CNP action 4

tag 7 22 lc cnp

6 22 not just Action, also main org

see 3 prong --> Jan6 doctors Gold

see Leo cleta fitton kirk

see open ltr

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mta? doku ‘Bad Faith’ a Must-See for Americans Concerned About Christian Nationalism

as the aggressive Christian nationalism that infuses the MAGA movement and Republican Party intensifies, journalists and filmmakers are paying closer attention to the threat this political ideology and its adherents pose to freedom in America. A must-watch new documentary, “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” will be available for streaming on AppleTV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play beginning Friday, April 26.

Directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones and narrated by Peter Coyote, “Bad Faith” makes masterful use of archival and current footage of Christian nationalist religious and political figures, infographics, and interviews with scholars, religious leaders, political analysts, and even a former Trump administration official.

The film draws a compelling through line from the scheming power-building of Paul Weyrich, the right-wing operative who recruited Jerry Falwell and other evangelical preachers to create the religious-right as a political movement in the late 1970s, to the institution-destroying antidemocratic ambitions of MAGA insiders like Steve Bannon, as well as Donald Trump’s dominionist “prophets” and “apostles” and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists they inspired.

As Owen Gleiberman noted in a review for Variety, “what sounded like crackpot raving” from Weyrich’s tear-it-all-down manifesto 15 years ago is “now the cutting edge of the mainstream Republican Party.”

“Bad Faith” explains how that transformation happened, documenting the role played by the Council for National Policy, a partnership between anti-regulation, economically libertarian oil barons and the religious-right leaders who intended to remake the Republican Party, take over the Supreme Court, and use their political power to enforce “traditional” views of family, sexuality, and gender on the rest of the nation.

The Koch brothers poured tens of millions of dollars into “a state-of-the-art political data platform” that Council for National Policy groups use to collect personal information—including personal mental health, behavioral health, and treatment data—and use that information to micro-target individuals. (In “God & Country,” another documentary released earlier this year, Ralph Reed is shown bragging that his organization tracked “147 different data points” on the conservative Christians they targeted for turnout operations.)

“Bad Faith” also connects the modern Christian nationalist movement to a longer history. As the Rev. William Barber points out in the film, the use of religion to justify “all kinds of evils” is not a new phenomenon. At its peak in 1924, the KKK claimed 8 million members, mostly white evangelicals. Linda Gordon, author of “The Second Coming of the KKK,” describes that movement’s belief that new immigrants were subverting the destiny of America to be a white Protestant country. Sound familiar?

Sociologist Samuel Perry notes in the film that Christian Nationalism emerges at times of cultural conflict when those in power—mostly White Christian men—think their power is threatened. Randall Balmer, author of a 2021 book that shares the “Bad Faith” title, describes how court rulings challenging the tax-exempt status of racially segregationist schools, not abortion, motivated evangelical leaders to seek political power in the 1970s. They settled on abortion as a more politically palatable motivator than the defense of racial segregation. As “Freedom Road” author Lisa Sharon Harper notes, religious-right activists targeting the Supreme Court waved the banner of abortion in order to advance white supremacy.

As “Bad Faith” makes clear, religious-right leaders viewed Trump as a powerful blunt weapon in a long-term political and spiritual war against the federal government and institutions dominated by progressive forces. “The Council’s gambit had paid off,” the film notes about Trump’s time in office. “Christian nationalists were firmly embedded at the highest levels of government. The Supreme Court had an absolute majority of justices poised to overturn landmark civil and women’s rights decisions. Paul Weyrich’s vision of a Christian nation was becoming a reality.”

That explains why Christian nationalist leaders were willing to dismantle democracy to keep Trump in power. Members of the Council for National Policy and its political action arm went into “full combat mode” to promote Trump’s big lie, and, as Right Wing Watch documented, they supportedhis efforts to keep power after the 2020 election, portraying it as a holy war between the forces of good and evil. As Samuel Perry notes in the film, viewing politics as spiritual warfare between the forces of God and Satan makes it easy for those who see themselves on God’s side to “justify just about anything.”

While Rev. William Barber offers “Bad Faith” viewers hope that a nationwide justice-seeking movement can reach some of the people who have embraced the Christian nationalist movement, the documentary also argues that our democracy is more fragile that most Americans understand. The Republican Party, says strategist Steve Schmidt, is “more extreme, more dangerous, more committed to the autocratic project of gaining power than it was on Jan. 6, 2021. And this has to be confronted. And there is no issue that supersedes it.”

The Christian nationalist movement is going all-out to put Trump back in power, and its Project 2025 is preparing to “take the reins of government” if he wins. But the political infrastructure built by the Christian right and its allies is far bigger than Trump himself. “Regardless of what happens to Donald Trump, it’s the machinery of the Council for National Policy that has the staying power,” says Anne Nelson, author of “Shadow Network.” “And it’s that machinery that presents the lasting threat to our democracy.”

*“Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy”is a Panarea Production. Directed, Produced and Written by Stephen Ujlaki. Co-Director/Co-Producer: Chris Jones. Executive Producers: Peter D. Graves, John Ptak, Todd Stiefel, Mike Steed. Co-Producer: Doug Blush.

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an 5 24

the bombshells over the past few weeks revealing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew flags associated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection and Christian nationalism over two of his homes were followed by a report that Leonard Leo, the right-wing legal activist behind Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, also flew one of those flags.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag has a “close association with both far-right Christian nationalists and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6,” Rolling Stone reported last week, adding it “raises serious questions about Alito’s ability to rule impartially.”

“The conservative court on which Alito sits is largely the product of right-wing dark-money overlord Leonard Leo, and — wouldn’t you know it — Leo flew the same ‘Appeal to Heaven‘ flag outside of his house in Maine,” Rolling Stone also reported.

On social media Rolling Stone noted: “Justice Samuel Alito is under fire for flying the far-right ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag outside his home. Turns out Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo has flown it too, according to an image provided to Rolling Stone.”

Rolling Stone editor Andrew Perez on Memorial Day via social media added: “Some of Leo’s neighbors send pics from his house today — he is back to flying this flag.”

IFrame Content

Alex Aronson is the former Chief Counsel, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) who now serves as Executive Director of the non-profit organization Court Accountability.

“Leo’s decision to re-hoist this theocrat flag is two things at once,” Aronson wrote on Monday. “1) an arrogant Alito-esque display of impunity, and 2) recognition of a strategic misstep in ever removing it, as he and his goons now lean into the gaslighting claim that it’s an innocent revolutionary banner.”

In 2019, even before Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the nation’s highest court, The Washington Post reported, “few people outside government have more influence over judicial appointments now than Leo.”

Leo has served on the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a highly-secretive right-wing organization that has been described as a “pluto-theocracy.” In 2021 Americans United for Separation of Church and State called CNP “The Scariest Christian Nationalist Group You’ve Never Heard Of.”

CNP’s members have included far-right activist Charlie Kirk and the heads of at least a half-dozen groups that appear on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate or extremist groups.

Last year ProPublica branded Leo as “The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority” who “built a machine that remade the American legal system.”

Leo also served as a vice president for the Federalist Society for many years, and has worked to support the nominations of every right wing justice on today’s Supreme Court, including Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

See the social media posts above or at this link.

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an 11 22

Embattled Republican National Committee chair **Ronna McDaniel** is launching two advisory groups in an effort to expand the party’s appeal to voters and examine what went wrong in the wake of stunning, historic midterm election losses – and she’s turning to some of the right’s most extreme leaders to perform the investigations.

Political analysts on both sides of the aisle generally agree that Donald Trump, Trumpism, the party’s lurch to far right wing extremism including white nationalism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, fascism, and the “Big Lie” of stolen elections hurt, not helped candidates in the 2022 midterms.

McDaniel has now tapped some of the very purveyors of that failed extremism to lead the shrinking party’s efforts to broaden its outreach and correct its errors.

“The RNC is tapping nearly a dozen people to serve in what it’s calling a ‘Republican Party Advisory Council’ – a group that includes former Donald Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, evangelical leader Tony Perkinsand a pair of Senate candidates who ran this year,” Politico reports.

Perkins is a far right wing religious extremist and anti-LGBTQ activist who decades ago reportedly had ties to white supremacist groups, which he has denied. For decades he has been president of the Family Research Council, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

Deeply embedded in Republican theocratic politics, Perkins was appointed twice by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent federal government body that has a history of advancing the agenda of America’s Evangelical Christian movement.

He is also a past president of the highly-secretive far Christian right organization, Council for National Policy (CNP).

CNP’s members are believed to include far right activist and lobbyist Ginni Thomas, whose attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results have been the subject of numerous reports. Also, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, which has faced allegations of racism, and far right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

...

Other members of the Council for National Policy include two other heads of organizations that appear on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups: Mat Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel; and Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association.

“The panel will also include former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, who in the wake of his loss has called on the party to move on from ‘consultant one-size-fits-all strategies,'” Politico reports.

Masters is a “Big Lie” purveyor who has also promoted the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement,” which falsely claims immigrants – people of color – are “replacing” white Americans.

Separately, Politico adds, the RNC is commissioning an investigation into what went wrong, commonly referred to as an “autopsy” to ensure in future elections the same decisions are not made. That work will be lead by current RNC members.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/coup-plotters-reunion-ginni-thomas/

an 11 22 badash

Political experts are warning about a group of nearly 60 far-right wing politicos including **Ginni Thomas**, **Matt Schlapp**, and **Cleta Mitchell** who reportedly will issue a letter calling for the House and Senate to delay votes on leadership positions including Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader.

Axios’ Jonathan first reported the news, posting at least part of the letter and the list of signatories (below).

Some of the other more recognizable names on the letter include **Mark Meadows**, the former Trump White House chief of staff; **Cleta Mitchell**, the attorney who The New York Times calls the “architect of Donald J. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election”; former Trump attorney **Jenna Ellis**; former U.S. Senator and former Heritage Foundation president **Jim DeMint** (R-SC); former Trump deputy campaign manager **David Bossie**, the right wing activist and head of the organization responsible for the **Citizens United** Supreme Court lawsuit that made countless billions of dark money in political elections legal.

Also, white supremacist and disgraced former U.S. Congressman **Steve King** (R-IA); convicted felon and disgraced former U.S. Congressman **Steve Stockman** (R-TX), right-wing religious extremist **Kenneth Blackwell** of the **Family Research Council**, which is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, and others.

“The Republican Party needs leaders who will confidently and skillfully present a persuasive coherent vision of who we are, what we stand for, and what we will do,” the letter reads. “Many current elections are still undecided. There should be no rushed leadership elections.”

“Conservative Members of the House and Senate have called for the leadership elections to be delayed,” it adds, not naming which ones. “We strongly urge both Houses of Congress to postpone the formal Leadership elections until after the December 6 runoff in Georgia and all election results are fully decided.”

Experts are weighing in and issuing warnings.

“Note at least 3 people on this letter–Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, and Cleta Mitchell–are almost certainly subjects of the Jan6 investigation,” observed civil rights and national security journalist **Marcy Wheeler**. “So this is partly a crime-protection racket, signed by Clarence Thomas’ spouse.”

HuffPost’s White House correspondent **S.V. Dáte**, who once in a press conference asked Donald Trump if he regretted “all the lying,” likened the list to “a coup-plotters reunion.”

Politico Senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who has done extensive reporting on the January 6 insurrection, commented, “some of these people are experts at seeking delays of elections.”

Investigative journalist and columnist Dave Troy, who has done extensive reporting on Vladimir Putin, noted: “All this makes me ask is what these clowns (Ginni Thomas, Cleta Mitchell, Mark Meadows et al) are planning between now and December 6, and how to stop whatever it is. Are they planning to poison someone? What is it this time?”

“Why aren’t these people in jail, anyway?” he also asked.

The American Independent’s senior political reporter Emily C. Singer simply called it a “who’s who of insurrection supporting Republicans.”

“So you’re telling me that Ginni Thomas, Mark Meadows and Matt Schlapp want to interfere in an ANOTHER election,” wrote Attorney Adam Cohen of Lawyers for Good Government. “Folks, even if the Democrats retain the House, we cannot rest. Because these people won’t.”

Read the letter below or at this link.

**U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene** (R-GA) expanded her white Christian nationalist attacks on Monday, barely one week after again promoting the racist “Great Replacement” theory at a Trump rally.

Speaking with **Charlie Kirk**, a far right wing radio host, founder of Turning Point USA, and member of the highly-secretive Christian organization Council for National Policy, Greene repeatedly attacked **U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock** (D-GA), the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church in Atlanta.

Greene has publicly embraced the “Christian nationalist” label for herself and has repeatedly made racist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ remarks while also promoting Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that Joe Biden stole the election, COVID and vaccine misinformation, and Vladimir Putin’s falsehoods.

Less than two weeks ago Greene posted to Twitter that President Joe Biden “is Hitler.” Democrats are seeking to censure her for those remarks.

“I truly feel that Herschel’s going to win” the U.S. Senate race against Sen. Raphael Warnock, Greene told Kirk.

She said Rev. Warnock “calls himself a Christian, calls himself a pastor, but preaches abortion from the pulpit.”

NCRM could find no evidence that Rev. Warnock “preaches abortion from the pulpit,” but being a pro-choice Christian is actually the norm in America.

Kirk interjected into Greene’s rant, “it’s so sick.”

“It’s such an abomination,” Greene continued, to which Kirk agreed.

“It’s completely wrong and evil,” she concluded.

Americans United, which calls itself “the only organization dedicated solely to defending the separation of church and state,” last year called the Council For National Policy the “scariest Christian nationalist group you’ve never heard of,” and “probably the most dangerous group you’ve never heard of.”

“Formed in 1981, in part by Religious Right activist and author Tim LaHaye, the CNP is an umbrella organization of religious and secular far-right groups whose leaders meet regularly to plot strategy and share information. They’ve been quietly pulling the strings of ultra-conservative politics for four decades.”

Watch Greene below or at this link.

ref

https://www.au.org/the-latest/articles/cnp-secret-group/#

Some Christian nationalist organizations love the limelight. Their leaders revel in appearing in the media. They give speeches at major events, write books and basically do all they can to keep themselves front and center. Think of the Rev. Jerry Falwell when he founded the Moral Majority in the late 1970s. For a time, he seemed to be everywhere.}:

Then there are groups that prefer to work behind the scenes, in the shadows. They shun scrutiny. The people who run them are far from household names. They work to be unknown.

These groups are probably more dangerous because nobody knows what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and how much money they’re spending to influence public policy in an attempt to force everyone to live by their beliefs.

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is probably the most dangerous group you’ve never heard of. Formed in 1981, in part by Religious Right activist and author Tim LaHaye, the CNP is an umbrella organization of religious and secular far-right groups whose leaders meet regularly to plot strategy and share information. They’ve been quietly pulling the strings of ultra-conservative politics for four decades.

Every now and then, a journalist lifts the veil on the group. In 2004, New York Timesreporter David Kirkpatrick got unprecedented access to the group and attended a CNP meeting in New York City. Kirkpatrick wrote that the CNP consists of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations … to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”

Later that year, I wrote about the CNP for Church & State, observing, “What amazes most CNP opponents is the group’s ability to avoid widespread public scrutiny. Despite nearly a quarter century of existence and involvement by wealthy and influential political figures, the CNP remains unknown to most Americans. Operating out of a non-descript office building in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax, Va., the organization has managed to keep an extremely low profile – an amazing feat when one considers the people the CNP courts.”

Now another reporter, Robert O’Harrow Jr. of The Washington Post, has produced an article exposing the machinations of the CNP. O’Harrow’s piece, “God, Trump and the Closed-Door World of a Major Conservative Group,” examines in part how former President Donald Trump, a biblically illiterate figure of questionable personal morality, won over so many evangelical leaders in 2016. (Spoiler: The CNP had something to do with it.)

O’Harrow also provides an in-depth history of the group and information culled from recordings of CNP meetings. As O’Harrow notes, the CNP operates alongside a dizzying array of far-right groups, some of which backed Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election and are now involved in voter-suppression campaigns. The network O’Harrow describes is octopus-like in its reach and ambition. The CNP doesn’t just share Christian nationalists’ goal of a theocratic America, it seeks to roll back every bit of progress, social or economic, our country has made since the New Deal.

Near the end of the article, O’Harrow writes, “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.”

From the shadows, the CNP has been working to remake America in its theocratic image for 40 years. Unfortunately, it has enjoyed many successes. The first step to reversing those is to throw a lot more light on this organization, its leadership, its tactics and its goals.

seth a

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-news-new-revelations-indicate

extensive on Ginni

But her role went deeper, and beyond C.N.P. Action. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.”

“The way it was presented to me was that Ginni was uniting these different factions around a singular mission on January 6,” said Stockton, who previously worked for Bannon. “That Ginni was involved made sense — she’s pretty neutral, and she doesn’t have a lot of enemies in the movement.”

...

In fact, observes the Times, by December 2020 “a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results or helping plan the January 6 rallies”—a group that went well beyond Eastman, Bannon, and Mitchell. From Turning Point USA (on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served) sending buses of insurrectionists into Washington on January 6, to the heavy involvement of the Tea Party Patriots, a far-right group with which Mrs. Thomas “had long ties” that was “headed byJenny Beth Martin,a fellow Council for National Policyactivist [with Thomas]”, Ginni’s political allies seemed to be in all the positions of authority and influence in the days and weeks before the January 6 attack—consistent with the job she’d set for herself starting in early 2019 in the Oval Office, namely ensuring that it was largely people of her selection in Trump’s political orbit.

