for America, which essentially concluded that he wasn’t even a conservative. (“Despite his rhetoric, Trump’s history suggests a reluctance to engage in debates over protecting civil society from the imposition of left-wing values,” it read in part.) After Trump mocked John McCain’s P.O.W. experience in Vietnam, Heritage Action’s chief executive, Michael Needham, called the candidate “a clown” on Fox News and said “he needs to be out of the race.” Trump claimed to want to shake up the Washington establishment. The Heritage Foundation is a Washington institution. Its large, stately headquarters sits just a few blocks from Capitol Hill.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And yet Heritage and Trump were uniquely positioned to help each other. Much like Trump’s, Heritage’s constituency is equal parts donor class and populist base. Its $80 million annual budget depends on six-figure donations from rich Republicans like Rebekah Mercer, whose family foundation has reportedly given Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. But it also relies on a network of 500,000 small donors, Heritage “members” whom it bombards with millions of pieces of direct mail every year. The Heritage Foundation is a marketing company, a branding agency — it sells its own Heritage neckties, embroidered with miniature versions of its Liberty Bell logo — and a policy shop rolled into one. But above all, Heritage is a networking group. It has spent decades fashioning itself into the hub of a constellation of conservative individuals and organizations united by their opposition to government regulations — from taxes to gun control to environmental protections — and socially progressive causes like same-sex marriage.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Feulner’s first law is people are policy,” Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder and former president, told me recently. Feulner was the head of domestic policy for the Trump transition, charting the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and several other agencies. We met late on a Friday afternoon, in a sitting room at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, a private social club founded by a group of Treasury Department officials during the Civil War. At his feet as we spoke sat a small box of table cards for a dinner he was hosting at the club that evening for the newly appointed director of Trump’s National Economic Council, the television personality Larry Kudlow — another name on Heritage’s Project to Restore America list. Now 76, ruddy, white-haired and content, almost jovial, Feulner founded Heritage decades ago as an ambitious young legislative aide with a radical dream built on a simple concept. As he put it, sinking deeper into his club chair: “First, you have to have the right people.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Heritage was born in the spring of 1971 in the basement cafeteria of the United States Capitol. Feulner had just turned 30 and was working for Representative Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican who had written a book, “The Democrat’s Dilemma: How the Liberal Left Captured the Democratic Party,” arguing that left-wing radicals inspired by the Fabian Society, a socialist group in Britain, were secretly trying to turn America into a socialist state via the Democratic Party. As an undergraduate at Regis College, Feulner had been drawn to an emerging conservative movement that saw as its enemy not only Democrats but also moderate Republicans who threatened to do to their party what they believed the Fabians had done to the Democrats. In 1964, as a graduate student at the Wharton School, he organized a campus group to support the insurgent presidential candidacy of his political hero, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Over breakfast at the Capitol, Feulner and another Hill aide, 28-year-old Paul M. Weyrich — later credited with coining the phrase “moral majority” — commiserated over a recent study from the American Enterprise Institute, an established conservative think tank, about a proposed supersonic transport plane. The report could have helped buttress their argument that the government should continue to fund the plane as part of its effort to win the Cold War, but A.E.I. had withheld it until after the Senate voted on the issue so as not to bias the debate. This was, to their thinking, the wrong approach. What if they could create a new sort of think tank, one that would actively seek to cultivate and influence politicians, and in the process advance the cause of movement conservatism?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Soon after, they made their pitch to Joseph Coors, the highly motivated Colorado beer baron who would later, at the suggestion of the Reagan White House aide and future National Rifle Association president Oliver North, wire $65,000 to a Swiss bank account to buy a cargo plane for Nicaraguan rebels. Coors had come to Washington in search of a conservative institution in which to invest. The meeting was held in the office of the irreverent ex-newspaperman and Nixon aide Lyn Nofziger. Weyrich had heard that Coors was also considering investing in A.E.I., which gave Nofziger the idea for “a little artifice,” as the official history of the Heritage Foundation describes it. Before Coors arrived, Nofziger sprinkled some cigar ashes on a thick American Enterprise Institute study resting on his bookshelf. When Coors asked about A.E.I., he took the book off-the-shelf and blew off the ashes. “A.E.I.?” he asked. “That’s what they’re good for — collecting dust.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Coors invested $260,000 in the new venture, and within a few years, Heritage had taken its place at the center of the growing conservative counterestablishment. Its initial fund-raising success foreshadowed the rise of the Republican donor class as a political force: Another early and generous giver was the banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, who went on to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in conservative media outlets and nonprofit organizations that, among other projects, targeted the Clintons during the 1990s. (Heritage trustees used to joke that Coors gave six-packs; Scaife gave cases.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Feulner packaged his fledgling think tank’s ideology into five basic principles: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values and a strong national defense. They would guide Heritage’s agenda, which would be set by Feulner and his senior leadership team. Feulner also anticipated the danger of his new think tank’s being dismissed as a tool of rich Republicans. To build a Heritage member base that would assert the foundation’s anti-establishment identity, he turned to Richard Viguerie, the conservative marketing pioneer known for his high-quality mailing list and his uniquely apocalyptic warnings of imminent national collapse.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Think tanks are sometimes referred to as universities without students, suggesting intellectual diversity within a general philosophical orientation. Heritage, by contrast, was strictly results-oriented. Feulner once likened his strategy to Procter & Gamble’s approach to Crest toothpaste: “They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer’s mind.” One way to promote Heritage’s brand was to inundate Congress with an unending barrage of bite-size “backgrounders”; another was by networking. Heritage hosted weekend retreats for lawmakers, study groups for young congressional staffers and semester-long internships for college students, complete with Heritage housing. In its early years, Heritage took up numerous political battles: It published papers advocating making Social Security voluntary, argued against giving striking workers access to food stamps and warned parents about the danger posed by the advancement of “secular humanism” in public schools. To Feulner, they were all worthy fights, but they were just a prelude to what Heritage’s official history calls “the Big Gamble” — its decision to invest in the presidential candidacy of the 68-year-old Ronald Reagan.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Feulner saw something in Reagan long before he became president. “We had met with him when he was governor in California; we had visited his ranch and seen copies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek with marginal notes in the book,” Feulner told me. “So we knew that he was one of us.” In the run-up to the 1980 election, Heritage spent $250,000 to assemble a comprehensive guidebook for conservative rule that it called “Mandate for Leadership” and aggressively marketed it to members of Reagan’s transition team, in particular Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s chief of staff in California and later became his attorney general in Washington. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The big gamble paid off: Meese told me that Reagan asked that the 1,093-page document be distributed at his first cabinet meeting. Reagan also turned to Heritage and Feulner to help staff and organize his administration. An enduring, mutually beneficial friendship was born. Meese wrote a letter on White House stationery stating that members of Heritage’s President’s Club — at the time, donors of $1,000 or more — would “provide a vital communications link between policymakers and those key people who made possible Reagan’s victory,” as Sidney Blumenthal reported in his 1986 book “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.” The relationship worked both ways. When Reagan’s second term ended, Meese joined Heritage as its first Ronald Reagan Fellow in Public Policy, with an annual salary of more than $400,000. Now 86, he remains at the think tank as distinguished fellow emeritus of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Reagan’s image is everywhere at Heritage, the informal poses and settings — on a horse, on a putting green, relaxing at his ranch — suggesting less a political actor than a beloved family member. But Heritage had its complaints about Reagan at the time. On the first anniversary of his presidency, the think tank issued a report characterizing his tenure as a disappointment to conservatives. Heritage laid much of the blame on personnel who were insufficiently committed to the president’s agenda. “They were looking for competent people,” Nofziger, who had gone on to become a key political strategist for Reagan, later recalled. “I tried to explain to them that the first thing you do is get loyal people, and competence is a bonus.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Over the following decades, Feulner continued to pursue his dream of turning the counterestablishment into the establishment. The prospects had perhaps never looked bleaker than they did in 2012, when Obama was easily elected to his second term. Having just turned 70, Feulner decided that it was time to retire. At that moment in conservative history, it was not difficult for him to see where the future of the think tank lay: the Tea Party. Heritage had helped organize and underwrite the anti-tax, anti-government — and, most of all, anti-Obama — movement, even creating a lobbying organization, Heritage Action, to help harness the energy it unleashed.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A couple of years earlier, in 2010, Feulner heard a talk given by one of the movement’s leading figures, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, at a meeting of a conservative dinner group in Georgetown. “When it was over, Richard Viguerie said to Jim: ‘That was such a fantastic speech. Why don’t you run for president?’ ” Feulner told me, recounting the events of the evening. “DeMint locked eyes with me and said, ‘The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be president of is the Heritage Foundation.’ ”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Feulner decided DeMint was someone to watch, and the next year, the senator earned the highest possible rating on Heritage Action’s new congressional scorecard, which evaluated lawmakers’ voting records on the think tank’s principles — higher than Michele Bachmann and much higher than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell. (“With each vote cast in Congress, freedom either advances or recedes,” Needham said when Heritage Action unveiled the new rating system.) </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">DeMint had fought the federal bailouts of the banks and carmakers, supported school prayer and opposed abortion and Obamacare. No less important, DeMint, who had an M.B.A. from Clemson University, shared the Heritage belief that politics was as much about sales and recruiting as it was about legislating or governing. Before running for office at the age of 47, he had operated his own marketing company; as a senator, he created a political-action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to raise cash for select conservative candidates. He was clearly a skilled fund-raiser, which was a big part of the Heritage job. He would have to be willing to give up his Senate seat to run a think tank, which was maybe not as far-fetched as it sounded. In addition to influence, Heritage offered something the government couldn’t: money. Without even having to taint his reputation by becoming a lobbyist, he would get a roughly 400 percent raise from his government salary, to nearly $900,000 in his first full year.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">DeMint started at Heritage in 2013. He created a new layer of senior staff that included allies from Capitol Hill, in the process effectively demoting many of Heritage’s veteran leaders. He also went on a hiring spree of young conservatives for the think tank’s media and internet operations. “Conservative ideas are invigorating,” DeMint told The New York Times in 2014. “We had allowed them to become too serious.” (DeMint declined to be interviewed for this article.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While Feulner and his senior staff had reserved the right to review policy papers, they generally avoided intervening in the research and publication process. DeMint and his leadership team were much more aggressive. Papers were heavily edited or even withheld from release altogether. Several scholars quit. DeMint replaced them, bringing in as Heritage’s chief economist Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and a founder of the Club for Growth, a lobbying group that advocates cutting taxes.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">DeMint intensified the think tank’s marketing efforts, targeting Obamacare in particular. A Heritage billboard went up in Times Square — “Warning,” it read, “Obamacare may be hazardous to your health” — and DeMint led a “Defund Obamacare Tour” across the country. In Congress, he had been something of a one-man ideological enforcer. Now he had at his disposal the power of an $80 million institution whose name was a one-word shorthand for movement conservatism; the backing of some of the country’s richest, most politically engaged Republicans; and a significant slice of the conservative base. Within months of his arrival, he was pressing House Republicans to send the president a spending bill that wouldn’t fund the Affordable Care Act, thus inviting a government shutdown. “There’s no question in my mind that I have more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator,” he said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2013.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But his most audacious bid for influence came the following year, when he inaugurated the Project to Restore America. “What we learned from talking to Heritage folks who had been in the Reagan administration was that we needed to be in the game early,” Ed Corrigan, one of DeMint’s Capitol Hill hires, told me. With its focus on staffing, the new effort was the logical extension of his fixation on recruiting the right conservatives for Congress, not to mention the concept at the very heart of Feulner’s vision for Heritage. To lead the project, DeMint turned to a woman who had spent decades building Heritage’s network and knew just how to staff a government: Becky Norton Dunlop, a former deputy personnel director for Reagan. “I know this is going to be hard to believe, but he said — and I agreed — that it was highly likely that a conservative would be elected president,” Dunlop told me, recalling her first conversation about the effort with DeMint. “We needed to be prepared.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dunlop’s name may be unfamiliar to most Americans, but she is something of a legend among movement conservatives. She came to Washington in 1973 straight from college to work for the American Conservative Union, the lobbying group best known for organizing the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and later married an aide to Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who gave her away at their wedding. (Her father, a Baptist minister, officiated.) Congress eventually pushed her out of the Interior Department for trying to demote or fire several National Park Service employees and replace them with political appointees. Years later, after a controversial stint as Virginia’s secretary of natural resources — “Gunning for the Environment?” was the headline of a 1997 Washington Post profile in the Style section — she landed at Heritage as its vice president for external relations and has been there ever since.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dunlop tapped her extensive network, groups like the Family Research Council, Liberty University and the Council for National Policy, an organization that brings together advocates of various conservative causes. “I talked to them all,” Dunlop said. “ ‘You need to think about this, and you need to spread the word. If you’re interested, get your house in order, talk to your spouse and get ready, because we need to save our country.’ ”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Not only was Trump an awkward fit for a staunch conservative like DeMint, but the Heritage president had strong ties to two of his primary opponents. His PAC had raised close to $600,000 for Marco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign, and he and Rubio were both associated with the C Street house, a group residence on Capitol Hill affiliated with the Fellowship Foundation, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast. Ted Cruz — to whom DeMint’s PAC had given nearly $1 million for his 2012 Senate run — had been a featured speaker on DeMint’s “Defund Obamacare” tour. Trump’s campaign promises to punish American companies that export jobs were anathema to Heritage’s 45-year history of support for free trade, not to mention the interests of some of its biggest donors. Even as Trump was gaining momentum, some senior staff members continued to resist the idea of embracing him, arguing that it would damage Heritage’s reputation, but DeMint decided to get out ahead of the rest of his party and work with Trump’s insurgent campaign.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">DeMint understood better than most what lit up the conservative base; after all, he had spent years stoking its anger at the Republican establishment. At a private dinner on Capitol Hill in January 2016, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, DeMint was the only one of a group of a dozen conservatives, including Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, who predicted that Trump would win the nomination.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump’s political views were less important than his approach to hiring. With DeMint’s guidance, he could bring in trusted conservatives who supported a Heritage agenda that included opening offshore drilling on federal lands; opposing mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food; reducing regulations on for-profit universities; revoking an Obama executive order on green-energy mandates for federal agencies; phasing out federal subsidies for housing; and opposing marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. “The watchword of personnel is: Get people who you want on the bus, and then figure out what seat you want to put them in,” Dunlop said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In March 2016, the Republican establishment stepped up its effort to stop Trump. More than 100 Republican national-security experts signed an open letter publicly committing to fight his election, calling him a “racketeer” and denouncing his dishonesty and “admiration for foreign dictators.” A number of the signatories were fellows of conservative think tanks; none were affiliated with Heritage at the time. Heritage treated Trump as it would any other candidate, giving his campaign staff more than a dozen briefings and sending them off with decks of cards bearing Heritage policy proposals and market-tested “power phrases.” At the same time, Heritage’s leaders were lobbying furiously behind the scenes to secure senior appointments to Trump’s post-nomination transition team. “It was the top priority for everyone at Heritage,” Dunlop told me.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Later that month, Trump’s campaign lawyer (and future White House counsel) Donald McGahn convened a gathering of conservative leaders at the Capitol Hill offices of his law firm, Jones Day. Only a small group attended: Newt Gingrich, Senator Jeff Sessions, a handful of other sitting lawmakers who were supportive of Trump — and DeMint. “At that time,” Gingrich told me, “Trump’s views were so unknown to the average conservative the concern was, is he going to be reliable?” As the conversation evolved, an idea emerged: What if Trump could present to the public a list of Supreme Court nominees? DeMint enthusiastically volunteered to help provide one. When he returned to Heritage’s offices, though, some senior staffers balked. One concern they raised was that it would be counterproductive for Heritage to explicitly endorse possible judicial appointees: Because the think tank was considered to the right of the Republican mainstream, its approval of candidates could make them toxic in the confirmation process. But DeMint was adamant, insisting that this was an opportunity Heritage should not pass up. The head of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, John Malcolm, ultimately wrote the list in the form of a post for Heritage’s news and commentary website, The Daily Signal. By then, Trump had already singled out Heritage at a news conference, announcing that it was one of the groups he was working with on a Supreme Court list.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Feulner, still active at Heritage as a member of its board, was the first from the think tank to join the Trump transition after the Republican National Convention. “August 2016, Christie calls, and then candidate Trump calls to confirm: Would I take over the domestic side?” Feulner told me. As he saw it, Trump held even more promise for Heritage than Reagan had. “No.1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes, and No.2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed,” Feulner said. “And so if he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet even as he was drilling further into the Trump team, DeMint was running into trouble inside his own building. Over the summer, complaints about his heavy-handed management style started to reach some members of Heritage’s 22-person board. DeMint and his loyalists rejected the criticisms of his leadership, suggesting that they were the work of Mike Needham, the 36-year-old chief executive of Heritage Action. Needham came from a different world than DeMint. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and joined the think tank straight out of Williams College, beginning as Feulner’s research assistant and rising to become his chief of staff. He left in 2007 to work on the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani and then went on to attend Stanford Business School but returned after he graduated. As DeMint and his allies saw it, Needham was trying to orchestrate a palace coup, turning a handful of isolated complaints about his hiring practices and handling of Heritage’s research into a major case against DeMint as part of his own campaign to take control of the think tank. They knew, too, that Needham and Feulner were close and were convinced that Needham was trying to undermine DeMint with Heritage’s founder.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By early November, the tension between DeMint and Needham had escalated, and the senior staff was divided by their respective loyalties. It was just the sort of factionalism that would soon come to define the nascent Trump administration, with its personnel conflicts and firings. As the election approached, it seemed to some at Heritage that DeMint’s future was uncertain. The Republican Party appeared to be headed for defeat and years of soul-searching, which might present a natural occasion for new leadership at the think tank.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On election night, Heritage turned its first floor over to a viewing party with an open bar, chicken wings and red, white and blue cupcakes. The mood grew increasingly celebratory as the evening wore on and Trump’s tally of electoral votes built toward 270. Some staff members stayed until dawn, went out for breakfast and came back for an all-staff meeting called by DeMint in the larger of Heritage’s two auditoriums. “As you know, I’m kind of a serious guy, so it’s rare that I feel giddy,” he began. DeMint said that Heritage had taken a huge risk — “we were criticized by a lot of our friends in the movement for even going to meetings with Trump” — but that it had paid off. “Most of you are too young to remember the old ‘Mission: Impossible’ series on television, but after they had accomplished their impossible mission, they were all sitting around lighting cigarettes, and the commander would always say, ‘I love it when a plan comes together!’ ” (He was most likely recalling another television program, “The A-Team.”)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Corrigan had been in close contact with the Trump campaign for months. Now he told the assembled crowd of about 200 people what Heritage had been doing for the campaign and previewed the opportunities ahead. There were thousands of jobs to fill, and the priority was to fill them with “change agents,” he said. “When it comes to personnel decisions, that is the most frequently asked question, even before ‘Are they qualified?’ ‘Are they a change agent?’ ” In the coming days, employees were encouraged to join the transition and were assured that as long as they were working as volunteers, Heritage could continue to pay their salaries and hold their jobs for them.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Trump transition offices quickly filled with Heritage staff members recruiting and vetting hires for the administration. The upheaval inside the transition caused by Christie’s firing worked to DeMint’s advantage: Pence was an old friend and conservative ally on Capitol Hill. Christie’s departure also opened the way for Rick Dearborn to take control of the daily decision-making. Dearborn, the longtime chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, had already been a strong presence on the transition team. He went back years with Corrigan, who was the director of the Senate’s conservative caucus for nearly a decade before joining Heritage with DeMint. Corrigan had been informally feeding Dearborn names for months.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Matthew Buckham, [dad ed MTG?] a project administrator in Heritage’s communications department who joined the transition to vet ambassadors and diplomats, told me that he and the rest of Heritage’s staff on the transition tried to put forward every Heritage employee who wanted to work for the administration, whether in policy, administration or management jobs. “Any list we touched we made sure had as many Heritage people as possible,” he said. One of Heritage’s labor economists, James Sherk, an advocate of rolling back labor rights, joined the White House domestic-policy council; another, David Kreutzer, who was a co-author of a Heritage policy paper arguing that “no consensus exists that man-made emissions are the primary driver of global warming,” joined the Environmental Protection Agency. Roger Severino, the director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, who has opposed extending civil rights protections to gay, lesbian and transgender people, joined the Department of Health and Human Services to run its Office for Civil Rights. Sean Doocey, a former Heritage employee who had worked at the think tank’s Training and Recruitment Center, joined the Presidential Personnel Office — the little-known agency responsible for recruiting and vetting appointees for the executive branch — as its deputy director.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Heritage helped place countless others, from staff assistants to cabinet secretaries. In some cases, DeMint intervened directly, calling Pence to argue for Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman whose political career DeMint helped start years earlier in South Carolina. Mulvaney is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as this article went to press, he was serving out the remaining time in a stint as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer-protection watchdog agency that he had voted to disband in Congress. (He recently fired all 25 members of the agency’s advisory board.) “Not only were we not going to bash the president,” Buckham told me. “We were going to help him and push our friends into positions of policy and influence.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the spring of 2017, just a few months into his tenure, President Trump expressed his gratitude to both DeMint and Heritage in a speech at the National Rifle Association: “Those people have been fantastic; they’ve been real friends.” And yet even in this moment of triumph, DeMint was losing the battle to keep his job. Emboldened by Trump’s victory, he asked for a new contract on the eve of the inauguration. (He earned $1.2 million the previous year.) Heritage’s three-person leadership team — Barb Van Andel-Gaby, a member of one of the families that founded the multilevel-marketing company Amway; Thomas A. Saunders III, a private-equity executive; and Nersi Nazari, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur — were noncommittal. Soon after, they came to Washington for a few days to perform their own internal investigation of the personnel problems, interviewing various staff members about DeMint’s leadership.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By the time the foundation’s largest donors — $10,000 or more a year — gathered in April 2017 for their annual retreat at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar in San Diego, Heritage’s senior management, like that of the administration it was staffing, was consumed by chaos, confusion, resentments and infighting. DeMint, by now, was blaming Feulner as well as Needham; he was certain that Feulner still effectively controlled the board and was turning it against him. Shortly after DeMint and his management team returned to Washington, he was stripped of his power while his severance package was negotiated. Many of the people he had brought in, including Corrigan, James Wallner (a research executive), Wesley Denton (a communications executive) and Buckham, soon left, too. Rumors swirled that Stephen Bannon would be taking over. He was still at the White House at the time, but he was close to Mercer, and it was no secret that Trump was turning on his power-hungry, attention-seeking chief strategist.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Amid the upheaval, Saunders, the board’s chairman, issued a statement on the ouster. “Heritage is bigger than any one person,” it read. In his first address to the staff, the think tank’s new interim president, Ed Feulner, assured them that Heritage would continue to be “Donald Trump’s favorite think tank.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Heritage’s longer-term future was placed in the hands of an 11-person presidential search committee, made up of trustees. They spent months looking for a candidate who could provide continuity, building on the relationship with Trump that DeMint had established, but also signal a departure from the DeMint era. By last fall, they had assembled a short list that was leaked to The Washington Post. It included Marc Short, the White House legislative director and longtime aide to Mike Pence; Todd Ricketts, the Chicago Cubs co-owner and major Republican donor who had recently been nominated as deputy commerce secretary; and David Trulio, then the vice president for international government affairs at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. None of them got the job. Just as Dick Cheney had once led George W. Bush’s search for a vice president before securing the position for himself, the presidency of Heritage went to the chairwoman of the search committee, Kay Coles James.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">James, who is 69, is an almost total anomaly in the political world: a black female Republican who supports Donald Trump. In her first address to the Heritage staff, she spoke about her difficult childhood in Richmond, Va., with an absentee father and a mother on welfare. The hiring of a black woman as its president seemed like a coup for an institution that has been widely accused of representing only the interests of white men. “She did not get the job because of her gender or race,” Feulner told me. “She got it because she’s such an extraordinary individual. My only regret is that she’s not 10 years younger.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In many respects, James does have the perfect résumé for Heritage. She served under Reagan and George Bush and was the director of the office of personnel management for George W. Bush. Along the way, she worked for several conservative organizations, including Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and served on the board of Focus on the Family, the evangelical group known for its opposition to abortion, premarital sex and gay and transgender rights. In 2005, she did a brief stint with a defense contracting firm whose founder, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty a year later to bribing a congressman with more than $1 million in return for favors and earmarks. James went on to start her own nonprofit, the Gloucester Institute, which describes itself as a leadership training center; it offers mentoring and networking programs to black and Latino undergraduate and graduate students. According to Gloucester’s 990 tax form, she earned $50,000 as president of the organization in 2016, the year before she became president of Heritage.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">James worked on the Trump transition, overseeing the White House’s budget and personnel management offices. In March, on a Politico podcast, she said that she had been eager to join the administration to work on the president’s “urban agenda.” She was blocked by Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former “Apprentice” villain and director of communications for the White House Office of the Public Liaison, who during the campaign was charged with African-American outreach. “The way it was described to me is she approached the whole thing like it was ‘The Apprentice,’ ” James said on the podcast. “So she looked around Washington and said, ‘O.K., who do I need to get rid of first?’ ” (Newman herself was pushed out last year.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I met James, who has short, graying hair and favors colorful blazers, in May in her new Heritage office, which is enormous and looks out at the Capitol. After we settled onto a large, comfortable couch, she described her new job at Heritage as “the crown jewel” of her career in the conservative movement. I asked James how she thought Trump was doing. “People are focused up here on the trouble and all of the noise that you hear in Washington,” she said, gesturing at eye level. “But down here, the bass notes are strong and loud. There’s a lot of good that is going on, but we are in such a partisan, vitriolic atmosphere in this town right now that very often we overlook the bass notes.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In recent months, James has applauded Trump’s tax cuts and deregulatory agenda; his crackdown on illegal immigration; his choice of the hard-liner John Bolton as national security adviser; his effort to rescind funding for a variety of federal programs, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program; and an executive order that will curtail the amount of time that federal union representatives can spend helping colleagues file claims for workplace grievances, including sexual harassment. Part of her task at Heritage, James told me, will be to expose a more diverse audience to the think tank’s ideology. “If you talk to anyone about shaping the future of this nation, they will tell you that there are certain demographics that must be touched — millennials, women and minorities,” she said. “And so I tell people that unless our ideas are reaching those demographics, then we are going to be looking at a shrinking minority view in this country.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A few weeks later, on a rainy morning in Washington, Heritage held a party for the dedication of a new dormitory for its interns, a gift from the family of E.W. Richardson, a World War II bomber pilot who went on to become a successful Ford dealer. Donors ate finger food and drank mimosas under a tent on Heritage’s rooftop. Some wore name tags on their lapels and dresses identifying them by their level of giving; those who had added Heritage to their wills wore an extra ribbon: “Legacy Society.” James was the only person of color I saw in a crowd that easily exceeded 200 people.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Forty-five years after its founding, Heritage may finally be the establishment, but its self-image remains fixed in time. It is, as ever, the nation’s last line of defense against the advancing forces of progressivism, perpetually in need of financial reinforcements. Speaking to the gathered group of donors and Heritage staff members, James, standing beside an American flag and a large portrait of Richardson in his flight gear, described the new intern dorm as an expansion of the think tank’s “base of operations” against what she characterized as a “very determined and very well-resourced foe. They want to change America into something she was never intended to be. And they might succeed if we don’t fight every single day of our lives.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, Heritage marked the occasion with news releases and a booklet, “Blueprint for Impact,” promoting how much of Heritage’s agenda Trump had already embraced — 64 percent, according to the think tank’s analysis. Heritage’s director of congressional and executive branch relations, Thomas Binion, went on “Fox & Friends” to discuss the report, saying the think tank was “blown away” by Trump’s performance. The president, apparently watching in the White House, promptly tweeted, inaccurately: “The Heritage Foundation has just stated that 64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than even Ronald Reagan.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The president and his favorite think tank continue to draw closer. Administration officials speak regularly at Heritage and give frequent interviews to The Daily Signal. In April, Pruitt and Attorney General Jeff Sessions were both scheduled to speak at a Heritage donor conference in Palm Beach, Fla. (Sessions, under fire from the president because of the Russia investigation, dropped out.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Even with DeMint gone, Feulner is enjoying unique access to the Trump administration. During one of our conversations, he told me he had recently accompanied the vice president on Air Force Two to Hillsdale College, a Christian stronghold of conservative thought in Michigan. And last year, he was the lone think-tank head invited to a White House dinner for the conservative movement’s “grass-roots leaders.” He was seated right beside the president. Feulner’s dream had finally been fulfilled. I asked him if he believed the Trump presidency would be transformative for the country. “I think we’re very, very optimistic,” he said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">There is still a huge number of vacancies across the administration. At this point in their presidencies, Obama had filled 584 of his politically appointed, Senate-confirmed positions, and George W. Bush had filled 652; Trump has filled just 450. The Presidential Personnel Office was portrayed in a recent Washington Post article as a frat house, with widespread workplace vaping and happy-hour drinking games involving Smirnoff Ice.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The turnover rates have also been historic. In March, The New York Times reported that nine of the top 21 White House and cabinet positions have been emptied and refilled at least once; neither Obama nor Bush had lost a single cabinet member by that point in their administrations. Since taking office, Trump has replaced more than half of his 65 most influential advisers, according to a tracker created by the Brookings Institution. Christie recently laid the blame for the turnover on what he described as a “brutally unprofessional” transition, saying that proper vetting would have caught a lot of Trump’s most problematic appointees. A number of other senior advisers seem to be on shaky ground with the president, and an exodus is anticipated after the November midterm elections.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct voter-fraud commission, which was created to find evidence to support Trump’s baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a sense, the transition is still going, and as long as Trump remains in office it may never end. “I get calls from people every day who still want to go in,” Dunlop told me. “Or I’ll hear from the White House, or I’ll run into someone at a reception or over coffee, and I’ll say, ‘I’ve got a name for you. I’ll send it along.’ ”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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testifies 2017?<div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation. He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly those tied in with Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A hard right party commonly disparaged as fascist, UKIP sought to restore what it saw as true conservatism. Bannon was greatly invested in the USA Tea Party ‘movement’ at the time, as evidenced by his movie productions and speaking engagements, so he viewed UKIP as a natural comrade in arms.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">UKIP had been stagnating as a political force while known as a single platform party, focused almost entirely on immigration crackdown and demand for UK’s exit from the European Union. Co-founder Farage had returned to lead the party for a 2nd time in November 2010 — later in the same week as the first Tea Party Republicans were elected in the US midterms — after failing in his bid to become House of Commons Speaker earlier that year, and began to incorporate a wider variety of populist messaging with a focus on local elections to increase growth.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Soon after Bannon took over Breitbart in the summer of 2012, he brought Farage to the USA for a grand tour of New York and Washington, D.C. During this trip, Bannon introduced Farage to a number of movers & shakers, including the staff of Jeff Sessions, the then-senator from Alabama who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Throughout the previous year, a UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge was garnering a lot of press for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox, after being founded in 1997 by Fox and Reagan BFF/ex-UK-PM Margaret Thatcher, its stated goal was to protect the 80's holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special relationship’ from “the European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States.”</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Atlantic Bridge fell into the sea in late 2011, after extensive investigations found Fox had been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” by internationally courting a variety of corporate lobbyists and military contractors via the dark money donated to Bridge as a falsely-labeled charity. Fox then resigned his Cabinet position, taking a few others down with him.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">One of those affected was yet another powerful hedge fund manager, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, climate-change denier & funder, and longtime Tory/Conservative donor named Michael Hintze who provided the majority of those donations and lent his private jet to Fox for schmoozy jaunts to meet with D.C. defence contractors. With a strong interest in geopolitical wargames, a habit of supporting Defence Secretaries, and a predilection for hiring senior military officials at his powerful firm Convertible & Quantitative Strategies, it’s small wonder Hintze sought to establish a Western security superhighway before the Bridge collapsed.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Back in 2007, however, Atlantic Bridge was still in its prime, and it gained even more power when a giant among US political activist groups began an official partnership with it. The American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, so they may further the ideals exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">ALEC’s decades-old modus operandi is to write complete versions of new legislation, which invariably benefits only its powerful corporate members, to be passed off to complicit politicians and introduced in Congress as original products. An official ALEC newsletter from Dec 2007 bragged of the Bridge Project’s new plans to enact “a series of events aimed at conservative leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia — exposing them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.”</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Catherine Bray is pictured in the newsletter as the Director of International Relations for Atlantic Bridge; she had previously worked for prominent UKIP member & climate change denier Roger Helmer and subsequently worked for Tory Daniel Hannan, “the man who brought you Brexit.” In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen, Atlantic Bridge’s Washington DC Director, and J.D. Gordon, a retired Pentagon spokesman and well-traveled defense lobbyist. Lee Cohen is now an ardent Trump supporter, publishing an IJR essay in November 2016 predicting Trump and new UK PM Theresa May will be the new Reagan & Thatcher.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director for Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier Cain promised to reduce corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA. Cain began briefly leading Obama in the polls at that time and was the most reported-on GOP candidate in 2011, but quit the race less than 2 months later after sexual misconduct charges arose.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Gordon was slightly controversial when he originally joined up as one of Cain’s foreign policy advisers, as he had recently left a fellowship position at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank (or perhaps hate group) devoted to advancing founder and former Reagan official Frank Gaffney’s pet cause of extreme Islamophobia. Cain’s campaign also absorbed the staff of Gordon’s own embryonic thinktank, the Center for Security and Democracy, which included a former Heritage Foundation manager.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">J.D. Gordon is most recently known for his work as a key foreign policy adviser to Cain clone Donald Trump, who counted Herman among his early campaign rally speakers/surrogates, and about whom Gordon wrote a pro-Trump Breitbart article in April 2016. Gordon was also Jeff Sessions’ deputy, allegedly traveled to Budapest six times during the campaign, participated in the infamous July 2016 Republican National Convention meeting — hosted by the Heritage Foundation — involving co-adviser Carter Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and is said to have previously recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow. Gordon also claims he personally asked to water down the RNC platform with noncommittal language omitting lethal weapons support for Ukraine, and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, then frequently cited as one of the farthest-right sitting Senators. An ardent tax reformer, Family member,[C STREET?]  and anti-immigration crusader, he was on board with the Tea Party from its inception in early 2009, setting the stage with the establishment of his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC in 2008. The Fund attacked Republicans for being too ‘moderate’ and then gave millions to the successful 2010 Senate campaigns of such first-time Tea Party candidates as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey. Also in 2010, DeMint introduced the first bill intended to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few months later with his first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage, so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he endorsed Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">A large chunk of the money for that tactical assault was provided by Robert Mercer, with other miniature morsels of Mercer Money going to DeMint, Toomey, and Rubio at various times. Unsurprisingly, Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time, with Lee and Demint tying for the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">DeMint resigned from the Senate less than two months after the 2012 election in order to become president of Heritage — a thinktank which shares an enormous number of historical, practical, and membership commonalities with ALEC — by which time Atlantic Bridge had been dead [in the UK] for over a year. Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, Liam Fox, J.D. Gordon, and/or any of the other Atlantic Bridge ambassadors still managed to make their way to any one of the legendary parties thrown at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a four-story townhouse rented (?) by Breitbart near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">As for the gregarious and cigar-chomping heavy drinker Nigel Farage, we don’t have to imagine anything. He was treated as the guest of honor at a Breitbart Embassy dinner & cocktail party in September 2014, where the stars of the new right rubbed shoulders with journalists from across the media spectrum. Other guests that night included LifeZette’s Laura Ingraham, a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Steve Bannon had been partially living at the Embassy since at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially expected to serve as a means to rub shoulders with the movers & shakers of the DC political elite. “Andrew [Breitbart] said that if you didn’t have a place within spitting distance of the Capitol, no one would come,” Bannon told The Washington Post at an Embassy blowout schmooze-and-boozefest CPAC rager in 2014. “He loved to throw big parties.”</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">But regardless of the precise circumstances by which Bannon became enmeshed with the UK’s conservative elite prior to mid-2012, engrossing as the detailed story may be, his friendship with UKIP & Brexit’s Farage tells us all we need to know. As such, we should be unsurprised to learn it was allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.</div>