Caroline Wren, the top aide of top Trump adviser (and then-secret Donald Trump Jr. fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle, told Dustin Stockton that Jenny Beth Martin’s group and Women for America First—the latter the insurrectionist outfit behind the January 6 event that incited the attack on the Capitol—were only able to work together because Ginni Thomas, who’d served as an “early Tea Party activist” with Women for America First leader Amy Kremer, had worked diligently to make that cooperation possible.

Without Ginni Thomas, the Times indicates, the “years[-long]…bitter legal dispute” between Kremer and Martin would have made their cooperation impossible—and thus the January 6 White House Ellipse event that launched an insurrection a non-starter.

The second was to mobilize supporters in swing states to ignite Tea Party–like protests against the virus-related public safety lockdowns. BOOST GNP OR AT LEAST REMOVE WHAT APPEARED TO BE SLOWING ECONOMY SEE PUNDIT TRIO ECON]

The third was to deploy physicians with dubious credentials to dismiss the dangers of Covid-19 through a massive media blitz. All three initiatives were activated in April. It was a rehash of a familiar formula, concocting groups whose names and URLs changed with dizzying speed and calling them “grassroots” organizations. (Critics preferred the term “astroturf.”)

https://documented.net/investigations/documented-obtains-list-of-2020-donors-to-ginni-thomas-group-that-supported-trumps-attempted-coup

donors, extensive

no lnx many

INVESTIGATION

Documented Obtains List of 2020 Donors to Ginni Thomas Group That Supported Trump’s Attempted Coup

Documented is revealing a list of CNP Action's 2020 donors, and can confirm that Ginni Thomas remained on the board of the group as it laid the groundwork for January 6.

COUNCIL FOR NATIONAL POLICY

PUBLISHED ON

APR 12, 2022

COPY LINK

New documents reveal that Ginni Thomas remained on the board of Council for National Policy Action (“CNP Action”) in 2020 as it worked to support former President Donald Trump’s attempted election coup.

Documented has additionally obtained a list of funders to the organization that year, as well as recordings, documents, and other materials that provide further evidence of Thomas’ advocacy related to the 2020 election.

According to a tax filing obtained by Documented, Thomas remained on CNP Action's nine-member board of directors in 2020, as the group promoted baseless election fraud conspiracies, urged Republican legislatures in swing states to reject Biden's win, and pressed Congress to only count Trump electors from those states. Thomas’ 2020 role in CNP Action has not been confirmed until now.

Separate materials obtained by Documented describe the 2020 donors who bankrolled CNP Action's activities that year. Those donors include:

Leonard Leo, the longtime Federalist Society officer who shaped Trump’s judicial nominations, and who plays a key role in a network of interlinked dark money groups. Leo and Thomas have a long relationship: for example, in 2009, Leo helped Thomas create Liberty Central, a tea party themed nonprofit, with Leo serving as a founding board member, and Thomas as the group's President.

Michael Farris, who “played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the lawsuit that Republican state attorneys general filed in December [2020] in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election of President Biden,” according to the New York Times. Farris is CEO of the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which regularly litigates before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where Clarence Thomas was part of the 5-4 majority that backed a Colorado cake shop owner’s refusal to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple.

Floyd G. Brown,who produced the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad and founded the sensationalist right-wing website Western Journal, which published an op-ed in December 2020 from Trump ally Michael Flynn declaring “It’s time for god-fearing Americans to fight.”

Other CNP Action donors include Paige Patterson, the controversial former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and executives from groups like Susan B. Anthony List and Independent Women’s Voice, which regularly participate in litigation before the Supreme Court. The amount contributed by each donor is not known.

Screen Shot 2022 04 07 at 10 51 32 AM

DOCUMENT

CNP Action 2020 Donors

This document, a slide from a presentation at a CNP Action event, identifies 21 contributors to CNP Action in 2020.

PUBLISHED: APRIL 12, 2022

Additionally, as described in the timeline below, Documented has obtained several years of recordings and other materials that show Thomas’s long history with CNP Action and its sister organization, the Council for National Policy (“CNP”).

These CNP recordings and materials document the group's efforts both before and after the 2020 election to narrow access to the ballot and to lay the groundwork for Trump’s attempted coup. They show Thomas' close working relationship with CNP member Cleta Mitchell, the Trump legal advisor who was on the call where the president pressured the Georgia Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes.” They also show CNP’s attempts after January 6 to thwart the work of the bipartisan committee examining the attack on the Capitol.

Thomas has already faced scrutiny for dozens of texts that she had sent White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in late 2020 urging him to overturn the election. Taken together, these materials provide further evidence of Thomas' ties to the attempted election coup, and may deepen pressure for her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to recuse from cases relating to the election and the violence on January 6.

CNP, Ginni Thomas, and Election 2020

18 May 2019

Thomas and Cleta Mitchell Announce Project to “Protect President Trump”

In May of 2019, Thomas jointly addressed a CNP conference with Mitchell, who would later join President Trump’s legal team and peddle election fraud myths. “I’m so thankful that CNP put Charlie Kirk and Cleta and I all together—it really goes very well,” Thomas said. “Watch what happens.”

At the event, Thomas described a new project called Crowdsourcers, as well as a separate PAC and nonprofit to “protect President Trump,” both of which were to be set up by Mitchell. The PAC/nonprofit venture was slated to do business under the name “American D-Day.” There is no record of a PAC or nonprofit having been registered with the Federal Election Commission or IRS under that name, although it is not known whether the project advanced under a different name. Documented first reported on the details of this project in 2019, in partnership with The Intercept.

2020

28 Feb 2020

CNP Action Pre-Election Session Alleging Voter Fraud

On February 28, 2020, CNP Action sponsored a session at a CNP conference that described the upcoming election in nearly apocalyptic terms and—before a single ballot had even been cast—warned that Democrats were planning to engage in widespread fraud through practices like vote by mail.

One panelist, True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, warned that Democrats would use “mob rule” to siege the 2020 elections with fraudulent votes: “The swarming tactics of a radicalized socialist mindset is a dangerous thing to behold.” Another panelist, Save Our States’ Trent England, warned that the “inner city” is “where the fraud happens,” and stressed the need to find Republican poll watchers in urban and tribal precincts. This was another CNP story that Documented first reported on in partnership with The Intercept.

28 Feb 2020

ALEC CEO Discusses Steps State Legislatures "Can Take to Question the Validity of an Election"

During the question-and-answer portion of the February 2020 session, American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”) CEO Lisa Nelson stated that ALEC had been working on “action items that [state] legislators can take to question the validity of an election.” Nelson told the group, “obviously we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote. But it's very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that really what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.”

The idea that Republican-led state legislatures could overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint Trump electors would be a key part of Trump’s attempted coup strategy.

11 Nov 2020

CNP Action Post-Election Strategy Session

Cleta Mitchel Speaking at the May 2019 CNP MeetingCredit: CNP. Obtained By Documented.

In the days after the 2020 election, CNP Action sponsored a session at the CNP conference titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” According to the conference agenda, the panel included Cleta Mitchell, who at the time was advising the Trump campaign, and publicly making voter fraud claims too absurd even for Fox News hosts. The other panelists, Heritage Action’s Hans von Spakovsky and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF)’s J. Christian Adams, were also top purveyors of voter fraud myths.

CNP Action Steps DocPublished by the Center for Media and Democracy

Following the November 11, 2020 session, CNP Action circulated an “Action Steps” document urging the group’s powerful members to contact state lawmakers in three swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden—Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania—and press them to reject the election results and appoint Trump electors. “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this,” the document advised. The “Action Steps” document additionally urged state legislators to contact lawmakers in other states to “amplify” that it is state legislators’ “duty to appoint electors to the Electoral College.”

Those “Action Steps” tracked efforts by Trump’s legal team to overturn the election. As Barton Gellman concluded at The Atlantic:

[T]he strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden on November 7 was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead. Every other objective—in courtrooms, on state election panels, in the Justice Department, and in the office of the vice president—was instrumental to that end.

8 Dec 2020

CNP Action Distributes Memo Written by Cleta Mitchell on Overturning Election Results

Cleta Memo CNP Published by the Center for Media and Democracy

In December 2020, CNP Action circulated a newsletter that included a 21-page report titled “Five States and the Election Irregularities and Issues,” which also described steps that state legislatures or Congress could take to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Metadata shows that Cleta Mitchell—who was still advising the Trump campaign—created the report. The report focused on alleged “irregularities” in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where Trump and his allies were pressing litigation, but where time was running out for courts to “declare the elections null and void.”

As was the case with the “Action Steps” document, the December 8 report backed the Trump campaign’s effort to pressure state lawmakers to ignore vote counts and appoint Trump electors. The report asserted that, in light of the fraud that the Trump campaign (falsely) alleged in its lawsuits, in each of those five states, “the State Legislature must reclaim its constitutional authority and responsibility to do what the constitution requires: appoint the presidential electors.”

In addition to backing the Trump campaign’s unlawful call for state legislatures to ignore voters and appoint Trump electors, the report additionally declared that “Congress has the ultimate responsibility for receiving and counting the electoral college votes,” and that “[t]here is no constitutional obligation for Congress to accept fraudulent vote and electoral votes.”

This argument helped set the stage for members of Congress to make spurious objections to the electoral vote count. Additionally, during the same period that Thomas’ CNP Action was advocating for Congress to count false electors, Thomas was in contact with multiple Congressional offices about supporting Trump.

10 Dec 2020

CNP's Conservative Action Project Calls on "State Legislators to Appoint New Electors"

Screen Shot 2022 04 12 at 2 03 13 PM

CNP’s Conservative Action Project publicly called for state legislatures and Congress to overturn the results of the election in a letter signed by dozens of high-profile CNP members. The letter, which cited the December 8 “Five States and the Election Irregularities” report, asserted that “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”

[L]egislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean Electoral College slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states."

Again, CNP was asking state and federal legislatures to ignore the law and the constitution. After voters have already cast ballots, state legislatures cannot simply ignore the will of voters and choose their own electors. And Congress cannot just count the “alternate electors” selected for Trump. Republicans in battleground states did try to appoint themselves as illegitimate “alternate electors,” as part of a scheme orchestrated by Trump campaign officials and Rudy Giuliani, but the plot ultimately failed.

CNP’s December 10 letter was signed by at least two individuals who would go on to organize the Jan. 6 rally: Tea Party Patriots Chair Jenny Beth Martin and conservative activist Ed Martin.

30 Dec 2020

CNP's Conservative Action Project Calls on U.S. Senate to "Rescue Our Republic"

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As the January 6 electoral count drew near, on December 30, 2020, CNP's Conservative Action Project sent the U.S. Senate a letter demanding "a public hearing prior to the counting of electoral votes on January 6," and that the Senate "review the evidence of the problems of the state elections, particularly in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. We ask you to study carefully and consider the Constitutional obligations and duties conferred upon you as Senators. Be willing to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and contest the electoral votes from these states."

The letter came the same day that Sen. Josh Hawley announced that he would be contesting election results in Pennsylvania.

2021

14 Jan 2021

CNP's Conservative Action Project: "Cruz, Hawley, Brooks and Colleagues Follow the Constitution"

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Just over a week after the January 6 attack, CNP's Conservative Action Project issued a statement condemning violence, but declaring that "the actions of 8 Senators and 139 House members, including Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz, and many others, who intended to or did debate the certification of certain states’ 2020 electors is not, and never will be, tantamount to violence. The right and ability to object to electoral certification is written into the Constitution and housed in the procedural rights of those who represent us."

15 Dec 2021

Thomas Signs CNP Conservative Action Project Letter Attacking Jan. 6 Committee

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On December 15, 2021, CNP’s Conservative Action Project distributed another letter—this one signed by Thomas—calling the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack an “overtly partisan political persecution,” and demanding that the two Republican lawmakers on the panel, Reps. Lynn Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, be stripped from their membership in the Republican conference.

2022

3 Jan 2022

CNP Conservative Action Project Opposes "the Gross Abuse of Authority by the January 6 Committee"

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Days before the anniversary of the January 6 attack, on January 3, 2022, CNP's Conservative Action Project sent another letter attacking the January 6 committee, calling its efforts to investigate the Capitol attack an “assault on the rule of law which is a bedrock principle of our form of government.”

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Previous Slide Next Slide

INVESTIGATING CORPORATE INFLUENCE

do i have this? lots

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/05/17/council-national-policy-behind-curtain

CNP Action, Inc.

According to CNP's website, "CNP Action, Inc. is the 501(c)(4) sister organization of the Council for National Policy. Founded in 1987, CNP Action, Inc. serves as an advocate for conservative principles such as limited government, free economic enterprise, traditional values and a strong national defense. It promotes issues or specific pieces of legislation through regular Action Sessions and publications."^[21] Beginning in April 2020, this organization began involved with strategies to reopen U.S. states despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.^[22][23]

CNP Action Organized "Pro-Trump" Doctors To Legitimate Reopening Efforts

Associated Press reported on a May 2020 conference call between CNP Action and a senior staffer for Trump's reelection campaign, originally obtained by Center for Media and Democracy. In the leaked meeting, these operatives discussed "recruiting 'extremely pro-Trump' doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible" despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.^[22] When asked about these efforts by AP, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh asserted he took no issue with contradicting the government's infectious disease experts. Murtaugh explained, "Our job at the campaign is to reflect President Trump’s point of view... We are his campaign. There is no difference between us and him."^[22]

CNP Action Helped Coordinate COVID-19 Lockdown Protests

In April 2020, CNP Action "hosted weekly conference calls to coordinate coronavirus response tactics", working together with organizations including FreedomWorks, Open the States, ReOpen PA, The Save Our Country Task Force, and Tea Party Patriots.^[23] The stated goal of Tea Party Patriots was to "share the stories of people who have been affected by the lockdowns, to show that we must be concerned with both sides of this crisis."^[23]

CNP also shared information through email about attending in-person events, including an Eagle Forum-organized car protest at the Alabama Capitol Building and a lockdown protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol.^[23]

ref

https://www.prwatch.org/comment/45372

alex k may 15 2020

shadowy right-wing nonprofit is helping coordinate coronavirus response strategy and promoting the lockdown protests.

Working alongside close allies that have helped coordinate the protests, including Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks, Council for National Policy Action (CNP Action) has been hosting conference calls and publishing action memos around reopening states' economies.

CNP Action is the 501(c)(4) nonprofit affiliate of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a coalition of far-right political advocacy and think tank figures that has worked largely behind the scenes since its founding in 1981. CNP’s membership includes conservative Republicans and right-wing extremists who work together to shape policy. Trump allies, including senior adviser Kellyanne Conway and former chief adviser Steve Bannon, were CNP members as of 2014. Vice President Mike Pence and Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulow have also been members, according to a recently published book by Anne Nelson.

Since last month, CNP Action has hosted weekly conference calls to coordinate coronavirus response tactics. The first call featured Moore, who founded the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Meese, and Al Regnery, chairman of CNP’s Conservative Action Project and the cousin of prominent white nationalist William Regnery.

Moore has called the lockdown protesters "the modern-day Rosa Parks" for "protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties."

The email announcing the second call, which featured ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson and State Policy Network CEO Tracie Sharp, links to information about an April 21 car protest at the Alabama Capitol Building in Montgomery, organized by the anti-LGBTQ group Eagle Forum. The forum's founder, the late Phyllis Schlafly, was a CNP member, and several current staffers are part of the CNP-connected "Save Our Country Task Force."

The announcement directed readers to the private Facebook page of the group ReOpen PA, which was one of three groups that organized an April 20 lockdown protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol. The other two groups' Facebook pages have been deactivated.

In an announcement of the third call, CNP Action directs allies to send links to op-eds, articles, and social media posts to a TeaPartyPatriots.org email address, indicating that the group is involved in CNP's organizing efforts. "The Save Our Country Task Force will send it out for others in the coalition to share and cross-promote for a multiplying effect," the announcement says.

"We need to share the stories of people who have been affected by the lockdowns, to show that we must be concerned with both sides of this crisis," states the Tea Party Patriots Action website.

The Save Our Country Task Force is an overlapping group, tied closely to ALEC, that's chaired by Trump economic adviser Art Laffer and includes Moore and CNP's president Bill Walton, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, in its leadership. Laffer sits on ALEC's Board of Scholars and co-authors ALEC’s annual “Rich States, Poor States” publication with Moore. Last year, Trump gave Laffer, a former Ronald Reagan adviser and a supply-side economics evangelist, a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

On the May 4 call, Robert Alt of the Charles Koch-funded Buckeye Institute spoke, and his remarks were posted online.

An announcement for the fourth weekly CNP Action call links to the ReOpen PA Facebook page as well as to a "Zoom Grassroots Briefing on #ReOpenAmerica with Steve Moore and [conservative pollster] Scott Rasmussen." Moore and FreedomWorks have been helping coordinate on-the-ground lockdown protests.

The announcement links to the Open the States website, a project of Convention of States Action, which has also helped coordinate protests. "Check out the Open the States online community to connect with other Americans concerned about how the COVID-19 response is affecting our communities and liberties," it states.

The call took place on May 11 and featured Mercedes Schlapp, a lobbyist and senior advisor to Donald Trump's campaign, and her husband, Matt Schlapp, a lobbyist and the head of the American Conservative Union. No one mentioned the protests, but the speakers disputed the severity of the coronavirus. In one exchange, Walton and the Schlapps tried to downplay the risks of the deadly virus.