<a href="http://fusion.kinja.com/koch-brothers-former-right-hand-mans-new-gig-helping-r-1796032402">http://fusion.kinja.com/koch-brothers-former-right-hand-mans-new-gig-helping-r-1796032402</a>Congratulations are in order for Jim DeMint: Saying that his move signals a “new mission” for the Tea Party, the former senator has gone from presiding over <a href="http://gawker.com/leaked-files-show-how-the-heritage-foundation-navigates-1727706821" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">one of the most well-funded institutions</a> in the dark-money ecosystem to advising one of the most radical. DeMint, the Republican who retired from the Senate in 2013 to run the Heritage Foundation has been named a “senior advisor” to the Convention of States Project—a nationwide effort <a href="http://fusion.kinja.com/right-wing-billionaires-are-buying-themselves-a-new-con-1793960357#ga=2.254206336.924033623.1497300927-1445517093.1479398248" rel="nofollow" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">backed by billionaires like the Kochs and the Mercers</a> to revise the United States Constitution without the approval of Congress.<p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A hero to Tea Party Republicans, DeMint <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/in-the-demint-era-at-heritage-a-shift-from-policy-to-politics.html?r=0" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">was already perceived</a> to have led Heritage away from its policy-oriented beginnings, and <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/02/why-jim-demint-was-ousted-from-heritage-237876" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">according to Politico</a>, his continued support for Trump drove a wedge between him and the Heritage Foundation’s board of directors. They voted early last month to remove DeMint as president of the organization amid a broader debate in the conservative establishment over what posture to take towards an increasingly volatile Trump administration.