WALTON, introducing a caller's question: We're now discovering, as the science rolls out, that there are tens of millions more people infected with this virus than previously imagined.... It's decidedly reduced the lethality of it.

MERCEDES SCHLAPP: ...I think that the reality is, is that when they looked at the modeling...it depends what assumptions you put into the modeling to see, and so I think the thing is, let's go from millions of deaths to having more like, if you can get it down to not millions of deaths we're in better position.

MATTSCHLAPP: ...Even if you’re in some of these really, really serious demographic categories, the survival rate is so high, so we should feel optimistic about it instead of pessimistic.

The call largely revolved around what the Trump campaign is doing to win the election in the face of the current crisis.

CNP did not respond to a request for comment.

Extremists at the Center for National Policy

The Southern Poverty Law Center published a leaked full roster of CNP from 2014, which identified 413 members. "The list is surprising, not so much for the conservatives who dominate it," wrote Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok, "but for the many real extremists who are included."

At the time, populating CNP's executive committee, board of directors, board of governors, and general membership were :{a :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{number of extremists:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: from hate groups such as the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council and Liberty Counsel; the neo-Confederate League of the South; and the anti-Muslim Center for Security Policy.

On the board of governors was Michael Peroutka, who was on the board of League of the Southand appeared on a white nationalist radio show. Also involved with CNP were Liberty Council’s Mat Staver, who has tried to re-criminalize gay sex; Alan Sears of the anti-LGTBQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom; Tim Wildmon, president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group the American Family Association; and conspiracy theorists Jerome Corsi, who was investigated in the Trump-Russia probe, and Joseph Farah.

The recent CNP Action announcements link to a Liberty Counsel initiative led by Mat Staver called ReOpen Church.

CNP's founders include multiple members of the conspiracist John Birch Society and Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC.

As of 2018, the most recent tax year on record for CNP, the board of directors included Tony Perkins, who was president at the time, andKenneth Blackwell of the Family Research Council. The current board of governors and general membership rosters are unknown.

Perkins will be a speaker during next week's CNP Action call on May 18.

Billionaire Funding

In 2018, CNP Action had a small budget, having spent $127,000 and received only $95,000 in contributions. Bill Walton was chairman, and Blackwell, Adam Brandon-the president of FreedomWorks-and Perkins were directors.

CNP is a much larger operation, having spent $2.9 million and taken in a total of over $3.2 million in 2018.

Richard DeVos, the father-in-law of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is a former president of CNP, and his family foundation has funded the group. DeVos's parents' family charity, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, are regular donors, having given money in the 2018 fiscal year, the most recent on record.

The family foundation of Robert Mercer gave $75,000 to CNP from 2013-14. Another right-wing political megadonor, Foster Friess, has been part of CNP and likely funded the organization.

Tim Phillips, a Tea Party organizer and president of Koch's Americans for Prosperity, was listed as a member of CNP's Board of Governors in 2014. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is now defunct but was run by the Koch family, donated $75,000 to CNP from 2011-12.

Institutional donors include the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and Judicial Watch, as well as from the donor-advised fund sponsors the National Christian Foundation and National Philanthropic Trust.

shadow net

trump admin scotus tax code revision 228, 257-9

ch 1 index

ch 1 texas: scc broke civil war slavery, n and am // prot N nat cncl churhes; paige p and paul pressler houston arist judges humble oil --> exxon; hippie 60's ~ ; took over SBC; states rights

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Network-Media-Secret-Radical/dp/163557319X?asin=163557319X&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

thom h vid:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkUFwCR5mKk

comwlth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YANRFT3jv0

intervw: https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2022/5/11/anne-nelson-part-02

jul 2022 franken audio interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY2YLGcwBh8

https://flux.community/anne-nelson/2021/05/disinformation-factory-how-christian-fundamentalist-media-brainwash-millions

Other contenders, such as Parler and Frank (launched by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell) also vie for attention. The CNP has tried to develop its own “celebrity spokespersons” to cultivate specific target audiences, such as CNP member Charlie Kirk, who has his own YouTube channel and a radio program on Salem Media targeting youth. CNP member Alveda King (MLK’s niece) is prominently featured on Salem’s TownHall as an African-American opponent to HR1 and voting rights initiatives.

2/21 ***

https://washingtonspectator.org/nelson-cnp/

On January 6, 2021, a stunned nation watched as protesters stormed the Capitol to prevent the certification of the electoral votes from the November election. The effort failed, but not without shining a harsh light on the fault lines of American democracy.

In the weeks that followed, analysts have struggled to define how much of the incursion was the spontaneous result of a “riot”—or a “peaceful protest” gone wrong—and how much was the result of a planned operation.

One major player in the events leading up to the assault on the Capitol was the Council for National Policy, an influential coalition of Christian conservatives, free-market fundamentalists, and political activists. Over the previous year the CNP and its members and affiliates organized efforts to challenge the validity of the election, conspired to overturn its results, and tried to derail the orderly transfer of power. This is an account of the measures they took, leading up to the deadly January 6 insurrection.

The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory the previous year. From the beginning, its goals represented a convergence of the interests of these three groups: a retreat from advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities, tax cuts for the wealthy, and raw political power. Operating from the shadows, its members, who would number some 400, spent the next four decades courting, buying, and bullying fellow Republicans, gradually achieving what was in effect a leveraged buyout of the GOP. Favorite sons, such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, were groomed, financed, and supported. Apostates, such as John McCain and Jeff Flake, were punished and exiled. The leaders of the CNP tended to favor their conservative Christian co-religionists, but political expedience came first.

In 2016, the CNP put its partners’ money, data, and ground game behind Donald Trump, as the ultimate transactional candidate. [interesting as kochs and others distanced, at least at 1st, mercers?]Trump promised it retrograde social policies, a favorable tax regime, regulatory retreats, and its choice of federal judges. He delivered in spades. By 2020, the leaders of the CNP were ready to go to extreme lengths to keep him—and themselves—in power.

Over the final year of the Trump presidency, the CNP took center stage. By January 2020, its leading figures had become sought-after guests on talk shows and frequent visitors to the White House. Many of its stated goals had been advanced. By March, the Republican Senate had confirmed more than 185 of Trump’s conservative nominees for the federal bench. All but eight of the judges had ties to the Federalist Society, headed by longtime CNP members Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo. Two of the CNP’s favored Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, had been confirmed. The court was only one justice away from a conservative majority, and the CNP had its eye on the seat held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With a second term in office and normal attrition, Trump could decisively tilt the federal courts, opening the door for a massive overhaul of the American legal framework.

Many initiatives that were pending in the courts had been addressed by fiat.Trump rolled back scores of environmental regulationscreated to protect air quality, potable water supplies, and wildlife, as a quid pro quo for the support he received from CNP’s favored oil and gas interests. His administration decimated the budgets and personnel of federal agencies assigned to protect public health, public safety, and public lands, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Park Service, to the benefit of corporations and extractive industries. There was also notable progress on CNP’s social agenda,with the erosion and rollback of the rights of LGBT populations, women, and minorities in the courts and state legislatures.

The CNP’s plutocrats were pleased with what they had wrought. The “tax reform” enacted by Trump and the Republican Senate concentrated ever greater wealth in the hands of America’s most affluent individuals through tax cuts for corporations and the rich, driving income inequality to the highest levels in 50 years. The country’s tax revenues as a share of gross domestic product plummeted, and budget gaps widened, but Republicans—who had made a career of loudly condemning deficit spending—remained mute as long as the measures benefited the moneyed class instead of those who needed help.Donald Trump remained a dependable ally, asking only for an audience for his megalomania and a free pass for the business interests of the “Trump brand.” In return, he delivered his dynamism and his unshakeable base. This state of affairs was so satisfactory that the Republican Party decided not to bother drafting a new party platform for the 2020 election. Instead, it recycled the 2016 platform, which included former CNP President Tony Perkins’s drafts opposing marriage equality and promoting conversion therapy.

Ultimate realization of the CNP’s agenda depended on winning a second term for Trump in November. With another four years, it could enshrine its socially regressive policies on the federal level, further blur the line between church and state, and consolidate huge windfalls for corporations and wealthy individuals. As of January 1, electoral prospects looked sweet. The Republicans’ strongest suit was the economy. Massive tax cuts had flooded corporations with cash, which, as critics of the tax bill had predicted, they used to buy back their stock and drive up share prices 28 percent in 2019. This boosted Trump’s popularity among the 55 percent of Americans who reported owning stocks, but did little to spur the growth Republicans had promised would offset the soaring deficits.

On the tactical front, it seemed as though the Trump team had found a winning formula. Ralph Reed, a member of the CNP’s board of governors (also known as a central figure in the scandal involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff), continued to employ his Faith and Freedom Coalition and its partner, United in Purpose, to get out the vote among conservative white Christians in critical swing states, expanding their targeting from evangelicals to Catholics.

The coalition’s data and app development also advanced. The uCampaign apps developed by Thomas Peters had served their purpose in the 2016 and 2018 elections, but they were due for an upgrade. In late 2019, word began to circulate that Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was preparing to release the Trump 2020 app, a component of what he labeled a “juggernaut campaign.” Parscale had quietly taken over Trump’s digital operations and planned to use the new app as part of a broader strategy.Trump 2020 was designed to leverage uCampaign features such as gamification (awarding points and prizes for participating in campaign activities and sharing contacts). It also expanded the use of geolocation devices to recruit and harvest data from attendees of Trump rallies.The crowds, energized by Trump’s live performances, would be invited to download the app and recruit others across their social networks. The rallies were a crucial component of the campaign. The more outrageous Trump’s rhetoric on the podium, the more earned media coverage he received. In contrast, the Democrats were still in disarray, with a dozen primary candidates competing for fragmented press coverage and no clear front-runner.

Then, on January 20, 2020, doctors diagnosed the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the United States.

The patient was a man who had just returned to Snohomish County, Washington, from a family visit to Wuhan, China. The virus spread across Washington State, then ravaged New York City and New Orleans. The first U.S. Covid death was reported as occurring on February 6. On February 20, the global stock market went into a free fall that didn’t abate until April. Bloomberg News called it the Great Coronavirus Crash.

Trump’s reelection strategy rested on a thriving economy, as well as mass rallies and in-church recruitment. Now public health officials were urging lockdowns that would derail both the economy and the gatherings. Trump’s CNP supporters stepped up to the plate.

The CNP’s meetings had long featured briefings on forthcoming elections by members and allies, followed by a memorandum containing a series of “Action Steps.” The October 2018 meeting’s action steps, for example, called for members to “Volunteer and Contribute to key candidates and organizations (FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, [anti-abortion group] Susan B. Anthony List) that are engaged in turning out voters” for the midterms.

But by February 2020, the CNP, fearing the erosion of Trump’s support, shifted its strategy from boosting the popular vote to deflecting it. Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council, told the group, “We’ve been focused on the national vote, and obviously we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote, but it’s very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” Her organization, she told them, had already drafted a model resolution “to make sure there’s no confusion among conservative legislators around national popular vote and the Electoral College.”

Nelson noted that her group was exploring additional ways to invalidate a potential Trump loss in consultation with three election experts, including CNP board of governors member Cleta Mitchell, “who I know you all know, on trying to identify what are those action items that legislators can take in their states, and I think that they’ve identified a few.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 them to the state legislators, and they can start to kind of exercise their political muscle in that area.” [EG DOUG MATRIANO IN PA] BOLICK AZ

So as early as February 2020, the CNP and its advisers were already anticipating various strategies to overturn the results of the election in the event of the loss of either the popular vote or the Electoral College, or both. At the same time, they adopted a three-pronged approach to enhancing Trump’s chances in November.The first involved expanding their use of data to juice Republican votes and suppress Democratic turnout. The second was to mobilize supporters in swing states to ignite Tea Party–like protests against the virus-related public safety lockdowns. The third was to deploy physicians with dubious credentials to dismiss the dangers of Covid-19 through a massive media blitz. All three initiatives were activated in April. It was a rehash of a familiar formula, concocting groups whose names and URLs changed with dizzying speed and calling them “grassroots” organizations. (Critics preferred the term “astroturf.”)

United in Purpose took the lead. In June 2016, UiP had convened the epic Times Square gathering of 1,000 fundamentalist activists to give Trump their blessing. Now, over the spring of 2020, UiP held a series of conference calls to update its strategy. One call—a recording of which was leaked to The Interceptreporter Lee Fang—took place in mid-April. UiP Chairman Ken Eldred told his associates on the call that the Covid-19 virus was a “gift from God” because it was turning Americans back to Christ and building audiences for religious broadcasts—which had been crucial platforms for political campaigns. But “Satan has been busy too,” Eldred warned. “The virus has messed up many of our plans involving our in-person meetings with voters.” UiP called its 2020 campaign “Operation Ziklag” (named after a Biblical town that served as a base for the Philistines until it was won by David).

The April call featured various movers and shakers from the CNP. Ralph Reed spoke to the “macro political landscape,” explaining that a key component of the Democrats’ strategy was the Black vote in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democrats had experienced a significant drop-off between 2012 and 2016. “There were 47,000 fewer Black votes cast in just Milwaukee County alone,” Reed told the call participants—in Wisconsin, a state Trump had won by fewer than 24,000 votes.

This was not a coincidence. In September 2020, Britain’s Channel 4 reported that the Trump campaign had used Cambridge Analytica data to profile and target 3.5 million Black voters in 2016, assigning them to a category the campaign called “Deterrence,”with messaging designed to suppress the vote.

Reed told his associates that “his ‘data partners’ had identified 26 million key voters in battleground states, about three-fourths of whom were Facebook users,” The Intercept’s Fang reported. Once again, the 2020 strategy, like the 2016 efforts, would strive to get out the vote for Republicans and suppress the vote of traditional Democrats.

Abortion continued to be a major calling card of the campaign, spearheaded by CNP Gold Circle member Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the Susan B. Anthony List. Dannenfelser, who had recently joined the UiP alliance, told the callers that her organization had conducted surveys on messaging with pro-life working-class voters in battleground Rust Belt states and found that its “born alive” formulation on abortion, promoted by Trump, “has had a tremendous effect in moving persuadable voters in all those areas in Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.” This would strengthen Trump’s chances in the swing states that comprised the “northern path” to victory: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as the “southern path” of North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. (Georgia, assumed to be solidly in the Republican column, would prove a wild card.)

The CNP’s second stratagem to “reopen the economy” debuted around the same time. On April 13, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Robert Costa reported that White House staff had presented Trump with a list of “100 business executives” who could advise him as to how to jump-start the economy. The piece quoted CNP co-founder Richard Viguerie, who began his career under the tutelage of disgraced radio evangelist Billy James Hargis and went on to pioneer the use of direct mail in political marketing. “Obviously, the sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans,” Viguerie said. A lot of them, he added, “feel there might be an overreaction to all of this [epidemic].”

According to The Washington Post’s unnamed sources, “The outside effort from conservative groups is expected to be led by Stephen Moore,a conservative at the Heritage Foundation who is close with White House economic officials; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots; Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks,a conservative advocacy organization; andLisa Nelson, chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative pro-business policy and lobbying organization with ties to the Koch brothers.”

This initiative marked a shift in the CNP profile. Going into the 2016 elections, the public faces of the organization had been prominent fundamentalists. Tony Perkins, CNP president from 2016 to 2019, is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister and longtime head of the fundamentalist lobbying group Family Research Council, and he has hosted Christian nationalists Robert Jeffress and David Barton on his radio broadcasts. Almost half of Trump’s original Evangelical Advisory Board—including Perkins—were members of the CNP, and they were in and out of the Oval Office on a regular basis. But in 2019, Perkins was succeeded as CNP president by William Walton, the founder and chairman of Rappahannock Ventures, a private equity firm, with long ties to the Koch Brothers and a limited religious profile. In 2015, Walton chaired a panel at the CNP, stating, “Most of my career has been spent in business and on Wall Street, and I was among the first to attend the Charles Koch seminars.” Other figures connected to the Koch empire ascended in the CNP hierarchy. Jenny Beth Martin, who co-founded the Tea Party Patriots with Koch backing, rose to the office of secretary. Adam Brandon, head of the Koch-founded “grassroots” organization FreedomWorks, took a spot on the board of directors of CNP Action, the organization’s lobbying arm.

David Koch died in August 2019, but his brother Charles carried on. A man with no particular religious profile, Koch embarked on a “charm offensive,” distancing himself from Trump and his fundamentalist allies, presenting himself to the media as a “unifier” (and scrubbing the CNP’s Free Enterprise Award from his profile). But his funding activities told a different story. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Alec Kotch has recorded millions of dollars in grants from Koch and affiliates such as the Donors Trust to organizations run by leading members of the CNP. Theseinclude ALEC, as well as the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA. Some of these groups would play important roles in attempts to disrupt the electoral process in the months ahead.

The Washington Post’s April story on the “100 business leaders” initiative made no mention of the CNP, despite the fact that among the leading figures, Moore was on the CNP board of governors, Nelson was a member, and Martin and Brandon were officers. Moore warned the Post that the disaffection of “the right” presented a growing threat to public order, neglecting to mention the ways the CNP was stoking the flames. “There’s a massive movement on the right now, growing exponentially,” he said. “In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets by conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states. People are at the boiling point.”

The “boiling point” materialized over the next two weeks, as Moore forecast, with the assistance of another CNP-linked effort called Convention of States, led by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and CNP Gold Circle member.He :{told the *Post*:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: his group would function as a “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other” and praised “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns. “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about the protests across the country.”The most publicized events occurred at the Michigan statehouse on April 15 and May 1, when armed protesters invaded the state Capitol, but these were far from the only ones.

The new “businessmen’s group,” previewed in The Washington Post as “100 business executives,” officially debuted on April 27, billed as the “Save Our Country Coalition.” It called for a series of measures to reopen the economy, flying in the face of expert medical recommendations for curbing the epidemic, whose U.S. death toll now approached 55,000. The CNP was heavily represented among the group’s leadership, including stalwarts such as Richard Viguerie, Ed Meese, and Kenneth Blackwell, as well as rising stars Adam Brandon, Jenny Beth Martin, and Lisa Nelson.

One notable addition was a California physician named Dr. Simone Gold. Over the summer, she emerged as a key player in the third prong of the CNP’s campaign, the war against public health policy, the result of another set of conference calls between Trump campaign staff and members of CNP Action. On one April call, published by the Center for Media and Democracy, CNP President William Walton told the group, “We need to make not just the economic argument, we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us.” Within days, Gold began to appear across right-wing media platforms, promoting the false message that hydroxychloroquine (a medication used to treat autoimmune diseases) was both a prophylactic and a cure for Covid-19 (as reportedin the September 2020 Washington Spectator). On June 1, The Guardian quoted Brandon’s report that he had raised $800,000 along the way to a $5 million multiplatform media blitz for the campaign.

On July 27, Jenny Beth Martin, Gold, and a dozen other physicians held a Washington, D.C., press conference to deliver their dangerous message. The video reached millions of viewers on Breitbart and President Trump’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter feeds. Major social media platforms quickly removed it as a violation of their Covid-19 misinformation policies, but Gold’s message has continued to circulate on alternative platforms.

The 2020 political campaigns stumbled ahead. Both the Democrats and the Republicans suspended rallies and canvassing in the late spring. On June 5, Joe Biden won the 1,991 delegates needed for the Democratic nomination, and the general campaign officially began. Democrats proceeded cautiously, forgoing rallies and canvassing on the advice of public health officials. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, returned to holding mass gatherings, starting with a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20. This became the first of the campaign’s “superspreader” events. Four weeks after the rally, Oklahoma’s Covid-19 cases tripled. On July 30, rally attendee and former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died of Covid-19.

Trump and the CNP doubled down. On August 19, the CNP opened its meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City with a panel featuring attorney Sidney Powell. Two days later, Donald Trump addressed the CNP in his single major convention-eve event. Over chants of “USA! USA!” Trump acknowledged key supporters by name, including CNP President William Walton, Executive Director Bob McEwen, and Secretary Jenny Beth Martin. His rambling speech attacked familiar enemies and lauded familiar friends, including evangelicals, extractive industries, and the gun lobby. Photos from the event showed several hundred tightly packed, unmasked guests in the ballroom. That afternoon’s program featured attorney Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma native and a longtime CNP board of governors member, on panels called “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.”Executive committee member Brent Bozell III told his fellow members that the left plans to “steal this election.”

“And if they get away with that, what happens?” Bozell demanded. “Democracy is finished because they usher in totalitarianism.”

Trump’s speech to the CNP was released by the White House and widely covered by the national press, but news organizations gave short shrift to the CNP and the scope of its operations. (The New York Times, for example, identified it as merely “a conservative group.”)

But the CNP was becoming less of a mystery. Over the previous months, a small band of researchers had made significant progress in shining a light on the organization’s agenda. Brent Allpress, an academic in Australia, found a back door into its online archives and began to access records of past meetings, which were used in a British documentary called People You May Know (in which this reporter also appears). Two watchdog organizations stepped up their monitoring of the CNP: The Center for Media and Democracy added new funding streams and strategic initiatives, as well as publishing CNP files sourced from Brent Allpress, and Documented found additional CNP meeting materials. Both groups posted meeting agendas, videos of presentations, and—critically—the updated membership rosters for September 2020 that Allpress had accessed. CNP had intentionally elevated its profile, but now it was in danger of losing its cloak altogether.

The rest of the August CNP meeting was held under the usual conditions of secrecy, but this time its proceedings were leaked to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr., who published an account on October 14.The CNP leaders were sounding notes of alarm. “This is a spiritual battle. This is good versus evil,” CNP president Walton told the group. “We have to do everything possible to win.” Trump’s disastrous handling of the Covid-19 crisis was hurting his chances at the polls, and Democratic voters were newly energized. The old messaging about abortion and unisex bathrooms looked less compelling as the pandemic death toll mounted and millions were thrown out of work.

The CNP went into crisis mode, focusing on the mechanics of the election. Charlie Kirk, head of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA and a relatively new member, took the stage to celebrate the closure of campuses, which could deprive the Democrats of a half-million student votes. “So, please keep the campuses closed,” he said. Executive committee member Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, asked his audience for ideas to foil mail-in voting: “We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do.”

The lawyers in the room were eager to help. One of them, the CNP board member Cleta Mitchell, was a partner in the influential Milwaukee-based law firm Foley and Lardner. She also served on the board of directors of the ultraconservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. In 2020, the Bradley Foundation grantedhundreds of thousands of dollars to ALEC, FreedomWorks, and the CNP itself.

Cleta Mitchell had worked closely with another leading CNP member on election matters in recent years. This was Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a member of the board of directors of CNP Action. Ginni Thomas was known as the not-so-secret weapon of the CNP and its allies. A longtime supporter of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, she had spoken at the organization’s student conference and served on its advisory council. She was listed as a contributor at the Daily Caller,the online media platform founded and funded by fellow CNP members. At the May 2019 CNP meeting, Thomas and Mitchell offered a joint presentation on electoral strategies, and at the February 2020 meeting, Heritage Foundation alumna Rachel Bovard praised Thomas as a key liaison to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington,” Bovard said. (Bovard joined Thomas on the board of CNP Action shortly afterward.)

A few weeks later, the CNP received some important news. On September 18, Justice Ginsburg had died, at the age of 87, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. CNP affiliates swung into action, repeating the process that had won them two previous conservative justices under the Trump administration. Kelly Shackelford, CNP vice president and chairman of CNP Action, had described his operation at the meeting the previous February, as reported by The Washington Post: “He bragged about extensive behind-the-scenes coordination by his group and other non-profit organizations to influence the White House selection of federal judges. ‘Some of us literally opened a whole operation on judicial nominations and vetting,’ he said. ‘We poured millions of dollars into this to make sure the president has good information, he picks the right judges.’”

Shackelford’s forces promoted the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, another Federalist Society alum, to fill Ginsburg’s seat. Barrett was a longtime CNP favorite. Investigative journalist Robert Maguire learned that, as of July 2018, the domain name “confirmbarrett.com” had already been reserved by the Judicial Crisis Network, founded and chaired by CNP board of governors member Gary Marx and closely aligned with the Federalist Society.The Judicial Crisis Network went on to spend at least $9.4 million in television spots and $4.3 million in digital ads, direct mail, and text messaging to promote Barrett’s nomination,according to a report by Michael Biesecker and Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press.

September 26 was another red-letter day for the CNP. President Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony [SUPERSPREADER // GOLD STAR?] to announce Barrett’s nomination, and the CNP treated the event as a victory lap. Once confirmed, Barrett would serve as the fulcrum for the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century, the fulfillment of decades of hard work by CNP strategists. At least 15 members of the CNP were listed among the attendees at the Rose Garden event—equal to the combined number of White House officials and members of Congress present. Among the crowd were old CNP warhorses Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, as well as newly prominent election wranglers Jenny Beth Martin, Cleta Mitchell, and Tom Fitton. Exactly one month later, on October 26—one week before the election—Amy Coney Barrett would be confirmed as the Supreme Court’s new associate justice, after her nomination sailed through the Republican-controlled Senate.

But the Rose Garden event may have also constituted the CNP’s last hurrah for the Trump era. Defying urgent public health advisories, more than 150 guests sat in tight rows, mostly maskless, engaging in spirited conversation. Two weeks later, Dr. Anthony Fauci decried it as a “superspreader event,” as at least seven attendees tested positive for Covid-19—including Donald and Melania Trump.

On Election Day, November 3, the nation held its breath. Ralph Reed’s massive get-out-the-vote effort had driven up turnout, but so had the Democrats. On November 4, as the results hung in abeyance, a site called StoptheSteal.us was registered. It was discovered the following day by Brent Allpress, who traced its registration to an account called “Vice and Victory,” owned by a curious figure named Ali Alexander. Alexander was sometimes known as “Ali Akbar,” the name he was listed under as a member of the CNP on 2017 and 2018 rosters. He began to use the name “Alexander” after pleading guilty to two counts of felony in 2007 and 2008. As “Ali Alexander,” he announced the launch of #StoptheSteal on Twitter with a list of 15 partners and the text, “Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election.” One of them was CNP member Ed Martin, head of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles Forum Fund.

A new Stop the Steal Facebook group had appeared on November 4 and was banned the following day. The Washington Post quoted the page’s recruitment of “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote” and solicitation of donations to cover “‘flights and hotels to send people’ to battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.” According to the Post, the “Stop the Steal” group appeared as a co-host on 12 different Facebook protest listings, among them one for a car caravan from California. The group gained 360,000 members before it was removed for violating Facebook’s rules for inflammatory content, as users called for “civil war” and “overthrowing the government.”

According to Allpress, the StoptheSteal.us site provided organizational information for protests on November 6 at counting centers and capitols across six “contested” swing states.CNP member Charlie Kirk was listed as the primary organizational contact for Nevada protests, along with alt-right activist Mike Cernovich.The Center for Media and Democracy reported the state-level involvement of other CNP members and added that FreedomWorks, run by CNP Action board of governors member Adam Brandon, was organizing “Protect the Vote” protests in five states.

On November 6, as Biden pulled ahead, Jenny Beth Martin announced that Tea Party Patriot Action was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in four swing states, “working with FreedomWorks, Turning Points [sic], Heritage”—all run by members of the CNP—“and countless social media influencers to help organize and assemble citizens in various locations around the country to voice our support for transparent and honest ballot counting.”

The election was called for Joe Biden on November 7, based on late-counted ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.Attorney Cleta Mitchell made her feelings known on Fox News, stating, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted,” and tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!”

The CNP refused to surrender and convened a special meeting November 12 to 14. Mitchell appeared at the meeting on an updated panel, now called “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” And CNP Action answered the question with a new set of “Action Steps.”

These directed members to lobby legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada to support litigation challenging the election outcome; to “actively educate your pastor and church” with resources from Charlie Kirk, the Family Research Council, and others;to “reach out” to 10 CNP affiliates engaged in the Georgia runoff election; and (ominously) to “connect with local law enforcement.”

Other measures were being set in motion. A familiar figure resurfaced: Trump’s first national security adviser,Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Flynn, too, had a history with the CNP. In July 2016, Flynn appeared on a CNP panel on “Terrorism and the Condition of the Military.” Academic researcher Allpress foundFlynn listed in a Zoominfo database of “email addresses and direct dials for the Council for National Policy employees” with a CNP phone number (first listed on November 26 and still active as of February 11—throughout the period when he was appearing at the Stop the Steal protests, including in the January 6, 2021, WildProtest rally).

Dispelling any possibility of the entry representing another “Mike Flynn,” the listing was linked to his 2016 CNP panel appearance.

Ginni Thomas is listed in the same CNP employee database, also as having an undisclosed staff role.

Flynn’s affiliations underscore a disturbing link between Trump’s team and the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon. On July 7, 2020, the CNN reported that Flynn had tweeted a video of himself taking an oath with a QAnon slogan, accompanied by a QAnon hashtag.

In the weeks following the election, Flynn appeared on a December 4 Red State Talk Radio program called “In the Matrixxx: General Flynn Digital Soldiers.” This was a term Flynn had introduced in a May 2016 speech, as aforce to combat the “insurgency” created by the professional news media: “So the American people decided to take over the idea of information . . . and they did it through social media.” In his introduction, Matrixxx host Jeffrey Pederson urged, “Patriots, join us in a Q army. Are you guys ready for some booms?” In a telephone interview, he congratulated Michael Flynn on his November 25 presidential pardon for lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation. “We are your digital soldiers, sir.”

Flynn replied, “The digital army that we have is unstoppable. . . . When I see people that don’t want to fight on the battlefield, the Twitter space, the Facebook space, we don’t necessarily choose the terrain that we want to fight on, but when we get on that terrain, and we’re on it . . . we fight like digital soldiers, and we will overcome everything.”

When host Jeffrey Pederson complained that his program had been taken down from a number of major digital platforms, Flynn answered, “Digital Soldiers is gonna have a capability soon. . . . We need a new platform of truth, it’s gonna happen.”

Concerning “this disastrous election we’ve just had,” Flynn adhered to the CNP party line concentrating on state-level action. “We are going to win. We have to be patient, we have to persevere through this, we have to be committed to fight for the truth in these various swing states where the hearings have been occurring. . . . For the people that are in those states, those affected states, you need to be calling your representatives, you need to be going to these rallies that they’re having at the state capitals, and you need to be putting demands on your state officials, your state political class, to not accept this gross . . . this abuse of our election system.”

On December 10, the CNP’s Conservative Action Project published a letter stating, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election.” It stated that “state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It further called on conservative leaders and groups to implement the strategy discussed at the previous CNP meeting and pressure their state and national representatives to replace the electors. The letter was signed by over a dozen members of the CNP, including the president, the executive director, and executive committee member Jenny Beth Martin.

Over the course of November, Stop the Steal organizers had summoned their supporters to join a series of pro-Trump “Jericho Marches” and prayer vigils around the country. These included a “March for Trump” 20-city bus tour organized by Women for America First, one of Tea Party activists Amy Kremer’s organizations, culminating in a December 12 rally in Washington D.C. Michael Flynn was a headliner for the event, and his speech was recorded by the Right Side Broadcasting Network and posted on YouTube:{. Standing over a Women for America First podium before the Supreme Court, Flynn proclaimed,“We are not going to give up!” His words were met by chants of “Stop the Steal!” from the crowd—which included hundreds of Proud Boys and QAnon supporters in combat fatigues and paramilitary gear.Flynn }:{his remarks with a blessing for the military, first responders, and the police. “They’re fighting on the front lines of freedom right now—for us.”}::{ }:

Legal efforts to overturn the election results continued, but counts and recounts of the ballots came up with the same results, and the challenges were dismissed by courts across the country. Trump’s circle of trusted advisers was shrinking, and the president considered desperate measures.

On Friday, December 18, an extraordinary meeting took place in the White House with four participants who had not been recorded on the official calendar, among them Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell, both of whom had ties to the CNP. According to a February 6 account of that meeting in The New York Times, Sidney Powell proposed that Trump appoint her special counsel to investigate voter fraud, and Trump considered naming Flynn head of the FBI and chief of staff for the rest of his administration.

The previous day, December 17, the right-wing site Newsmaxhad posted an interview with Flynn. “The president has to plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is,” Flynn said. “This is just totally unsatisfactory. There’s no way in the world we’re going to be able to move forward as a nation with this. . . .He could immediately on his order seize every single one of these machines around the country on his order.He could also order, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. It’s not unprecedented.”

Now, in the White House meeting of December 18, witnesses reported that Powell and Flynn urged Trump to consider the National Emergencies Act and “extraordinary measures” to address the electoral outcome. Others in the meeting objected, and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff General James McConville quickly issued a :{statement:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: saying, “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

As the options diminished, CNP members doubled down. On January 2, President Trump held a conference call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he famously ordered Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes—one more than Biden’s margin of victory. The CNP’s Cleta Mitchell, one of three lawyers on the call, was identified by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as one of the “attorneys that represent the president—who is not the attorney of record but has been involved [in the efforts to challenge the electoral results].” Mitchell reinforced Trump’s false claims of fraud and pressed Raffensperger to hand over his investigations of the allegations.

Once again, the effort backfired. The Raffensperger call was leaked to the press, and the Georgia official was lauded as a champion of democracy for resisting Trump’s bullying behavior. Mitchell resigned from her position at Foley and Lardner, based on the firm’s policy that its attorneys would not represent “any parties seeking to contest the results of the election.”

Trump’s paths to victory were diminishing by the day. The next juncture was January 6, when Congress was scheduled to certify the Electoral College vote. Stop the Steal had been mobilizing for weeks, with the support of the president’s Twitter feed.

The CNP connection surfaced on a number of fronts, as reflected in a chronology published by The Washington Post. On December 20, the domain “WildProtest” was registered. The Post’s Philip Bump wrote, “It appears to be the brainchild of Ali Alexander” (the onetime CNP member and former Ali Akbar). On January 2, Amy Kremer of Women for America First tweeted, “We are excited to announce the site of our January 6 event will be the Ellipse in President’s Park, just steps from the White House!” Kremer appeared in the CNP’s 2014 roster on the CNP board of governors, listed as chairman of the Tea Party Express. Her daughter Kylie Kremer took out the National Park Service permit for the “March for Trump,” dated January 5, 2021.

CNP affiliates took action on a local level. Two days before the protest, Charlie Kirk tweeted that his organizations were “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” (Kirk was indulging in hyperbole. Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet later confirmed to Reuters that Kirk’s organization, Turning Point Action, sent “seven buses carrying 350 students” to the rally, but added that the group “condemns political violence.”) Another tweet from Turning Point Action**invited**protesters to “ride a bus & receive priority entry” and “stay in a complimentary hotel.” Both tweets were deleted after January 6.In Lynchburg, Virginia, more than 100 protestersboarded buses organized by Liberty Counsel Action, chaired by CNP board of governors member Mat Staver.