Various activist groups have sought to amend the constitution on specific points through an Article V convention before, but few have been as well-funded or as ideologically driven as the Convention of States Project, steeped in evangelical Christianity and backed by millions of dollars in dark money. Between 2011 and 2015, the group’s <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3525760-Citizens-for-Self-Governance-2015-Form-990.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">budget</a> more than tripled to $5.7 million—buoyed by donations from the Mercer Family Foundation and various donor-advised funds linked to the Koch brothers. (Eric O’Keefe, a longtime Koch operative, co-founded the Convention of States Project’s parent organization, Citizens for Self Governance, and serves as chairman of its board of directors.) Two thirds of state legislatures (so, 34) must pass resolutions petitioning Congress to hold an Article V convention in order to make it happen; so far, <a href="https://www.cosaction.com/missouri_passes_convention_of_states_application_becoming_12th_state_to_do_so" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">12 have passed</a> the Convention of States application.<p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Convention of States is a much more radical approach to a constitutional convention” than earlier efforts, Arn Pearson, General Counsel at the Center for Media and Democracy, told Fusion. “Their budget has increased dramatically. This is their effort to push the state agenda as far as they can while they hold peak power.”One Convention of States lobbyist (a member of the Utah legislature in his spare time) lauded <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3525790-Ivory-Texas-Plan-Email-2-25-16.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">Texas governor and Article V proponent Greg Abbott’s plan</a> for several proposed amendments, including one that would prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within a single state—a proposal that would effectively negate what little remains of progress made during the New Deal and the Civil Rights eras. “I see these guys as the new Confederacy,” Pearson said. “They want to have it so that states are no longer bound by federal law. They want the ability to opt out.”<div class="js_ad-mobile-dynamic js_ad-dynamic" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“People are disgusted with Washington,” <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/12/jim-demint-joins-group-that-wants-to-amend-constitution-tea-party/102748540/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">DeMint told USA Today</a>. “They are ready to move power back closer to home.” A fitting cause for the gentleman from South Carolina—although, actually, the preferred terminology these days isn’t “states’ rights” but “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/12/05/next-up-for-alec-taming-the-federal-government/?utm_term=.48b55023830f" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: inherit;">local control</a>.==

bails to head heritage:  <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/06/1293171/jim-demint-resign/">http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/06/1293171/jim-demint-resign/</a>

In an unexpected move, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), an arch-conservative and leader of the Tea Party movement, is <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323501404578161613763222762.html">resigning</a> his seat in order to head up the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington DC.

DeMint has been among the most extreme members of the Senate since first getting elected in 2004, drawing a hard-right line on issues from unions to LGBT rights to abortion and beyond.

Here’s a look back at some of DeMint’s Senate highlights:

1. Stood with Akin after “legitimate rape” remarks. Following Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/19/711991/gop-senate-candidate-victims-of-legitimate-rape-wont-become-pregnant/">infamous statement</a> that victims of “legitimate rape” can’t become pregnant, DeMint was one of the first major conservatives to <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/10/25/1082501/despite-legitimate-rape-comments-right-wing-groups-continue-to-spend-for-akin/">stand with</a> the Missouri congressman. DeMint even used his political action committee to donate $90,000 to Akin’s campaign and used its network to raise hundreds of thousands more. “We support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us,” DeMint’s group said.

2. Led the opposition against Obamacare. In 2009, during the height of the GOP’s opposition to health care reform, DeMint told a conference call of conservative activists that, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/07/white-house-plans-to-use-demints-waterloo-quote-to-rally-the-troops/">it will be his Waterloo</a>. It will break him.” Ironically, DeMint <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/20/demint-explains-early-support-for-romneycare/">once supported</a> Mitt Romney’s health care reform in Massachusetts, the law on which Obamacare is based.

3. Wants to prevent gay or unmarried teachers from teaching in public schools. In 2010, DeMint “said if someone is openly homosexual, they <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/02/demint-gays-unmarried-pregnant-women-teachers_n_748131.html">shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom</a> and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.” During his first Senate campaign in 2004, DeMint agreed with the state party’s platform barring gay teachers from public schools, claiming that the government shouldn’t endorse <a href="http://www.wistv.com/global/Story.asp?s=2380660">certain behaviors</a>.....

</blockquote>

==

... "<a href="http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/toxic_power_the_20_most_expose.html" target="_hplink">Both senators from eight states of the 'Toxic 20' states</a> -- Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi -- supported a resolution by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., to repeal the health-protective mercury and air toxics standard."

==

democ now

ceo jpm dimon kiss ass:

SEN. JIM DEMINT: Thank you, Mr. Dimon. I really appreciate you voluntarily coming in to talk with us. It is important that we talk about things happening in the industry. It will, I think, advise us, help us and—as we look forward, and hopefully it will contribute to best practice scenario in the industry, and I appreciate your emphasis on a continuous quality improvement. We can hardly sit in judgment of your losing $2 billion. We lose twice that every day here in Washington and plan to continue to do that every day. And it’s comforting to know that even with the $2 million—$2 billion loss in a trade last year, your company still, I think, had a $19 billion profit. During that same period, we lost over a trillion dollars. So if we had a clawback provision, none of us would be getting paid here. So the intent today is really not to sit in judgment, but to maybe understand better what happened....

===

one of most conservative

wants to defund NPR

kingmaker/funding provider

<div class="storyDateline">Reporting from Washington —</div>

Republican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint's political action committee, which is trying to elect like-minded conservatives to the Senate, made a fundraising push Friday as it neared its $5-million goal.

The committee already has invested $4.9 million in 11 Senate campaigns, including those of <a title="Christine O'Donnell" class="taxInlineTagLink" id="PEPLT00007608" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/government/christine-odonnell-PEPLT00007608.topic">Christine O'Donnell</a> in Delaware, Rand Paul in Kentucky and others.

On Friday, DeMint highlighted <a title="Joe Miller" class="taxInlineTagLink" id="PEPLT00007606" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/joe-miller-PEPLT00007606.topic">Joe Miller</a> in Alaska, who beat Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the primary but now faces a write-in challenge from the incumbent, as well as the campaigns of Ken Buck in Colorado, <a title="Dino Rossi" class="taxInlineTagLink" id="PEPLT005676" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/dino-rossi-PEPLT005676.topic">Dino Rossi</a> in Washington and <a title="Sharron E. Angle" class="taxInlineTagLink" id="PEPLT000135" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/government/sharron-e.-angle-PEPLT000135.topic">Sharron Angle</a> in Nevada.

C street

met w/ honduran coup prez?

----

TP:

<a href="http://politicalchili.com/2010/03/origins-of-the-tea-party-movement-part-iiib-kochs-inside-game/">Koch Industries—Executing The Inside Game</a>

“On the day in October 2009, David Koch announced he had planned the Tea Party movement Koch gave Senator Jim DeMint the <a href="http://www.americansforprosperity.org/102009-americans-prosperity-foundation-honors-sen-jim-demint-washington-award">[Americans for Prosperity Foundation] Washington Award</a>.”

I had already determined Sen. Jim DeMint’s obvious role – he has repeatedly endorsed “tea party” candidates* throughout the country and a little research at <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/">www.opensecrets.org</a> produced the information he has received $62K in donations from Koch Industries.  (In addition to some nice contributions by Club for Growth and AT&T – net neutrality anyone?  And, of course, DeMint’s protégés would be more than happy to vote him in as the next Leader of the Senate – either as majority or as minority).  I doubt his vanity is behind this, however.  His principles, maybe -

<a href="http://blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2010/04/21/senator-demint-to-brody-file-tea-party-movement-will-bring.aspx">Senator Jim DeMint</a>: “Well, I think people are seeing this massive government growing and they’re realizing that it’s the government that’s hurting us and I think they’re turning back to God in effect is our salvation and government is not our salvation and in fact more and more people see government as the problem and so I think some have been drawn in over the years to a dependency relationship with government and as the Bible says you can’t have two masters and I think as people pull back from that they look more to God. It’s no coincidence that socialist Europe is post-Christian because the bigger the government gets the smaller God gets and vice-versa. The bigger God gets the smaller people want their government because they’re yearning for freedom.”