CNP member Ginni (Mrs. Clarence) Thomas promoted the protest on her Twitter feed on January 6, tweeting, “Watch MAGA crowd today best with Right Side Broadcasting (https://rsbnetwork.com/), and then C-Span for what the Congress does starting at 1:00 pm today. LOVE MAGA people!!!!”

On another front, CNP member Scott Magill, a retired military physician who had joined the hydroxychloroquine campaign, summoned “fellow Warriors and Friends” to the protest on behalf of his organization, Veterans in Defense of Liberty. Magill had made a video presentation to a 2017 CNP meeting, which was accessed by Brent Allpress, describing VIDOL as a national organization made up of “battalions” and “companies,” formed to “identify and oppose all who would destroy our freedom, our Judeo-Christian values, our culture, or our morals.” It was expanded, he said, to include a “cavalry division of Veteran motorcycle riders” that could function as a “peaceful rapid response team.”

Jenny Beth Martin claimed a major role in the day’s events. On December 30, she tweeted, “I will be speaking at the #StoptheSteal rally on January 6. We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” She indicated that her protégé, Dr. Simone Gold (the mouthpiece for Covid misinformation), would be speaking as well. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots were listed as one of the 11 participating organizations on the March to Save America website (along with Turning Point Action and Phyllis Schlafly Eagles). The site announced, “At 1:00 pm we will march on the US Capitol building to protest the certification of the Electoral College.” (The webpage included an automatic SMS opt-in and a Covid-19 disclaimer waiving any claims against the organizers for “illness or injury.”)

On Tuesday, January 5, Trump supporters gathered at Freedom Plaza in Washington for a Stop the Steal “pre-rally.” Ali Alexander led them in cries of “Victory or Death!” Michael Flynn told them, “We stand at a crucible moment in United States history,” and local CBS affiliate reporter Mike Valerio tweeted from the scene, “We’ve heard General Mike Flynn give a salute / shoutout to QAnon soldiers.”

On January 6, thousands of protesters converged on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. President Trump addressed his followers in strident tones, urging them to “walk down to the Capitol,” “show strength,” and “demand that Congress do the right thing.” Then he departed for the White House to watch the day’s events on television.

The crowd moved toward the Capitol and invaded its halls, attacking Capitol police officers and vandalizing the premises. Simone Gold reprised her speech in the Rotunda, condemning the Covid-19 vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” Some members of the mob clutched Bibles and carried signs reading “Jesus Saves.” Americans were stunned by shocking images of men in paramilitary gear snaking up the Capitol steps, of the mob assaulting a prostrate police officer, of extremists brandishing zip-tie handcuffs in the Senate chamber.

On the Senate floor, Brent Bozell IV was recorded entering the chamber, speaking on a cell phone, then repositioning the C-SPAN camera to point at the floor. Bozell is the son of Brent Bozell III, a 30-year veteran of the CNP and a member of the executive committee.

In the aftermath of the attack, Charlie Kirk and other supporters of the protest deleted their tweets, but many had already been archived. Simone Gold expressed “regret” for her actions, but on January 18 she was arrested by the FBI on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct. Gold’s sponsor, Jenny Beth Martin—who was scheduled to speak on January 5 but did not—told Robert O’Harrow of The Washington Post that her group had provided no financial support for the rally. “We were shocked, outraged, and saddened at the turn of events Wednesday afternoon,” she said.

On January 6, Brent Bozell III gave an interview to Fox Business describing the riot as “an explosion of pent-up outrage from Middle America.” He said, “Look, they are furious because they believe this election was stolen. . . .I agree with them.” He condemned the breaching of the Capitol, blaming it on “one element that went forward in lawlessness.” His son was charged with participating in the breach by the FBI 10 days later.

It will be months, if not years, before the details of the events in January will be fully revealed, including the identities of the organizers and underwriters and the role of the CNP. Many additional threads require urgent examination, and this will demand the combined efforts of federal and congressional investigators, journalists, academics, and litigators. One is the mounting evidence of heavy QAnon involvement in the violence in the Capitol. The FBI has noted the wide display of “symbols associated with QAnon conspiracy theories” among the rioters, and QAnon followers are heavily represented among those arrested so far. The marchers on the Capitol also bore a number of Christian Nationalist symbols, including a wooden cross and a flag reading “Make America Godly Again.” Recently, there have been disturbing reports that QAnon has been aggressively targeting Midwestern evangelicals, including mainline Protestants, Southern Baptists, and Pentecostals.Pentecostals are a little-understood but growing force in American politics, particularly among African-American and Hispanic voters, and the CNP has been cultivating their leaders for years.

The CNP’s affiliates were by no means acting alone in attempting to overturn the results of the election, or in their support for the Capitol protest on January 6. The evidence shows various networks at work: civilian and military, independent and intersecting, feckless and murderous.

What is irrefutable is that members of the CNP and their circle exerted their influence and manipulated their followers to support Trump’s lies about the stolen election and his effort to derail the electoral process. Many of these people emerged as key players in the efforts to disrupt America’s 220-year-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and stoked the fury of insurrectionists who desecrated American democracy on that fateful January afternoon.

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Bloomsbury will publish a :{:{new paperback edition:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: in May, 2021. Nelson is the recipient of the Livingston Award for journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research.

covid prong //:

pseudo event, tobacco playbook 3rd party bs: NOTE RWI NICHE SLEEPER CELLS]

NOTE CORP CNP ALEC KOCH TPBASTARDS USE HYDROXY IN CYNICAL? FURY? MOVE TO RE-OPEN ECONOMY

9/20

https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/

On July 27, a dozen physicians posed in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., dressed in white lab coats with “America’s Frontline Doctors” stitched over the pocket. The group’s chief spokesperson wasDr. Simone Gold, an emergency physician from Los Angeles. They were introduced by Jenny Beth Martin, the founding CEO of Tea Party Patriots, as participants in the “White Coat Summit.” The doctors made spirited arguments for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for Covid-19 and against wearing masks and imposing lockdowns—all running counter to the recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[[1]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn1)

Although the event was billed as a “press conference,” few journalists attended. A video posted by a bystander showed only a handful of attendees, most of them dressed in tourists’ shorts and T-shirts. But the event was livestreamed by Breitbart News and quickly went (so to speak) viral.

There was a rapid backlash. Much of the media attention focused onDr. Stella Immanuel, one of Gold’s cohort. Following the press conference, the Daily Beast posted a video of Immanuel, who is also aPentecostalpreacher, delivering a sermon claiming that variousfemale ailments were caused by sexual visitations from “demons.”

Immanuel has since disappeared from the America’s Frontline Doctors online roster, but the group has continued to get traction. On August 10, Pat Robertson’s show on the Christian Broadcasting Network carried an interview with Simone Gold and an endorsement of her hydroxychloroquine cure.On August 21, Alex Jones’s NewsWars carried an interview with another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, Mark McDonald. McDonald—a child psychiatrist—maintained, “If all Americans had access to hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would essentially end in about 30 days.”

Science has shown otherwise. Despite early hopes last spring, there is mounting evidence that hydroxychloroquine is a problematic—and even dangerous—treatment for Covid-19. One expert with firsthand knowledge is Nick Sawyer, an academic emergency physician in Sacramento, Calif. In July he wrote an article for Lifeline, the publication of the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, describing his harrowing two weeks of service in the Covid wards of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Sawyer was part of a team of California doctors dispatched by Governor Gavin Newsome to offer emergency assistance at the epicenter of the epidemic, at the height of the New York City outbreak.

Sawyer is now dealing with the spike in cases in California, this time with the benefit of four months of additional Covid research. “The science on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 is settled—multiple high-quality studies have shown that it shows no benefit,” he notes. Far more concerning, Sawyer says, is its potential harm: “Hydroxychloroquine can cause unstable cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death.” Over recent months, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and other organizations have issued warnings that the drug should be withdrawn as a Covid-19 treatment. “It’s irresponsible for America’s Frontline Doctors to continue to push this medication on the unwitting American population,” Sawyer states.

Why, then, would Gold’s band of physicians continue its campaign to pitch the treatment to the public? Simone Gold has repeatedly described her group as a “grassroots organization” acting in the service of its patients.[[2]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn2) In fact, it has been a highly orchestrated effort, months in the making, assembled by conservative Washington insiders in direct consultation with the White House, with the goal of reopening the economy in time to benefit Trump’s reelection prospects—regardless of the toll in human lives.

The first public mention of the initiative may have been a Washington Post story on April 13, as the virus raged across New York City and Covid-19 deaths passed the 20,000 mark.[[3]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn3) The Post reported the creation of a new conservative coalition [biz man group 100?] “pushing for the White House and GOP lawmakers to push back against health professionals who have urged more caution.” The leadership was listed as Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council. A fourth individual, Jenny Beth Martin, is the founding director of the Tea Party Patriots. She would play a key role in organizing the events to come, including the doctors’ Washington “summit” in July.

Brandon, Nelson, and Martin are all prominent members of a secretive organization called the Council for National Policy,a shadowy coalition that coordinates initiatives among conservative megadonors, political operatives, and media owners, many of them Christian fundamentalists (see “Holding Democracy Hostage”).

The Post story quoted an interview with Richard Viguerie, a co-founder of the CNP, on the mission of the initiative: “The sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year. . . . Conservatives feel the government has overreacted, and it’s got to end.”[[4]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn4)

The new coalition, called Save Our Country, officially debuted on April 27, as U.S. Covid deaths approached 55,000.[[5]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn5) Headed by economist Art Laffer, its maiden press release featured quotes from Brandon, Nelson, and Martin. “The long-term consequences of a prolonged societal shutdown outweigh the damage done by the virus itself,” Martin stated. “We must immediately reopen the economy.”[[6]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn6) Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the Save Our Country coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns: “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about protests across the country.”[[7]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn7)

But the state-level protests turned out to be of limited utility, and the group began to look for new avenues. In April, CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the CNP, began a series of weekly conference calls to discuss Covid strategy. On May 11—as U.S. Covid deaths reached 74,270[[8]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn8)—one of the calls was intercepted and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Associated Press.

Among the participants were CNP President William Walton, CNP member Nancy Schulze,[[9]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn9) and Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. Schulze, the wife of former nine-term Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Dick Schulze, opened the call with a warning that two-thirds of the American people were wary of reopening the economy. But, she added, “Doctors are seen by the American people—they have a 92 percent trust rate with the American people according to polling. . . . There is a coalition of doctors, doctors’ coalition, who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care, andthese doctors could be activated for this conversation now for reopening. NOTE RWI NICHE SLEEPER CELLS]

“The one thing the left does give credence to, in that they tend to be motivated by a secular worldview, the one thing that they do appreciate and listen to is science, and we have doctors that have the facts, that lived this themselves, that are in the trenches, that are saying it’s time to reopen,” Schulze continued. “I’ve been working with them for three years. There’s a coalition of doctors . . . including the most respected doctors in this country, that are ready to speak if somebody will just call on them.”

Walton told her, “We need to not just make the economic argument,we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us. THIRD PARTY TOBACCO PR BS And so that would be great if you, if we could tee that up.”

Schulze said she’d be happy to put him in touch “with any and all of these doctors, and I have submitted 27 of these doctors’ names to the campaign for the doctors’ coalition that they’re in the process of building.”

Mercedes Schlapp asked Schulze if she had spoken with Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign.“I know they’ve been working on building that coalition. I know they’re going through the vetting process right now. As long as you have the names, that would be helpful. . . . Those are the type of guys we want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the message.”

Schulze replied, “I’ve been working with Hannah for over six weeks now, so they already have been vetted. But they need to be put on the screen.”[[10]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn10)

Dr. Simone Gold, a 54-year-old emergency physician from Los Angeles, was ready for her close-up. On April 22, Gold had tweeted a stand-up of herself wearing a white “Emergency Dept.” coat, in front of Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai hospital emergency room, suggesting that concerns over the virus were inflated. She pointed out that the hospital “parking lots are empty, the emergency department volume is down, the patient census is down, and that’s really in most of the areas I’ve been to.”[[11]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn11)

On May 7, she brought a more explicit anti-lockdown message to a program on the Whiskey Politics show on Salem Radio, part of the massive Salem Media conglomerate owned by two leading members of the Council for National Policy.[[12]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn12) It was headlined “DR. SIMONE GOLD GOES PUBLIC! What the Government WON’T Tell Us About COVID-19.”

“It’s not at all clear that overall, that social distancing is going to make a huge impact,” Gold said.[[13]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn13) “We’re all acting like as though there’s a huge medical crisis. There’s a medical issue, we should handle it responsibly, but what’s going on in our country now is a terrible legal crisis. Our constitutional rights are being trampled on right and left.”[[14]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn14) Gold later added, “There’s always viruses . . . but I’m not sure that it’s front-page news.”[[15]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn15)

The Guardian reported that over the same period, the Save Our Country coalition spent $50,000 on videos on social media platforms “targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.”[16] GUK

On May 19—as U.S. Covid deaths reached 84,640[[17]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn17)—the CNP’s doctors coalition (billed as “A Doctor A Day”) made its debut with an open letter to Donald Trump signed by “500+ doctors” (a number that was later revised to over 800). “In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” it stated. “It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown.” The lead signatory was Dr. Simone Gold.

On June 16—with U.S. Covid deaths approaching 110,000[[18]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn18) and the U.S. economy in freefall—the Save Our Country coalition published an open letter to President Trump and Leader McConnell, urging “that the multi-trillions of dollars of federal government debt spending in the wake of the Coronavirus come to a stop.”[[19]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn19) Twelve of the 20 signatories (among them Brandon, Nelson, and Martin) were members of the CNP, including CNP President William Walton and Executive Director Bob McEwen.

The push to reopen the schools became a full-court press. On July 7, Trump assembled a White House meeting on the subject. Jenny Beth Martin spoke as both the CEO of Tea Party Patriots and “as a mom.”

“Mr. President, you were right, and I hope you will trust your instincts,” she told Trump. “America is not meant to be shut down. And we have to reopen schools this fall. I’ve been in touch with almost a thousand doctors from around the country. I helped Dr. Simone Gold spearhead a letter to you signed by 800 physicians and surgeons who talked about the side effects of the lockdowns. I’ve done a second letter with over 150 doctors, 240 nurses, 330 educators, 70 national groups, and thousands of parents and concerned Americans who want to see schools reopened.”

A video of Martin’s statement appeared, billed as “Mom Gives Unexpected Speech Directly to Trump” without naming her or her affiliation. It was posted on various social media platforms, including Glenn Beck’s YouTube channel, The Blaze (where it clocked over 400,000 views as of August 4).[[20]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn20)

Dr. Simone Gold was now preparing to join Jenny Beth Martin on center stage. On July 22, Gold warmed up for her appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, with over 157,000 YouTube subscribers. Kirk, a member of the Council for National Policy, heads a group called Turning Point USA, which recruits right-wing campus activists. (Donald Trump addressed its Youth Action Summit last December, and Donald Trump Jr. is quoted on its website stating, “I’m convinced that the work by Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk will win back the future of America.”)[[21]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn21)

The introduction for Kirk’s show summed up the case Gold and her colleagues would make over the coming weeks: “Charlie is joined in studio by board-certified emergency physician Dr. Simon [sic] Gold, who says nearly everything we’ve been told about the Chinese Coronavirus is a lie.She and Charlie take a deep dive into the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and why the U.S. government is barring physicians from prescribing the drug—endangering potentially 100,000 lives, at least. Charlie also takes on Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, asking if Dr. Gold challenges the effectiveness of wearing masks. Dr. Gold makes a stunning and factual assertion about the death rates and who exactly is to blame for what she believes is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated against the American people.” [[22]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn22)

Gold’s “stunning assertion” was the often-repeated claim that doctors were falsifying death certificates, speculating without foundation that they were inflating Covid-19 cases by “20 to 30 percent.”[[23]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn23)Gold also asserted, “Masks are really foolish, they don’t do anything. . . . There’s zero scientific justification for the mask.”[[24]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn24)

Jenny Beth Martin emphasized a social media campaign from the start. Her Tea Party Patriots website posted the program of the White Coat Summit, offering the participating doctors a two-hour session devoted to expanding their social media reach: “YouTube and other social media vastly exceed television news as the information source for most Americans. Interviews and Q/A with social media personalities with large followers is the best way to talk to Americans. Doctors who want to answer questions from these modern journalists will have the opportunity.”

By the time Jenny Beth Martin hosted Gold’s White Coat Summit on July 27, U.S. Covid-19 deaths had skyrocketed to over 136,000.[[25]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn25) The physicians’ presentation carried a lethal stew of misinformation. Dr. Bob Hamilton, a pediatrician from Santa Monica, assured viewers, “Children are not passing [the virus] on to their parents or their teachers.” (A few days later, the CDC released a report on a massive transmission event in June at a Georgia summer camp, with a median age of 12.[[26]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn26))

Dr. Richard Urso—an ophthalmologist—praised hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for the virus,but it was not clear that Urso had ever had any significant experience treating Covid-19 patients. Another speaker was Dr. Daniel Erickson, a Bakersfield physician who co-owns an urgent care facility. In April he had been censured by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine for his “reckless and untested musings” opposing stay-at-home orders and promoting the conspiracy theory about doctors misattributing deaths to Covid-19.[[27]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn27)

The social media strategy paid off. Gold and her colleagues’ video, livestreamed on Breitbart News, reportedly reached 185,000 concurrent users.[[28]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn28) The New York Times’ Kevin Roose reported that over its six hours on Facebook, it was the second-most-engaged post on the platform, with 14 million views.[[29]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn29) (The audiences for network news broadcasts, by comparison, range from 9 to 12 million.) A few hours after the presentation, President Trump tweeted the video to his 84.5 million followers.Donald Trump Jr. told his 5.3 million Twitter followers, “This video is a much [sic] watch!!! So different from the narrative everyone is running with.”[[30]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn30) Trump redoubled his support at his press conference the following day, stating “I think they’re very respected doctors.”[[31]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn31)

But major social media platforms reacted with relative speed. Facebook took the group’s video down a few hours after it was posted, and Twitter and YouTube followed suit, all three on the grounds that the video violated their Covid-19 misinformation policies.[[32]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn32) Twitter took the unusual step of suspending Trump Jr.’s account for 12 hours.

Gold had built the original America’s Frontline Doctors website on a SquareSpace platform, but SquareSpace took it down. Gold rebuilt the website (omitting Stella Immanuel of “demon sperm” renown) and started raising money through PayPal and fundly.com. The doctors’ program also remained on the Tea Party Patriots site.

still a member/ active?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pro-confederacy-anti-equality-christian-nationalist-extremist-michael-peroutka-wins-gop-primary-for-maryland-attorney-general/

far-right extremist Michael Peroutka became the Republican Party’s nominee for Maryland state attorney general with a victory in Tuesday’s primary.Peroutka’s victory is a fiery red flag about the increasing extremism of the Republican Party’s base—as is the gubernatorial primary victory of Trumpist Dan Cox. In April, both Peroutka and Cox appeared at a gathering of QAnon conspiracy theorists called “Patriots Arise.”

Peroutka declared in 2014 that the Maryland General Assembly was no longer a legitimate governing body because its support for marriage equality violated God’s law, and that therefore none of the laws it passed were “legally valid and legally enforceable.”

Peroutka was a board member of the Confederacy-celebrating, pro-Southern-secessionist League of the South. At the group’s 2012 national convention, he led the crowd in singing “Dixie,” which he referred to as “the national anthem.” He quit the League in 2014 when he decided to run for the Anne Arundel County Council, claiming unconvincingly that he had been unaware of the group’s racism.

Peroutka founded the Institute on the Constitution, a Christian Reconstructionist organization that favors religious tests for public office and teaches that the government’s role is to enforce God’s law, and that the government has no legitimate authority to “house, feed, clothe, educate, or give health care to…ANYBODY!”

In 2004, Peroutka ran for the presidency as the nominee for the Christian nationalist Constitution Party. As recently as 2013, he was denouncing the Republican Party and “their brand of worthless, Godless unprincipled conservatism.” That year he appeared at a rally organized by right-wing activist Larry Klayman that was intended to force then-President Barack Obama out of office by a massive show of civil disobedience.

Notably, Peroutka’s extremism did not prevent him from being embraced as a member of the influential and secretive Council for National Policy, which brings together leaders from across the right-wing political movement in the United States.

VICE’s Cameron Joseph wrote about the potential for a Peroutka victory in a story published Monday. In a 2017 story for Talking Point Memo, Joseph reported that during Peroutka’s presidential campaign, Peroutka said he was still angry that Maryland hadn’t seceded in the run-up to the Civil War, praised his son for calling the Confederal flag the “American flag,” and praised his daughter for refusing to play the Battle Hymn of the Republic in her school band.

With Trump’s endorsement, Cox handedly beat Gov. Larry Hogan’s hand-picked successor in the GOP primary. Cox organized buses to attend the Jan. 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol and, during the attack, sent a tweet calling then-Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor.”

Journalist Sarah Posner, who has spent years covering the religious right and its allies, wrote in a Twitter thread this morning, “The projected victories of two far-right GOP candidates in the Maryland primary for governor and attorney general provides a potent opportunity to show how the long game of Christian nationalism intersects with the insurrection and election denialism.”

Tags: Dan Cox Donald Trump Michael Peroutka Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christian Reconstructionism Church-State Election 2022 QAnon Council for National Policy Institute on the Constitution League of The South Maryland Republican Party Republican Party

===

1 22

former top FBI official who served as Chief of the Bureau’s Counterespionage Section and led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election says it’s “concerning” that **Ginni Thomas** signed a letter attacking the House January 6 Select Committee.

**Peter Strzok**, who also led the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server and for a short time served on the Mueller Investigation, responded to Tuesday’s social media eruption over the resurfaced letter signed by Thomas, a far right wing conspiracy theorist and lobbyist who happens to be married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

That letter calls for U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to be expelled from the House Republican conference, which would also involve stripping them of their committee assignments.

Strzok was more focused on the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and other points of the letter which was signed in December by Thomas and more than 60 other mostly far right wing conservatives – making it a veritable who’s who of well-known extreme conservative activists including the head of an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

“Which is more concerning: That the spouse of a SC Justice recently signed a letter calling the Jan 6 Cmttee ‘an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong’ Or,” Strzok wrote, “The fact that the former President who encouraged those ‘private citizens who have done nothing wrong’ to violently oppose the peaceful transfer of power appointed three of nine Justices to the Supreme Court?”

More than 700 Americans have been charged in conjunction with the January 6 attack.

The letter, resurfaced by Charlie Sykes [ntbcw savage] at the never-Trump media outlet The Bulwark, also claims, falsely, that the January 6 Committee is using “improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics…for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery.”

On the morning of the January 6 attack Ginni Thomas, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out, expressed support for the so-called protestors, declaring “LOVE MAGA PEOPLE!!!!”...[twt]

ref twt

that the spouse of a SC Justice recently signed a letter calling the Jan 6 Cmttee “an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”

ref 2

December 15, 2021

The Honorable Kevin McCarthy

Minority Leader and Member (CA-23)

U.S. House of Representatives

2468 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Dear Leader McCarthy,

The undersigned conservatives ask that the House Republican Conference act immediately to remove both Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) from the Republican conference due to their egregious actions as part of the House of Representative’s January 6th Select Committee.

As you are aware, this committee has no formal representation from Republicans. Both Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger serve at the request of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). As part of Pelosi’s team, Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger have deliberately sought to undermine the privacy and due process of their fellow Republicans, and those of private citizens, with improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics designed not to pursue any valid legislative end, but merely to exploit for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery.

The actions of Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger on behalf of House Democrats have given supposedly bipartisan justification to an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law, legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong, and which demeans the standing of the House.

As duly elected representatives, Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger are free to serve in the House, but they should no longer do so with the privileges granted to members of the House Republican Conference. They should no longer be given access to the benefits of a conference they actively seek to undermine.

We ask that the GOP conference meet immediately to vote on stripping Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger from their membership in the GOP conference. We further inform you that conservative leaders are launching a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.

:{:{The Honorable Edwin Meese III}: Attorney General President Ronald Reagan}: (1985-1988)	The Honorable J. Kenneth Blackwell Chairman, Conservative Action Project (CAP) Chairman, Constitutional Congress, Inc.
The Honorable Bob McEwen (R-OH) U.S. House Committee on Rules Former Member	The Honorable Matt Schlapp Chairman American Conservative Union (ACU)
The Honorable Jim DeMint Chairman, Conservative Partnership Institute Member, US Senate (SC 2005-2013)	Ed Corrigan Vice Chairman, Conservative Action Project President & CEO, Conservative Partnership Institute
Jenny Beth Martin Chairman Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund	The Honorable Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II Chairman Election Transparency Initiative
David N. Bossie President Citizens United	The Honorable Tony Perkins President Family Research Council
The Honorable David McIntosh President Club for Growth	Scott T. Parkinson VP for Government Affairs Club for Growth
Rachel A. Bovard Senior Director of Policy Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)	The Honorable T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr. Chief Domestic Advisor President Ronald Reagan (1987-1988)
L. Brent Bozell III Founder and President Media Research Center	Alfred S. Regnery President Republic Book Publishers
Lisa B. Nelson odd no affil?	Cleta Mitchell, Esq.
David Bozell President ForAmerica	Noah Wall Executive Vice President FreedomWorks
Chad Connelly Founder and President Faith Wins	Terry Schilling President American Principles Project
William L. Walton The Bill Walton Show Resolute Protector Foundation	The Honorable Brooke Rollins President and CEO America First Policy Institute (AFPI)
The Honorable Russ Vought Director Office of Management and Budget (2020-2021)	Wesley Denton Chief Operating Officer Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)
Ginni Thomas President Liberty Consulting	Lori Roman President ACRU Action Fund
The Honorable Gary L. Bauer President American Values	The Honorable Briscoe Cain State Representative Texas House of Representatives
Elaine Donnelly President Center for Military Readiness	Craig Shirley Reagan Biographer Presidential Historian
Alan M. Gottlieb Chairman Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms	Gary A. Hofmeister Businessman Business Owner
The Honorable George K. Rasley Jr. Managing Editor ConservativeHQ.com	Seton Motley President Less Government
H. Preston Hawkins Chairman The Association for Community Education, Inc.	Richard Manning President Americans for Limited Government
Jeremy Cerone Member Council for National Policy	Robert K. Fischer Meeting Coordinator Conservatives of Faith
William Shaker CEO Washington Marketing Group	Paavo Ensio Chairman Universal Minerals Group
Richard D Hayes Partner Hayes, Berry, White & Vanzant, LLP	Joan Holt Lindsey President Lindsey Communications
Allen J. Hebert Chairman American-Chinese Fellowship of Houston	The Honorable Mary Vought Executive Director Senate Conservatives Fund
Clare Lopez Founder/President Lopez Liberty LLC	Sheryl Kaufman Board of Directors Americans for Limited Government
Dr. Allen Unruh Founder National Abstinence Clearinghouse	Amapola Hansberger President Legal Immigrants for America
The Honorable Morton C. Blackwell President The Leadership Institute	Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin (Ret.) Executive Vice President Family Research Council
Brandon Zehm Owner Zehm & Associates	Dr. Richard Rounsavelle Trustee MRC
Jenna L. Ellis, Esq.:{ Chair Election Integrity Alliance}:	Wendy Borcherdt Retired Political Volunteer Board Member, Hoover Institution
Jessie Jane Duff Gunnery Sergeant, US Marine Corps (ret) Ambassador, America First Policy Institute (AFPI)	Ralph A. Rebandt II Gubernatorial Candidate Ralph Rebandt for Governor
The Honorable Peter J. Thomas Chairman Conservative Caucus	Melvin Adams President Noah Webster Educational Foundation
Sandy Rios Director of Governmental Affairs American Family Association	Terrence Scanlon Former Chairman and Commissioner U.S. Consumer Product Safety Comn.
The Honorable Mike Hill Former Member Florida State Representative

:{:{The Honorable Edwin Meese III}:

Attorney General

President Ronald Reagan}: (1985-1988)

The Honorable J. Kenneth Blackwell

Chairman, Conservative Action Project (CAP)

Chairman, Constitutional Congress, Inc.

The Honorable Bob McEwen (R-OH)

U.S. House Committee on Rules

Former Member

The Honorable Matt Schlapp

Chairman

American Conservative Union (ACU)

The Honorable Jim DeMint

Chairman, Conservative Partnership Institute

Member, US Senate (SC 2005-2013)

Ed Corrigan

Vice Chairman, Conservative Action Project

President & CEO, Conservative Partnership Institute

Jenny Beth Martin

Chairman

Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund

The Honorable Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II

Chairman

Election Transparency Initiative

David N. Bossie

President

Citizens United

The Honorable Tony Perkins

President

Family Research Council

The Honorable David McIntosh

President

Club for Growth

Scott T. Parkinson

VP for Government Affairs

Club for Growth

Rachel A. Bovard

Senior Director of Policy

Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)

The Honorable T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.

Chief Domestic Advisor

President Ronald Reagan (1987-1988)

L. Brent Bozell III

Founder and President

Media Research Center

Alfred S. Regnery

President

Republic Book Publishers

Lisa B. Nelson odd no affil?

Cleta Mitchell, Esq.

David Bozell

President

ForAmerica

Noah Wall

Executive Vice President

FreedomWorks

Chad Connelly

Founder and President

Faith Wins

Terry Schilling

President

American Principles Project

William L. Walton

The Bill Walton Show

Resolute Protector Foundation

The Honorable Brooke Rollins

President and CEO

America First Policy Institute (AFPI)

The Honorable Russ Vought

Director

Office of Management and Budget (2020-2021)

Wesley Denton

Chief Operating Officer

Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)

Ginni Thomas

President

Liberty Consulting

Lori Roman

President

ACRU Action Fund

The Honorable Gary L. Bauer

President

American Values

The Honorable Briscoe Cain

State Representative

Texas House of Representatives

Elaine Donnelly

President

Center for Military Readiness

Craig Shirley

Reagan Biographer

Presidential Historian

Alan M. Gottlieb

Chairman

Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Gary A. Hofmeister

Businessman

Business Owner

The Honorable George K. Rasley Jr.

Managing Editor

ConservativeHQ.com

Seton Motley

President

Less Government

H. Preston Hawkins

Chairman

The Association for Community Education, Inc.

Richard Manning

President

Americans for Limited Government

Jeremy Cerone

Member

Council for National Policy

Robert K. Fischer

Meeting Coordinator

Conservatives of Faith

William Shaker

CEO

Washington Marketing Group

Paavo Ensio

Chairman

Universal Minerals Group

Richard D Hayes

Partner

Hayes, Berry, White & Vanzant, LLP

Joan Holt Lindsey

President

Lindsey Communications

Allen J. Hebert

Chairman

American-Chinese Fellowship of Houston

The Honorable Mary Vought

Executive Director

Senate Conservatives Fund

Clare Lopez

Founder/President

Lopez Liberty LLC

Sheryl Kaufman

Board of Directors

Americans for Limited Government

Dr. Allen Unruh

Founder

National Abstinence Clearinghouse

Amapola Hansberger

President

Legal Immigrants for America

The Honorable Morton C. Blackwell

President

The Leadership Institute

Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin (Ret.)

Executive Vice President

Family Research Council

Brandon Zehm

Owner

Zehm & Associates

Dr. Richard Rounsavelle

Trustee

MRC

Jenna L. Ellis, Esq.:{

Chair

Election Integrity Alliance}:

Wendy Borcherdt

Retired Political Volunteer

Board Member, Hoover Institution

Jessie Jane Duff

Gunnery Sergeant, US Marine Corps (ret)

Ambassador, America First Policy Institute (AFPI)

Ralph A. Rebandt II

Gubernatorial Candidate

Ralph Rebandt for Governor

The Honorable Peter J. Thomas

Chairman

Conservative Caucus

Melvin Adams

President

Noah Webster Educational Foundation

Sandy Rios

Director of Governmental Affairs

American Family Association

Terrence Scanlon

Former Chairman and Commissioner

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Comn.

The Honorable Mike Hill

Former Member

Florida State Representative

:{All organizations listed for IDENTIFICATION purposes only.

Signatures updated: 12/21/21.}:

ref 3

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Ginni+Thomas

The New Civil Rights Movement ginni 7 22...[many]

see documented docs

https://documented.net/investigations/council-for-national-policy-recordings

ALEC:

https://documented.net/investigations/exclusive-documented-obtains-recording-of-3-hour-long-voter-suppression-strategy-session-hosted-by-alec

https://newrepublic.com/article/165984/10-people-destroying-democracy

Anne Nelson/April 18, 2022

10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

They’re sowing disruption and disinformation, and they have their eyes on 2024.

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In recent years, America’s democracy has faced countless challenges. Some seemed to materialize out of thin air, but many have been the fruit of secretive networks such as the 40-year-old Council for National Policy. Here are 10 individuals who have sown the seeds of disruption and disinformation—and who are setting their sights on the 2024 presidential election.

Larry Arnn

President, Hillsdale College

For decades, Michigan-based Hillsdale has served as an academic partner for the religious right. The college has had a close relationship to the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian right umbrella organization that directs so much right-wing activism, through Arnn and his predecessor, George Roche III (who left in a cloud of scandal). Hillsdale’s major donors have constituted a who’s who of the radical right, including the Koch network and leading figures from the CNP. Arnn has expanded Hillsdale’s role as a platform for the CNP’s network of megadonors, fundamentalist activists, and media outlets, providing their policy prescriptions with a thin veneer of academic respectability. The college enrolls around 1,500 students, but its leaves an outsize footprint in political messaging. Its highly politicized publication Imprimis is sent to more than six million recipients. Hillsdale operates the Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., where it has groomed young conservatives at the Capitol Hill Staff Training School, run by the Leadership Institute (see Morton Blackwell, below). Hillsdale is also playing a role in the current disruption of public education, which has been used for political leverage in Virginia and beyond. In 2020, Donald Trump appointed Arnn chair of the 1776 Commission, to promote a “patriotic” rebuttal to the 1619 Project’s racially inclusive approach to U.S. history. Hillsdale has led an ongoing campaign to politicize public schools, promoting anti–critical race theory campaigns and assisting in the launch of “affiliate” charter schools in 11 states.