As he ranks as one of the poorest Senators, money does not appear to be his issue.  His “C Street” association with “The Family” and the above statement indicates he’s much more dangerous – an ideologue.

And now <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/09/did_jim_demintjust_take_contro.html" target="_blank">Senator DeMint</a> has anointed himself king/dictator/president to decide what will get passed in the Senate.  A one man bandit holding up the Senate.  If the Dems hold the Senate, is this what we can expect for the next two years from the Senate?  If the GOTP takes over the Senate, will he continue this tactic to for the GOP to get in line behind him?

I don’t think this is how our democratic republic is supposed to work.   And I think this is a warm up to protect the interests of the Koch brothers and their kind who have decided to put their interests ahead of the people in this country.  It seems money (for them) can buy happiness.  For the rest of us…not so much.

*  Christine O’Donnell, Ovide Lamontagne, Ken Buck, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Joe Miller, Dino Rossi (an establishment candidate who beat the Tea Party/Palin endorsed Clint Didier,.  Chuck DeVore (an establishment candidate who lost to Fiorina)

<a href="http://politicsunspun.com/?p=244">http://politicsunspun.com/?p=244</a>

===

<h3>Leadership PAC: </h3>

<a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00448696&cycle=2010">Senate Conservatives Fund</a>

</div>

<h2 class="ruleAbove"><a name="fundraising" id="fundraising"> </a>Career Fundraising</h2>

<table><tbody><tr class="rowTint"><td>1989 - 2010 Total Receipts:</td><td class="number"><img src="/4d089189-38d6-590a-a57d-5f421ce81716.gif"/> $17,204,404</td></tr><tr><td>1989 - 2010 Total Spent:</td><td class="number"><img src="/a1a71ac8-ee08-55a3-b8ff-7dc80af0f030.gif"/> $14,758,643</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td>Debts:</td><td class="number"><img src="/960639c3-518a-5a7a-9ba1-075398dfec48.gif"/> $0</td></tr><tr><td>Last Report:</td><td>Thursday, September 30, 2010</td></tr></tbody></table>

</div>

<h2>Top 5 Contributors, 1998 - 2010</h2>

</div>

<table><tbody><tr class="rowTint"><th>Contributor</th><th>Total</th><th>Indivs</th><th>PACs</th></tr></tbody><tbody /></table>

<table><tbody><tr><td>Club for Growth</td><td class="number">$153,996</td><td class="number">$147,100</td><td class="number">$6,896</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td>Scana Corp</td><td class="number">$77,725</td><td class="number">$62,725</td><td class="number">$15,000</td></tr><tr><td>Cancer Centers of the Carolinas</td><td class="number">$71,500</td><td class="number">$71,500</td><td class="number">$0</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td>Nelson, Mullins et al</td><td class="number">$67,374</td><td class="number">$48,874</td><td class="number">$18,500</td></tr><tr><td>Edens & Avant</td><td class="number">$60,000</td><td class="number">$60,000</td><td class="number">$0</td></tr></tbody></table>

SCANA Corporation (SCANA), through its wholly owned regulated subsidiaries, is primarily engaged in the generation, transmission, distribution and sale of electricity in parts of South Carolina and in the purchase, transmission and sale of natural gas in portions of North Carolina and South Carolina. Through a wholly owned nonregulated subsidiary, SCANA markets natural gas to retail customers in Georgia and to wholesale customers primarily in the southeast. Other wholly owned nonregulated subsidiaries provide fiber optic and other telecommunications services and provide service contracts to homeowners on certain home appliances and heating and air conditioning units. A service company subsidiary of SCANA provides administrative, management and other services to SCANA and its subsidiaries.  Ceo funded b2 and McC

<h1>Nelson, Mullins et al lawyers</h1>

<h2><a id="fundraising" name="fundraising"> </a>Fundraising/Spending by Cycle</h2>

2010 election</td><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Total Receipts</td><td bgcolor="#cccc99" align="right">$260,900</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Total Spent  (<a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expenditures.php?cmte=C00278895&cycle=2010">view expenditures</a>)</td><td bgcolor="#cccc99" align="right">$319,923</td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Begin Cash on Hand</td><td bgcolor="#cccc99" align="right">$62,767</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td bgcolor="#ffffff">End Cash on Hand</td><td bgcolor="#cccc99" align="right">$3,744</td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Debts</td><td bgcolor="#cccc99" align="right">$0</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Date of last report</td><td nowrap="nowrap" bgcolor="#cccc99" align="right">October 13, 2010</td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Contributions from this PAC to federal candidates (<a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cmte=C00278895&cycle=2010">list recipients</a>)

(72% to Democrats, 28% to Republicans)</td><td bgcolor="#cccccc" align="right">$200,050</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td bgcolor="#ffffff">Contributions to this PAC from individual donors of $200 or more ( <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cmte=C00278895&cycle=2010">list donors</a>)</td><td bgcolor="#cccccc" align="right">$162,570</td></tr></tbody></table>

</div>

<div class="viewMoreText">partner: Mr. Farrier has tried numerous cases in nonjury settings and has successfully resolved litigation through pre-trial dismissals and settlements. He has represented clients ranging from international insurance companies and oil conglomerates to national for-profit hospitals to local developers, investors, and closely held corporations. These cases have involved claims of ground water contamination, patent infringement, unfair competition and trade practices, violations of healthcare regulations, breaches of contract or fiduciary duties, partnership and shareholder disputes, thefts of trade secrets, bad faith denial of insurance coverage, and other allegations of improper conduct in business transactions. http://www.nelsonmullins.com/attorneys/richard-farrier

</div>

</div>

<h2>Top 5 Industries, 1998 - 2010</h2>

</div>

<table><tbody><tr class="rowTint"><th>Industry</th><th>Total</th><th>Indivs</th><th>PACs</th></tr></tbody><tbody /></table>

<table><tbody><tr><td>Retired</td><td class="number">$1,120,618</td><td class="number">$1,120,618</td><td class="number">$0</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td>Health Professionals</td><td class="number">$834,505</td><td class="number">$607,005</td><td class="number">$227,500</td></tr><tr><td>Republican/Conservative</td><td class="number">$801,888</td><td class="number">$723,229</td><td class="number">$78,659</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td>Real Estate</td><td class="number">$760,627</td><td class="number">$668,127</td><td class="number">$92,500</td></tr><tr><td>Lawyers/Law Firms</td><td class="number">$736,548</td><td class="number">$606,250</td><td class="number">$130,298</td></tr></tbody></table>

</div>

<h2><a id="funds" name="funds"> </a>Source of Funds</h2>

</div>

<table><tbody><tr class="rowTint"><td><img src="/f883a6f4-461c-5681-9f0e-39e4abd989ef.gif"/></td><td>Individual Contributions</td><td>$12,002,559</td><td>(70%)</td></tr><tr><td><img src="/1d8757ab-cb95-5a16-bb82-9038a38a5fbc.gif"/></td><td>PAC Contributions</td><td>$4,247,868</td><td>(25%)</td></tr><tr class="rowTint"><td><img src="/59436365-5a11-5551-883c-29e6ff8468d3.gif"/></td><td>Candidate self-financing</td><td>$10,000</td><td>(0%)</td></tr><tr><td><img src="/6cb753e6-8a0f-5e46-9717-a479ea207204.gif"/></td><td>Other</td><td>$943,977</td><td>(5%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

</div>

<div id="disclaimer">NOTE: All the numbers on this page are for the 1998 - 2010 election cycles and based on Federa</div>

---

James Warren "Jim" DeMint is the Junior <a title="U.S. Senate" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S.Senate">Senator</a> for the state of <a title="Category:Members of the U.S. Congress from South Carolina" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Members_of_the_U.S.Congress_from_South_Carolina">South Carolina</a>. He is a <a title="United States Republican Party" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=United_States_Republican_Party" class="mw-redirect">Republican</a> and was first elected in 2004. (<a rel="nofollow" title="http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/congdist/pagecgd109_sc2.gif" href="http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/congdist/pagecgd109_sc2.gif" class="external text">map</a>)

<h2>Contents</h2>

[<a href="javascript:toggleToc()" id="togglelink" class="internal">hide</a>]</div>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Record_and_controversies">1 Record and controversies</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Environmental_record">1.2 Environmental record</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Block_of_the_Legislative_Transparency_and_Accountability_Act_of_2007">1.2.1 Block of the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#National_security_and_foreign_policy">1.3 National security and foreign policy</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Biography">2 Biography</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Money_in_politics">3 Money in politics</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Committees_and_Affiliations">4 Committees and Affiliations</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Committees">4.1 Committees</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Committee_assignments_in_the_109th_Congress_.282005-2006.29">4.1.1 Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#More_Background_Data">5 More Background Data</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Contact">6 Contact</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Campaign_contact_information">6.1 Campaign contact information</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Twitter">6.2 Twitter</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Articles_and_resources">7 Articles and resources</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Resources">7.1 Resources</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Local_blogs_and_discussion_sites">7.2 Local blogs and discussion sites</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Articles">7.3 Articles</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#Articles_By_DeMint">7.3.1 Articles By DeMint</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#General_Articles">7.3.2 General Articles</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

<h2>Record and controversies</h2>

<div style="border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0.5em 0.75em; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll rgb(220, 232, 248); padding: 0.25em; border: 1px solid rgb(92, 121, 181);">General information about important bills and votes for can be found in Congresspedia's <a title="Category:U.S. legislation" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:U.S._legislation">articles on legislation</a>. You can add information you find on how Jim DeMint voted by clicking the "[edit]" link to the right and typing it in. Remember to <a title="Help:References" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Help:References">cite your sources</a>!</div>

DeMint voted for the <a title="Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002">Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002</a> that started the Iraq War.<a title="" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_DeMint#cite_note-0">[1]</a>

<div style="border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0.5em 0.75em; background: none 0% 0% repeat scroll rgb(220, 232, 248); padding: 0.25em; border: 1px solid rgb(92, 121, 181);">For more information see the chart of <a title="U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Iraq War" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._House_of_Representatives_votes_on_the_Iraq_War">U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Iraq War</a>.</div>

<h3>Environmental record</h3>

For more information on environmental legislation, see the <a title="Portal:Energy and Environment Policy (U.S.)" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Energy_and_Environment_Policy_%28U.S.%29">Energy and Environment Policy Portal</a>

<h4>Block of the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007</h4>

On June 28, 2007, Sen. DeMint blocked a deal between Senate Majority Leader <a title="Harry Reid" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Harry_Reid">Harry Reid</a> (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader <a title="Mitch McConnell" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mitch_McConnell">Mitch McConnell</a> (R-Ky.) that would have started up long-stalled conference proceedings on the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007. DeMint made an objection to the agreement by phone to the Senate floor, minutes after McConnell had said Republicans would drop their objections to naming conferees. DeMint argued that he would not let the bill proceed until certain earmark reforms were accepted. He stated, "We will not have earmark reform during this year’s appropriations process. That is why this is being done," DeMint charged on the floor, adding later that "the only reason to go to conference with [the rules] in is to take them out." Democrats responded, Harry Reid commenting, "Here we are, seconds from going to conference and a call comes in to the Republican cloak room. I understand the Minority Leader has a responsibility to take that ... but the eyes of the nation are on us... to not let us go to conference on some petty issue that my friend has raised is really bad.”

<dl>

<dd>Main article: <a title="Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Legislative_Transparency_and_Accountability_Act_of_2007">Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007</a></dd>

</dl>

<h3>National security and foreign policy</h3>

In early March 2007, the Senate began debate on a security bill (S.4) similar to the one passed by the House. The Senate legislation would drop House-passed provisions that would require that all containers on U.S.-bound vessels be screened in foreign ports for radiation, and all cargo loaded onto U.S. airliners be screened for explosives. Like the House version, the Senate bill contained a provision allowing airport screeners (employees of the Transportation Security Administration) to unionize. The Bush administration declared that the president would veto the bill if the provision was included in any bill which reached his desk. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff echoed Bush’s opposition, arguing that unionization would impede the department’s quick response to possible threats. Sen. DeMint promised to help uphold a veto, telling Bush “If the final bill contains such a provision, forcing you to veto it, we pledge to sustain your veto.”

<dl>

<dd>Main article: <a title="Congressional efforts to implement recommendations of the 9/11 commission" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Congressional_efforts_to_implement_recommendations_of_the_9/11_commission">Congressional efforts to implement recommendations of the 9/11 commission</a></dd>

</dl>

<h2>Biography</h2>

DeMint was born September 2, 1951 in Greenville, South Carolina. He was educated at Wade Hampton High School in Greenville, the University of Tennessee and Clemson University. He owned a market research firm in Greenville.

DeMint won the Republican primary for the 4th district in 1998, when Fourth District Congressman <a title="Bob Inglis" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bob_Inglis">Bob Inglis</a> decided to honor a promise to serve only three terms in the House and run against Senator <a title="Fritz Hollings (page does not exist)" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fritz_Hollings&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new">Fritz Hollings</a>. DeMint easily won election in November. The district is considered the most Republican in the state, and he never faced serious or well-funded opposition.

DeMint declared his candidacy for the Senate on December 12, 2002 after Hollings decided to retire after the 2004 elections. DeMint placed a distant second in that primary on June 8, 2004, 18 points behind former South Carolina governor David Beasley. However, he won a convincing victory in the runoff, and faced Democratic state education superintendent Inez Tenenbaum in November. The state's strong support for George W. Bush gave DeMint enough of a push to defeat her by 9.6 percentage points in November.

DeMint favors eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and Federal income tax. Additionally, while in Congress he sponsored legislation that would replace the current system with a 23% national sales tax on all goods and services. He claimed he had signed onto the legislation "to advance the debate" on tax reform, and that he did not specifically favor that version of reform over others.

DeMint also stirred controversy during debates with Tenenbaum when he stated his belief that openly gay people should not be allowed to teach in public schools. <a rel="nofollow" title="http://greenvilleonline.com/news/2004/10/06/2004100650449.htm" href="http://greenvilleonline.com/news/2004/10/06/2004100650449.htm" class="external autonumber">[1]</a> When questioned by reporters, DeMint also stated that single mothers who live with their boyfriends should similarly be excluded from being educators. He later apologized for making the remarks without specifically retracting their substantive claims, saying they were "distracting from the main issues of the debate." He also noted that these were opinions based on his personal values, not issues he would or could deal with as a member of Congress. He also favors banning all forms of abortion.<a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.ontheissues.org/SC_Senate.htm" href="http://www.ontheissues.org/SC_Senate.htm" class="external autonumber">[2]</a> <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/02/senate.southcarolina/index.html" href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/02/senate.southcarolina/index.html" class="external autonumber">[3]</a>

<h2>Money in politics</h2>

This section contains links to – and feeds from – money in politics databases. <crpcontribdata>cid=N00002472&cycle=2006</crpcontribdata>

<table><tbody><tr><th colspan="3">Links to more campaign contribution information for Jim DeMint

from the Center for Responsive Politics' <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org" href="http://www.opensecrets.org" class="external text">OpenSecrets.org</a> site.</th></tr><tr><td>Fundraising profile:</td><td><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.asp?cycle=2006&cid=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.asp?cycle=2006&cid=N00002472" class="external text">2006 election cycle</a></td><td><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allsummary.asp?cid=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allsummary.asp?cid=N00002472" class="external text">Career totals</a></td></tr><tr><td>Top contributors by organization/corporation:</td><td><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?cycle=2006&cid=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?cycle=2006&cid=N00002472" class="external text">2006 election cycle</a></td><td><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allcontrib.asp?cid=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allcontrib.asp?cid=N00002472" class="external text">Career totals</a></td></tr><tr><td>Top contributors by industry:</td><td><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?cycle=2006&cid=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?cycle=2006&cid=N00002472" class="external text">2006 election cycle</a></td><td><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allindus.asp?cid=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allindus.asp?cid=N00002472" class="external text">Career totals</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/search_result.asp?mem=DeMint%2C+James+W" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/search_result.asp?mem=DeMint%2C+James+W" class="external text">Revolving door profile for Jim DeMint</a> from the Center for Responsive Politics' <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.OpenSecrets.org" href="http://www.OpenSecrets.org" class="external text">OpenSecrets.org</a> website.</li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/travel.asp?CID=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/travel.asp?CID=N00002472" class="external text">2006 privately funded travel profile for Jim DeMint</a> from the Center for Responsive Politics' <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.OpenSecrets.org" href="http://www.OpenSecrets.org" class="external text">OpenSecrets.org</a> website.</li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/candlook.php?CID=N00002472" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/candlook.php?CID=N00002472" class="external text">Personal finance profile for Jim DeMint</a> from the Center for Responsive Politics' <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.OpenSecrets.org" href="http://www.OpenSecrets.org" class="external text">OpenSecrets.org</a> website.</li>

</ul>

<h2>Committees and Affiliations</h2>

<h3>Committees</h3>

<ul>

<li><a title="Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Senate_Committee_on_Commerce,Science,and_Transportation">Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation</a>

<ul>

<li>Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade, and Tourism - Ranking Member</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Innovation</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li><a title="Joint Economic Committee" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joint_Economic_Committee">Joint Economic Committee</a></li>

<li><a title="Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Senate_Committee_on_Energy_and_Natural_Resources">Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources</a>

<ul>

<li>Subcommittee on Water and Power</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Energy</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li><a title="Senate Committee on Foreign Relations" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Senate_Committee_on_Foreign_Relations">Senate Committee on Foreign Relations</a>

<ul>

<li>Subcommittee on European Affairs</li>

<li>Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance</li>

<li>Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Democracy and Human Rights</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

<h4>Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)</h4>

<ul>

<li><a title="Joint Economic Committee" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joint_Economic_Committee">Joint Economic Committee</a></li>

<li><a title="Senate Special Committee on Aging" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Senate_Special_Committee_on_Aging">Senate Special Committee on Aging</a></li>

<ul>

<li>Subcommittee on Aviation</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs Product Safety and Insurance</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Disaster Prevention and Prediction - Chair</li>

<li>Subcommittee on National Ocean Policy Study</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Technology Innovation and Competitiveness</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Trade Tourism and Economic Development</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li><a title="Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Senate_Committee_on_Environment_and_Public_Works">Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works</a>

<ul>

<li>Subcommittee on Clean Air Climate Change and Nuclear Safety</li>

<li>Subcommittee on Fisheries Wildlife and Water</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

<h2>More Background Data</h2>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.vote-smart.org/bio.php?can_id=CSC50354" href="http://www.vote-smart.org/bio.php?can_id=CSC50354" class="external text">Background information on Jim DeMint from Project Vote Smart</a></li>

</ul>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=CSC50354" href="http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=CSC50354" class="external text">Interest group scorecard ratings for Jim DeMint from Project Vote Smart</a></li>

</ul>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/d000595" href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/d000595" class="external text">Voting record for Jim DeMint from the Washington Post database</a></li>

</ul>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/cgi-bin/newmemberbio.cgi?lang=&member=SCJR&site=congressmerge" href="http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/cgi-bin/newmemberbio.cgi?lang=&member=SCJR&site=congressmerge" class="external text">Information on Jim DeMint from Congress Merge</a></li>

</ul>

<a title="Wikipedia" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wikipedia">Wikipedia</a> also has an article on <a rel="nofollow" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_DeMint" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_DeMint" class="external text">Jim DeMint</a>. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the <a rel="nofollow" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL" class="external text">GFDL</a>.