Joe Seales

CEO, Right Side Broadcasting Network

RSBN serves as the equivalent of a Trump-specific C-SPAN that has carried nearly every Trump speech, rally, and town hall since July 2015, as well as full coverage of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It also broadcasts a show called The Right View, with Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump. On January 6, it livestreamed Trump’s speech inciting the march on the Capitol, and it gave live coverage to the Florida “Freedom Rally to Show Support for President Trump and January 6th Political Prisoners” a year later. In July 2021, RSBN was temporarily suspended by YouTube, but the network looked to its own app and the new pro-Trump platform Rumble to continue to carry Trump’s rallies. The radical right has been assiduously constructing a parallel media system in recent decades. RSBN, Rumble, and Trump’s new Truth Social platform complement other media initiatives, ranging from traditional fundamentalist broadcasters like American Family Radio to social sites like Gettr and Parler, in the ongoing construction of an alternate political reality for millions of followers. In March 2022, after the height of the Ottawa truckers’ protests, RSBN promoted a truckers’ convoy roundtable hosted by Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it has offered ongoing amplification of Trump’s false election fraud claims. We can be sure that whatever Trump fabricates for future news cycles, RSBN will be repeating it.

Introductory offer: 50% off fearless reporting.

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Neil Patel

Co-founder and publisher of The Daily Caller

The Caller website was launched in 2010 by Patel and Tucker Carlson, his college roommate, with a $3 million investment from Patel’s fellow CNP member Foster Friess. (Carlson served as editor in chief until 2016 and left the publication in 2019, when Patel bought him out.) The site claims more than 20 million monthly readers, and the Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to almost 300 outlets. Patel has used the site as a platform for voices of the radical right, including Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville rally, as well as climate denial and disinformation, such as a falsified “nude” photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The site favors members of the CNP, including Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas (a Caller “special correspondent”) and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The Daily Caller has recently launched a Facebook video platform called American Voices, with three million followers, that partners with media platforms of the religious right. It also boosts Carlson’s Fox News broadcasts. The Caller’s YouTube channel features additional Carlson content, comedy and sports programming, as well as regular attacks on Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and CNN. It has given ample space to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and positive coverage of voter suppression legislation.

Jenny Beth Martin

Co-founder and CEO, Tea Party Patriots

Martin launched the Tea Party Patriots in March 2009 in collaboration with Amy Kremer and Mark Meckler, with funding from FreedomWorks, a “grassroots service center” founded with Koch backing. The Tea Party Patriots spent the Obama administration organizing various “spontaneous” anti-government, anti-tax rallies. Martin, Meckler, and Kremer also joined the CNP; by 2020, Martin had risen to the executive committee and Meckler to the status of Gold Circle member. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots became the meeting ground for the secular Koch brothers and the Christian nationalist CNP. She became the go-to woman for organizing campaigns, including political canvassing and public protests. Martin was a key point person for the CNP in Trump’s reelection campaign. In April 2020, she organized “100 Business Executives” in support of Trump, along with fellow CNP members Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Trump acknowledged Martin by name in his speech before the CNP on the eve of the 2020 GOP convention. On November 4, 2020, Martin announced that her organization was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in swing states. On December 30, she tweeted that she would be speaking at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally: “We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” (Martin was present at the rally, but didn’t end up speaking.) Most recently, Martin has spoken out in support of the Canadian truckers’ protest. “We are all truckers now,” she told The Hill in February.

Simone Gold

Founder, America’s Frontline Doctors

Gold was an emergency physician in Los Angeles who was tapped by the CNP leadership to serve as a point person for a massive Covid disinformation campaign. The plan was advanced on a conference call in May 2020, while the pandemic was first raging, and after Trump held his increasingly erratic press conferences that included CNP president William Walton and Trump aide Mercedes Schlapp. The goal was to use physicians to persuade the public that the economy could be opened up in time to benefit the Trump campaign. Gold began a series of appearances on media platforms run by CNP members, disparaging the idea that Covid was a “huge medical crisis,” pushing the false hydroxychloroquine “cure,” and attacking Anthony Fauci.

On July 27, 2020, Jenny Beth Martin introduced Gold and a dozen colleagues standing before the U.S. Supreme Court building, repeating a litany of falsehoods about the virus. Their statements, livestreamed by Breitbart News, quickly went viral, and the video was enthusiastically retweeted by Donald Trump. On January 6, Gold joined the mob that breached the Capitol. She was recorded in the Rotunda denouncing the Covid vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” She was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct (she pleaded guilty in March and will be sentenced in June). Over 2021, she appeared in a series of “Health and Freedom Conferences” across the country, sharing the bill with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. In 2020, she set up a profitable online prescription service for bogus Covid “cures.”

Morton Blackwell

Founder and president, the Leadership Institute

Blackwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie were young Goldwater activists when they joined forces in the 1960s. Together, they helped to create a constellation of conservative groups, including the CNP umbrella organization and its partner CPAC. Blackwell took on the task of training future generations of right-wing political candidates and activists. His Leadership Institute, launched in 1979, claims that it has trained more than 200,000 people over its history, many of them in county- and state-level sessions in battleground districts. The courses include fundraising, speechwriting, social media, and candidate development. Graduates of the institute include Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. The institute’s training is ongoing, especially in contested states. In 2021, the GOP, noting that it needed to net only five congressional districts to take the House, targeted 47 districts, five of them in Texas. That year, the Leadership Institute blanketed Texas, scheduling around 40 training workshops between March and November 2021—many months before the midterm elections. The national Democrats, in contrast, have tended to enter the state campaign arenas a few months or even weeks before the elections, offering minimal training on the ground, limited digital campaign tools, and poorly coordinated data. The institute’s menu of courses reflects the right’s current initiatives, including School Board Campaign Training and a School Board Activist Workshop.

Cleta Mitchell

Attorney}:

Mitchell is a longtime member of the CNP board of governors. More recently, she appeared on panels at 2020 CNP meetings speaking on “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Mitchell also serves on the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. Following Biden’s victory, Mitchell tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!” She traveled to Georgia as a volunteer legal adviser for Trump’s campaign and helped to file a December 2020 lawsuit challenging the returns. According to The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr., “On December 30, Mitchell wrote to [then–White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud.” On January 2, Mitchell took part in Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, of whom Trump famously demanded, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The call was leaked, and when Mitchell’s role was disclosed, she was obliged to resign from her position at the Foley & Lardner law firm. But Mitchell continues her work through her strategy sessions at the CNP, her board membership at the Bradley Foundation, her Apple podcast Who’s Counting?, and her November 2021 appointment to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting systems—including voting machines—and advises local officials on compliance with federal regulations.

Richard Graber

CEO, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

This Milwaukee foundation has assets of some $900 million. Graber is a member of the board of governors of the CNP, while CNP election strategist Cleta Mitchell is one of the foundation’s 11 board members. The Koch network and the DeVos family philanthropies may have received more attention, but the Bradley Foundation’s strategic, longtime focus on state-level politics has allowed it to make a major impact, using its home state of Wisconsin as a laboratory. In 2012 to 2013, the foundation spent more than $8 million on a network of groups promoting a right-to-work law also supported by then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a fellow CNP board member) and attacking Wisconsin trade unions. The resulting right-to-work law crippled the unions and contributed to Wisconsin’s shift from a Democratic to a swing state. In 2021, the Bradley Foundation earmarked $600,000 for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s voter management campaign software and other activities, bringing its ALEC contributions to $5.4 million over the previous decade. In 2020 and 2021, the foundation gave $200,000 to the Claremont Institute. Claremont has played a critical role in the radical right’s promotion of false claims of fraud and the efforts to rewrite voting laws in advance of the 2024 elections; John Eastman, who drafted the infamous six-point memo used by Trump to challenge the Electoral College on January 6, is a Claremont senior fellow. The foundation also contributed $300,000 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (chaired by Cleta Mitchell) and $175,000 to the Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative, both of which promoted Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Lisa Nelson

CEO, American Legislative Exchange Council

Nelson came to ALEC in 2014 after previous stints on Newt Gingrich’s staff and at GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization. ALEC was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, also a co-founder of the CNP. ALEC convenes corporate sponsors and Republican state legislators to “collaborate” on model bills—including legislation to oppose environmental regulation and gun control. In April 2020, The Washington Post reported that Nelson, Jenny Beth Martin, and Adam Brandon were leading an effort to organize a group of businesspeople to help Trump “jump-start” the economy in the depths of the Covid epidemic. Nelson continued her efforts over 2020 and doubled down after the Biden’s victory. From December 2 to 4, 2020, ALEC hosted a secret “process working group” for Republican state legislators, election commissioners, and attorneys to develop strategies on election oversight and redistricting. In July 2021, ALEC hosted and financed an “academy” under the rubric of the “Honest Elections Project” in conjunction with its annual meeting, with panels featuring Cleta Mitchell and other CNP strategists. Nelson offered a preview of their project to rewrite election laws at the CNP’s May 2021 meeting: “We’ve been targeting our efforts on those states that have had issues—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida to a certain degree.” Currently, Republicans control 30 state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If successfully implemented, the independent state legislature initiative could determine the outcome of the 2024 elections, regardless of the popular vote.

Daniel J. Schultz

Attorney and founder, Precinct Strategy

Schultz was an early proponent of the idea that Republican-controlled legislatures could overturn election results—later promoted as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” In some interpretations, Republican-controlled state legislatures could nullify the popular vote and send their own electors to put Trump in office. The key to his strategy? Purging from the Republican Party inconveniently ethical officials like Brad Raffensperger, starting at the precinct level. “We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz told Steve Bannon on his podcast in February 2021. Over the following months, there was a surge in candidates for precinct chairman positions across the country. Schultz has pointed to the strategy’s success in Arizona as a model. ProPublica reported that in one Maricopa district, the precinct roster grew by 63 percent in less than six months. Schultz’s website asks: “Can we get 3/10 of 1% of the 74 M Trump America Firsters to Become Republican Precinct Committeemen? To TAKE OVER The Republican Party? To Save the Republic?” He points out that precinct committeemen are the ones who elect the state party leaders and are the only ones who can vote to endorse primary candidates; in some states, they are the only ones who can nominate candidates to fill vacancies in state legislatures. The logic is that full slates of pro-Trump precinct chairs could guarantee pro-Trump candidates on the Republican state-level ballots in 2022, who could be activated to enact the independent state legislature doctrine in 2024—subject to judicial review. Donald Trump approves. On February 27, 2022, he issued a statement endorsing Schultz’s project.

Anne Nelson @anelsona

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right}:. She has taught at Columbia University for over 20 years and is currently a research scholar at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Read More: Magazine, May 2022, Politics, The Soapbox, Feature, Democracy, January 6, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Right Wing Extremism

ISLAMOPHOBE CRUZ TELLER GINNI PERKINS GAFFNEY

In May 2021, SPLC reported on leaked documents appearing to show Gabriel and other Islamophobic figures as being members of the secretive right-wing coalition Council for National Policy.For 40 years, Council for National Policy has brought together influential right-wing leaders, political operatives, conservative media figures, members of the religious right, free-market fundamentalists and donors.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch**/2021/05**/27/shadowy-right-wing-strategy-group-embraces-islamophobic-figures-policies-presents-challenge

islamophobia has a presence within the Council for National Policy, a secretive and influential right-wing coalition, according to leaked documents reviewed by Hatewatch.

A cache of documents obtained and published by the investigative research organization Documented appears to show anti-Muslim hate group leaders such as Brigitte Gabriel, Frank Gaffney and others who have stoked Islamophobia are involved with the Council for National Policy, or CNP. The documents also reveal that the coalition has promoted policies championed by the broader anti-Muslim network.

Founded in 1981, CNP is a coalition of influential right-wing leaders, political operatives, conservative media figures, members of the religious right, free-market fundamentalists and donors. The coalition operates on multiple fronts and focuses on political strategy, media and grassroots organizing. The goal of the coalition is to advocate for right-wing and anti-rights policies that favor conservatives and the religious right.

CNP has a habit of cozying up to extreme figures, the coalition’s rosters and associations appear to show. This includes figures known for engaging in anti-Muslim hate.

Journalist and author Anne Nelson researches CNP and is the author of “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” which provides an in-depth look into the coalition and its history.

“The Council for National Policy and its affiliates would be revealed to associate with unsavory characters, and they would be shocked that such nice folk could harbor such nasty ideology,” Nelson writes in the book.

In 2016, Hatewatch published CNP’s 2014 membership directory, a 191-page compendium on its over 400 members, some of whom are deceased, and their interests. The directory shows CNP membership included extremists harboring anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ views. It also revealed so-called “Radical Islam” and “Islamic Fascism” to be among the interests identified by several CNP members. “Radical Islam,” a problematic term as detailed later, continues to be a topic among the group.

While the coalition’s existence and some of its officers are public knowledge, CNP works hard to keep its membership and activities shrouded in secrecy, including reportedly encouraging members to keep quiet about the group. The New York Times once described CNP as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” CNP is invitation-only, with new members being nominated by current ones.

Reports and investigations over the years have sought to expose the coalition’s tactics, membership and influence. The cache of materials obtained by Documented provides further insight into the right-wing coalition’s inner workings in recent years, including its strategies, goals and talking points.

The documents also reveal CNP has only expanded the hate and far-right figures in its ranks. The inclusion of these figures puts Islamophobia among other problematic measures pushed by CNP that pose a threat to inclusive democracy.

CNP did not return Hatewatch’s multiple requests for comment.

Islamophobic figures in the mix

[ pix Brigitte Gabriel, founder and president of ACT for America, speaks at the 2017 Values Voter Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

One of those listed in CNP’s September 2020 roster is Brigitte Gabriel, an anti-Muslim firebrand who has called Muslims a threat to the civilized world and claimed a practicing Muslim “cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States.” Gabriel is the founder and head of ACT for America, an anti-Muslim hate group that operates a network of chapters across the U.S. that disparage Islam and promote Islamophobic legislation at the state and national level.

Despite Gabriel’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, she operates freely within mainstream conservative circles and maintains allies in Congress such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn.

According to Documented’s cache, Gabriel first appears in the January 2018 CNP membership roster. The cache spans back to 2017. She is listed as a member in subsequent rosters up to September 2020, the last list obtained by Documented. Documented did not return requests for comment by time of publication.

Regular members pay an annual fee of $1,750, according to CNP nomination documents published by Political Research Associates, an organization that researches the far right. There are other membership levels, and the higher the level, the higher the fees, up to several thousands of dollars.

Gabriel appears to be actively involved with CNP. In February 2020, she gave an “Update on the Middle East” at CNP’s meeting in Dana Point, California, according to a leaked copy of the agenda. Details about the presentation are unknown, however, the many other speeches of hers available on the Internet are often tinged with anti-Islam bias. The presence of anti-Muslim figures within CNP does not surprise Nelson.

“Islamophobia has been a core value of the Council for National Policy for a long time, an outgrowth of the Christian fundamentalist roots of the organization,” Nelson told Hatewatch in an interview. She posits CNP’s hardline Christian theology holds other religions, such as Islam, as “invalid.”

Gabriel’s relationship with CNP seems to be reciprocal, with the coalition promoting her brand and products.

“Brigitte Gabriel has been somebody who has been promoting and disseminating hate speech against Muslims,” Nelson said. “She’s a very fiery speaker and recently joined the roster of the Council for National Policy, whose member organizations also promote her books and her speaking engagements. It is a tragic decision because Muslims in the United States already face a great deal of prejudice and these figures just make their lives that much harder.”

Gabriel held a book signing at the CNP event she spoke at in February 2020. ACT for America and Gabriel did not return requests for comment.

According to a leaked 2016 copy of CNP’s media and confidentiality policy, “CNP members should not answer media inquiries about CNP. Only the CNP president or his or her designee is authorized to speak to the media about CNP.” Violation of this, according to the policy, “could result in sanctions, up to and including removal from CNP membership.”

Gabriel’s listed interests within CNP include “Radical Islam,” “Terrorism” and “Immigration,” among others, as revealed by Documented. CNP members’ interests are often listed with their names and affiliations and range from a variety of issues from “Judeo-Christian Values” to “Tax Reform” to “Regulatory Reform” to “Homosexual Issues.”

The term “radical Islam” is itself problematic because the descriptor “radical” is not used to describe any other religion and is often deployed to soften anti-Muslim bigotry. Gabriel herself has claimed that there is no such thing as radical Islam and that terrorism is associated with the “purest form” of the religion. Other CNP members view Islam in a similar way.

Gabriel and her group were some of former President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. CNP also threw its support behind Trump in 2016 after candidates more aligned with its members’ values, such as Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, dropped out. As Nelson details in “Shadow Network,” Trump’s willingness to adopt retrograde policies aligned with CNP and appoint conservative judges earned the backing of the coalition and its networks.

Gabriel – like several other CNP members – enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House under Trump, meeting with his staff on numerous occasions. The Trump administration implemented policies long promoted by the anti-Muslim network, such as the Muslim ban and a low cap on refugees. Tony Perkins, an influential figure among the religious right, is also president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council, which also traffics in anti-Muslim ideology and is currently avidly supporting voter suppression bills.He also enjoyed extensive access to the Trump administration.

As Nelson notes in “Shadow Network,” “Perkins – the man who declared ‘Islam is not a religion … it is a comprehensive system which is incompatible with the Constitution’ – was named to the U.S. Commission on International Freedom [under Trump].” Perkins is a longtime CNP member, having been with the coalition for 25 to 30 years, according to the September 2020 roster. He also served as the CNP’s president from 2012 to 2019, except for 2013 and 2014 where he was listed as vice president.