</a><h3><a id="Campaign_contact_information" name="Campaign_contact_information">Campaign contact information</a></h3>

<a id="Campaign_contact_information" name="Campaign_contact_information">DC Office:

340 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510-4002

Phone: 202-224-6121 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              202-224-6121      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Fax: 202-228-5143

</a><a rel="nofollow" title="http://demint.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home" href="http://demint.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home" class="external text">Web Email</a>

<a rel="nofollow" title="http://demint.senate.gov/" href="http://demint.senate.gov/" class="external text">Website</a>

District Office- Greenville:

105 North Spring Street, Suite 109

Greenville, SC 29601

Phone: 864-233-5366 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              864-233-5366      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Fax: 864-271-8901

District Office- Charleston:

112 Customs House

200 East Bay Street

Charleston, SC 29401

Phone: 843-727-4525 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              843-727-4525      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Fax: 843-722-4923

District Office- Columbia:

1901 Main Street, Suite 1475

Columbia, SC 29201

Phone: 803-771-6112 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              803-771-6112      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Fax: 803-771-6455

<h3>Twitter</h3>

Jim DeMint posts on Twitter at <a rel="nofollow" title="http://twitter.com/jimdemint/" href="http://twitter.com/jimdemint/" class="external free">http://twitter.com/jimdemint/</a>

Latest posts:

<ul>

<li><a title="JimDeMint: I'll introduce legislation to end taxpayer funding for NPR & PBS." href="http://twitter.com/JimDeMint/statuses/28418999965">JimDeMint: I'll introduce legislation to end taxpayer funding for NPR & PBS.</a></li>

<li><a title="JimDeMint: The incident with Juan Williams reminds us the only free speech liberals support is the speech with which they agree." href="http://twitter.com/JimDeMint/statuses/28418621728">JimDeMint: The incident with Juan Williams reminds us the only free speech liberals support is the speech with which they agree.</a></li>

<li><a title="JimDeMint: Great column in Human Events: " earmark="" moratorium="" should="" be="" gop="gop" s="" top="" priority="priority" http="" bit.ly="" byr8p="byr8p" href="http://twitter.com/JimDeMint/statuses/28032900633">JimDeMint: Great column in Human Events: "Earmark Moratorium Should Be GOP’s Top Priority" http://bit.ly/9ByR8P</a></li>

</ul>

See all the <a title="Members of Congress who Twitter" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Members_of_Congress_who_Twitter">members of Congress who Twitter</a>

</div>

<h2>Articles and resources</h2>

<h3>Resources</h3>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://demint.senate.gov/" href="http://demint.senate.gov/" class="external text">Official website</a></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.technorati.com/search/%22Jim%20DeMint%22" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/%22Jim%20DeMint%22" class="external text">Technorati Search: Jim DeMint</a></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Jim+DeMint%22&btnG=Search+News" href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Jim+DeMint%22&btnG=Search+News" class="external text">Google News Search: Jim DeMint</a></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news?p=%22Jim+DeMint%22&x=wrt" href="http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news?p=%22Jim+DeMint%22&x=wrt" class="external text">Yahoo! News Search: Jim DeMint</a></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/congtravel/member_report.php?member=7035" href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/congtravel/member_report.php?member=7035" class="external text">Power Trips: How much did Jim DeMint travel?</a></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/person.xpd?tab=stats&id=400105" href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/person.xpd?tab=stats&id=400105" class="external text">GovTrack Statistics: Jim DeMint</a></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://whereistand.com/JimDeMint/wizard" href="http://whereistand.com/JimDeMint/wizard" class="external text">See how you compare to Jim DeMint</a></li>

</ul>

<h3>Local blogs and discussion sites</h3>

<ul>

<li><a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.scdp.org/blog.php?PHPSESSID=7dcb2801b34b5bbf27ef8bd185482c8e" href="http://www.scdp.org/blog.php?PHPSESSID=7dcb2801b34b5bbf27ef8bd185482c8e" class="external text">South Carolina Democratic Party</a></li>

</ul>

<h3>Articles</h3>

<h4>Articles By DeMint</h4>

<ul>

<li>Jim DeMint, <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.goupstate.com/article/20080831/NEWS/808290242/1132/OPINION&title=We_have_an_efficientclean_energy_alternative" href="http://www.goupstate.com/article/20080831/NEWS/808290242/1132/OPINION%26title=We_have_an_efficientclean_energy_alternative" class="external text">"We have an efficient, clean energy alternative"</a>, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, August 31, 2008. (In this column DeMint promotes nuclear power as a solution to US energy problems. The column quotes <a title="Patrick Moore" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Moore">Patrick Moore</a> as an environmentalist who supports nuclear, without noting he is a paid consultant for the <a title="Nuclear Energy Institute" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nuclear_Energy_Institute">Nuclear Energy Institute</a> industry group.)</li>

</ul>

<h4>General Articles</h4>

<ul>

<li>Charles Babington, <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40620-2004Oct17.html" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40620-2004Oct17.html" class="external text">"GOP Nominee Regrets Remarks,"</a> Washington Post, October 17, 2004.</li>

<li><a title="Robert Novak" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Robert_Novak">Robert Novak</a>, <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=13436" href="http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=13436" class="external text">"How to Erase Earmarks,"</a> The Conservative Voice, March 28, 2006.</li>

<li>Mark Mazzetti, <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/washington/17intel.html?r=1&oref=slogin" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/washington/17intel.html?r=1&oref=slogin" class="external text">"Bush Allies in Congress Block Bill That Would Require Intelligence Disclosures,"</a> New York Times, April 17, 2007.</li>

</ul>

Corresponding article on <a rel="nofollow" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_DeMint" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_DeMint" class="external text">Wikipedia</a> and <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Jim_DeMint" href="http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Jim_DeMint" class="external text">Cause Caller</a>. (If Cause Caller link does not work, pick from its list of <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Senator" href="http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Senator" class="external text">senators</a> and <a rel="nofollow" title="http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Representative" href="http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Representative" class="external text">representatives</a>.)

<table><tbody><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">Current Office: U.S. Senate</th></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">111th Congress</th></tr><tr><td>Leadership Position:

</td><td>Committees Chaired:

</td><td>Committees,

Ranking Member On:

</td><td>Caucuses:

</td></tr><tr><td colspan="4">Committees:</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">110th Congress</th></tr><tr><td>Leadership Position:

None</td><td>Committees Chaired:

</td><td>Committees,

Ranking Member On:

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation/Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade, and Tourism</td><td>Caucuses:

</td></tr><tr><td colspan="4">Committees: Joint Economic Committee, Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation, Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation/Subcommittee on Aviation Operations Safety and Security, Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation/Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce Trade and Tourism, Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation/Subcommittee on Oceans Atmosphere Fisheries and Coast Guard, Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation/Subcommittee on Science Technology and Innovation, Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation/Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure Safety and Security, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources/Subcommittee on Energy, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources/Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources/Subcommittee on Water and Power, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations/Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations Democracy and Human Rights, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations/Subcommittee on European Affairs, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations/Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">Congressional Career</th></tr><tr><td>First Elected to Current Office:

November 2, 2004</td><td>First Took Current Office:

January 3, 2005</td><td>Next Election:

November 2, 2010</td><td>Term Ends:

</td></tr><tr><td>Freshman Member?

No</td><td>Previous Political Work?

U.S. House of Representatives</td><td colspan="2">Other Party Membership:</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">District Offices:</th></tr><tr><td colspan="4">

<dl>

<dd>1. 105 North Spring Street, Suite 109 Greenville, SC 29601

</dd>

<dd>2. 112 Customs House 200 East Bay Street Charleston, SC 29401

</dd>

<dd>3. 1901 Main Street, Suite 1475 Columbia, SC 29201

</dd>

</dl>

</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">Campaign Contact:</th></tr><tr><td colspan="4">

Website:

Webform Email: / Email:

Campaign Offices:

<dl>

<dd>1.

Phone: / Fax:

</dd>

</dl>

</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">Zip Code Affiliations:</th></tr><tr><td colspan="4"> </td></tr><tr><th colspan="4" align="center">Misc:</th></tr><tr><td colspan="4">Date of Birth: January 3, 2005</td></tr></tbody></table>

==

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading">Jim DeMint</h1>

<div id="siteSub">From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</div>

</div>

</div></div>

DeMint, Jim Sen 7% CPI

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