In 2017, Gabriel met with then-White House staffer and CNP member Paul S. Teller to hand-deliver a petition in support of Trump’s Muslim ban. Teller previously served as Ted Cruz’s chief of staff. He is also active within CNP. In 2020 , The Washington Post reported he held weekly meetings of the CNP-affiliated Conservative Action Project.According to the Post, the Conservative Action Project helped “choose loyalists to run federal agencies and coordinate outside messages with nonprofit organizations to support [Trump] administration policies and leaders.” Pages from Documented reveal Teller’s interests at CNP include “Immigration,” “Foreign policy” and “Religious freedom.” Teller now serves as the executive director of Advancing American Freedom, a group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Another anti-Muslim figurehead involved with CNP is Frank Gaffney.A former Ronald Reagan administration staffer, Gaffney has since become one of the most prolific anti-Muslim propagandists in the country. He is gripped by paranoid fantasies of foreign entities such as the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating and supplanting the U.S. from within. Gaffney founded the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and now serves in an executive chairmanship role at the group.

[pix Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, testifies during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Hatewatch first reported on Gaffney’s CNP membership in the publication of the group’s 2014 roster. He is listed as a “Gold Circle Member” in CNP’s September 2020 membership roster. Gold Circle Members pay a yearly fee of $10,000, as shown by nomination documents. Like Gabriel, Gaffney’s listed interests at CNP include “Radical Islam.”

Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2016, candidate Trump used data from a shoddy survey commissioned by the Center for Security Policy to justify his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The survey was done by The Polling Company, Kellyanne Conway’s company. Conway served as Trump’s senior counselor and was a member of CNP’s executive committee from 2014 to 2015, tax records show.

Like other anti-Muslim and far-right actors, CNP has begun to frame China as a new Cold War-style adversary. Gaffney and his group are active in stoking alarmism about the supposed threat from China. At a CNP conference in August 2020 in Arlington, Virginia, the coalition’s sister lobbying arm CNP Action, Inc., hosted a panel titled “Reckoning with China: Action Steps,” according to a leaked copy of the agenda obtained by the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy. The panel featured Gaffney as a participant.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is also a CNP member and counts “Radical Islam” among her interests. In 2013, Mother Jones reported Ginni Thomas and Gaffney were part of another right-wing strategy group known as Groundswell.

CNP has also included Islamophobic figures in its orbit and network. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn,Trump’s former National Security Adviser who was later pardoned by the former president after lying to the FBI, has ties to CNP, though he is not listed as a member. Flynn spoke at a CNP Policy Counsel event in July 2016. His name is also associated with a CNP Zoominfo account, as uncovered by investigative researcher Brent Allpress, suggesting Flynn might be involved more formally with the coalition. Flynn has a history of expressing anti-Islam sentiment, once calling the religion “a cancer.” In 2016, ACT for America advertised Flynn serving on its board of advisers. He was also a keynote speaker at ACT’s 2016 conference in Washington, D.C.

In September 2017, longtime anti-Muslim figurehead David Horowitz (who is not listed as a member) spoke at a CNP conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The theme of the event and Horowitz’s presentation was “Mapping the Left.” Horowitz heads the eponymously named David Horowitz Freedom Center, a hate group known for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment and helping fund other Islamophobic projects such as Jihad Watch and FrontPage Magazine. Once a leftist in the 1960s, Horowitz now tries to smear his former political affiliation as being totalitarian.

Dr. Mark Christian is listed as a member of CNP’s Board of Governors, which carries an annual fee of $6,000. Christian runs the anti-Muslim hate group Global Faith Institute, a group that peddles Islamophobic conspiracy theories while claiming to advocate for “the victims of Islam.” Christian is a former Muslim who converted to Christianity. He joins a cottage industry of former Muslims now disparaging their former faith. Christian is willing to associate with extreme figures in the anti-Muslim network, such as the former FBI agent turned anti-Muslim hate figure John Guandolo. Christian subscribes to the conspiracy theory that Islamic Sharia law is slowly “creeping” into American society.

“Islam has infiltrated all aspects of our life: our schools, churches, media, courts, military and our government,” reads a 2017 Global Faith Institute email to supporters. “Every day we are losing more of our freedom because of creeping sharia law.”

Christian did not answer a request for comment.

CNP’s rosters reveal the membership of other figures known for spreading Islamophobic rhetoric. One isfar-right historian William “Bill” Federer,who treads in Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. According to the watchdog and research group Right Wing Watch, Federer once claimed that an “atheist homosexual gay agenda movement” will “open up” the U.S. “to move into an Islamic future.” Federer has been featured at events such as the Values Voter Summit, an annual conference put on by the Family Research Council. Brigitte Gabriel has also spoken at the Values Voter Summit in recent years, including 2018 and 2019. Family Research Council’s executive vice presidentJerry G. Boykin is also a member of CNP.

Boykin has a track record of making anti-Muslim remarks, once claiming Islam should not be protected by the First Amendment. Boykin used similar rhetoric in a 2014 news briefing for Policy Counsel, a CNP publication and speaker series to inform the public on a “wide range of topics” and “variety of opinions.” Boykin goes heavy on the anti-Islam rhetoric in the article, which touches on the rise and activities of the terrorist group ISIS at the time. Boykin took issue with former President Barack Obama’s attempts to not conflate the terrorist group with a religion of around 1.8 billion people.

“I think most Americans have figured this out,” Boykin said. “When you say Isis [sic] is not Islam the rest doesn’t really matter because if you are laying out a strategy that doesn’t start with an understanding of your enemy and who you are up against and what motivates him to do what he does the rest doesn’t matter.”

Boykin adds elsewhere: “One of the mistakes that we make about Islam is that only 16% of Islam is actually a religion.” He claims the rest is a legal, geopolitical and military system. Claiming Islam is not a religion – or only part one – is a well-tread trope deployed by Islamophobic figures. “But only 16% is an actual religion,” he said. “And we make the mistake of thinking that it’s exactly like Christianity. It is not.”

CNP’s Policy Counsel includes a disclaimer that views expressed in the articles are not always representative of the coalition. “These views should not be construed as the views of the Council for National Policy, as an attempt to aid or hinder the enactment of any legislation, or as an intervention in any political campaign for public office,” the disclaimer reads.

However, as CNP papers brought to light by Documented reveal, the coalition has advocated for policies steeped in Islamophobia.

Turning interest into action

It appears stoking fear of Islam goes beyond merely the interests of CNP members and has manifested into policy recommendations. Documented produced a cache of documents attributed to CNP Action, Inc.

According to Documented:

CNP members meet together in-person three times a year and strategize about their collective goals. A number of the sessions at each meeting are action focussed [sic], and the participants collectively agree on a set of ‘action-steps’ that the members and their organizations (including the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the American Legislative Exchange Council) will carry out before the next meeting.

An action step from a May 2018 session called to “declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.” The session was facilitated by Jerry Boykin and featured Frank Gaffney as a participant. Designating the Muslim Brotherhood has been a longtime goal of Gaffney and the anti-Muslim network. The designation fits into greater paranoia of Muslims being a fifth-column threat in the U.S., or a group that attempts to undermine the country from within.

Prominent Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations are often accused by Islamophobia peddlers of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Arjun Sethi, a civil rights lawyer and author, noted in a 2017 column for The Washington Post that such a designation could have knock-on effects. “The result is likely to be intimidation, harassment and smears of Muslim and Arab groups here in the United States,” Sethi wrote.

Trump regularly threatened to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group while in office, but never did. Foreign relations experts and government officials have advised against such a designation. But there are still attempts to do so legislatively.

Bills attempting to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist group have been introduced in Congress multiple times in recent years. Sponsors of such bills include Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., and Ted Cruz. Both members of Congress have ties to Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy. Diaz-Balart joined Gaffney on his radio program “Secure Freedom Radio” in 2016 to promote the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation bill. Cruz has longstanding ties to the Center for Security Policy and tapped Gaffney to serve as an adviser during his 2016 presidential run. Cruz also has ties to CNP, having given speeches to the coalition.

Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America also lobbies for bills to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, lobbying disclosure forms show. The group also supported Trump to do so. ACT tweeted in 2019: “President Trump should 100% designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. Past administrations have promised but failed. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!”

CNP supports the effort to halt refugees from Muslim majority countries being resettled in the U.S. Leaked copies of the coalition’s newsletters from 2015 and 2016 reveal this support. Halting refugee resettlement has been a tactic pushed by the anti-Muslim network, since many of those displaced are from Muslim majority countries, with many being ones the U.S. has a presence in. In 2015, ACT for America launched a working group to push back against the resettlement program and “ensure that this broken system is fixed, and that potential terrorists are kept on the outside looking in.”

Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy also launched an anti-refugee project for activists interested in “building resistance” to resettlement programs. The group also published two monographs in 2015 about the program steeped in demographic anxieties about Muslim refugees moving and relocating to the United States.

Anti-refugee sentiment features in a December 2015 newsletter of “Heard Around the Hill,” a publication of CNP Action, Inc. The newsletter promotes legislation aimed at curbing refugee resettlement.

“Intelligence officials have determined that Islamic extremists have explored using the refugee resettlement program to enter the United States,” the newsletter reads. This claim was pushed back on by U.S. officials and refugee advocates at the time.

The newsletter adds that House Republicans introduced H.R. 4218, which would suspend refugees from entering the U.S. The bill was introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and did not make it out of committee. Now serving in the U.S. Senate, Blackburn has connections to such anti-Muslim hate groups as ACT for America and Center for Security Policy, having attended ACT’s annual conference and been a guest on Gaffney’s radio program.

The newsletter notes that the anti-LGTBQ hate group Liberty Counsel produced a petition in support of the bill. “If you would like to sign the petition, click here,” it reads with a hyperlink. The newsletter notes, “Mat Staverserves as Chairman of Liberty Counsel Action.” Staver is on CNP’s board of governors and counts “Radical Islam” among his interests.

Another “Heard Around the Hill” newsletter from April 2016 touched on CNP’s opposition to refugees, with the effort being led by Paul Teller.

“At the most recent CNP meeting … CNP member Paul Teller, Chief of Staff for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), referenced three pieces of immigration-related legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress that conservatives nationwide may want to examine and support,” the newsletter states. “One would suspend the entrance of refugees from terrorist-dominated countries, a second would give states the power to deny the resettling of refugees within their borders, and a third would focus key resources to better enable ICE agents to implement border security.”

The newsletter adds: “Please feel free to contact Paul Teller if you have questions or want to offer support for any or all of these efforts.”

While Islamophobia is at the coalition’s core, its activism and messaging on the issue may ebb and flow with what is politically relevant at the time.

“The political operatives of the Council for National Policy are very strategic,” Nelson said. “They do a great deal of polling, conduct focus groups, and promote inflammatory rhetoric when serves their political purposes. You are likely to see an uptick in their Islamophobic content at moments where the national news environment would favor it, such as periods of tension with Muslim countries or international incidents ascribed to terrorist organizations.”

Nelson says CNP and its network “were instrumental in convincing Trump to institute his infamous Muslim travel ban, which was opposed by foreign policy experts as being counterproductive to our national interests.”

She adds, “But again, this kind of dog whistle is signaling to their base. By lashing out at innocent populations, they are promoting a dangerous form of nationalism.”

‘We could expect a whole raft of measures’

The cache of documents reveals CNP’s willingness to embrace Islamophobic figures, their messaging and policies in its efforts to influence politics in the country. But Islamophobia is only one cog in the CNP machine.

The defeat of Donald Trump and Mike Pence has been a setback for CNP, having lost major allies at the federal level. The coalition continues to operate and reassess its strategy for the future. Nelson notes CNP and its networks will be eyeing the 2022 midterm elections. While the Democrats – who generally lean toward the left – narrowly hold both houses of Congress, Nelson notes trends show the party in White House generally does poorly in the midterms. She says the CNP has been active at the state level helping to promote voter suppression measures aiming to suppress “populations that favor the Democrats starting, but not ending with, African Americans.”

A CNP Action, Inc. action step from February 2020 advocated for “government-issued voter ID, including mail-in ballots and verification for residency and citizenship.” Voter ID measures have been criticized by voting rights advocates for disproportionately affecting black voters and other voters of color.

Nelson says that voter suppression efforts can help tip the midterms in favor of Republicans, some of whom have been known to support CNP affiliates’ access to power. A Republican takeover of Congress would derail the Biden administration’s policies and possibly set up a win for another Republican presidency in 2024.

“If the Radical Right of the Republican Party takes Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, there will be very little standing in their [CNP] way from reshaping the United States from the country as we know it,” Nelson says. “We could expect a whole raft of measures that would include not just depriving Muslims of basic rights, but rollbacks of voting rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights – and the list goes on and on.

“They have made no secret of the vision that they have for the United States, which is reminiscent of a 19th-century religious patriarchy. American voters will have to decide what kind of country they want for their children to inherit, and respond accordingly.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/10/25/god-trump-closed-door-world-council-national-policy/

wapo

in 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.

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 an open letter to Iowa voters 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.

[As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country]

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 networks of groupsthat served as a kind of nerve system for conservative influence campaigns.

The Council for National Policy provides a window into the conservative political and communications infrastructure that boosted Donald Trump. (Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images)

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.”

In a town where people and groups constantly angle for publicity, CNP bars the press and uninvited outsiders from its events.

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.”

[The Post's Biden Political Appointee Tracker]

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. (Helms, who became a revered member of CNP, was once described by The Post’s David Broder 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.”

LEFT: An internal CNP directory for 2015 had about 400 members across the country. They includedKellyanne 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)

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 new demographic reality: They constituted a diminishing proportion of the electorate and were losing their power to shape America’s culture and politics.

[‘We’re talking about a big, powerful phenomenon’: Multiracial Americans drive change]

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 “For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump.” 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.”

[Trump’s conservative imprint on the federal judiciary gives Democrats a playbook]

On May 18, 2016, Trump greatly boosted his prospects when he released the list of judges.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 accountasked 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, “Lessons From San Quentin.”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 “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” 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.)

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.

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 AdministratorScott Pruittappeared 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.”

[Tracking Biden’s unwinding of Trump’s energy and environmental policies, and new ones of his own]

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.”

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.

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,” itswebsite until recently stated.)

“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 thislittle 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 impeachmentproceedings. “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 anew 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.”

[Senate report gives new details of Trump efforts to use Justice Dept. to overturn election]

The integrity of elections has been a preoccupation on the right for years. In 2017, Trump announced a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, 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.

[“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.”

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 Save Our Country Coalition. 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 andprotection 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.”

[Analysis: The grim reality of a partisan pandemic]

CNP member Nancy Schulze told the campaign officials about “adoctors 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 calledJob Creators Networkand 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 Post story 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.”

[Timeline: Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election]

At least five other CNP members and their groups worked with other Trump supporters to amplify the Stop the Steal claims. 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 aimed at pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes,” the report said.

Why did Latino men shift toward Trump in 2020? I looked to my dad for answers.]

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 Turning Point USA, 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: “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” 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 wrote a note on social media 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.

[Rallies ahead of Capitol riot were planned by established Washington insiders]

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.”

[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)]

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 Shackelfordhosted 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 dubious claims 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 Leoand a former Heritage Foundation official have ties to a group launched last year called the Honest Elections Project. Kenneth Blackwelltook the lead of a group called the Center for Election Integrity. 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 Brennan Center for Justice 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.

[In weighing 2024 run, Pence tests whether there is political life after Trump]

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.

from chis adams pilf

...Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife withserious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidenceof election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.

At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”

A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”

Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.

Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committeeand a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor.In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections.

In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.

Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.

In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.

This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.

Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”

The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district.The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral.

Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one ofCharlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”

Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”

In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.

wfb beware bs cya

...In January and February, the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine each published longform pieces alleging that Thomas had a much larger role in the events of Jan. 6. The Times in particular cast Thomas as an important trouble-shooter in the leadup to the rally, reporting she acted as an intermediary among bickering activists organizing the event.

Citing second-hand information from organizer Dustin Stockton, the Times reported that Thomas acted as a peacemaker between two feuding faction leaders—Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and Amy Kremer of Women for America First—convincing both to participate in the rally for the sake of shared goals.

Thomas, Martin, and Kremer each reject that claim.

"I played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events," Thomas said. "There are stories in the press suggesting I paid or arranged for buses. I did not. There are other stories saying I mediated feuding factions of leaders for that day. I did not."

One of the factions Thomas supposedly negotiated with wasn't even involved with organizing the rally. Martin's Tea Party groups were not sponsors of the Ellipse event, nor did her organizations spend money to support the effort.

"We condemn the violence. We are shocked, outraged, and saddened at the turn of events on January 6," Martin said in a statement.

Kremer contested the allegation about Thomas in texts exchanged with Times reporter Danny Hakim, one of the Thomas story's two authors. Those exchanges happened on background, meaning Hakim could not attribute any statement to Kremer in the Times story.

After the article was published, Kremer gave Hakim an on-the-record statement rejecting the allegation that Thomas acted as a peace-broker for her and Martin. Hakim tweeted the statement, but the story was never updated online and remained unchanged as of the publication of this story.

Kremer told the Free Beacon that the Times disregarded her background denials in order to push a false narrative about Thomas. And she said it was "egregious" that the Times did not update its story when she issued an on-the-record comment that cast doubt on one of the article's biggest claims.

"The NYT seems to be more of an activist organization than a media outlet focused on real journalism," Kremer told the Free Beacon. "They certainly have no regard for the truth."[her politifact recd not gt]

"We do not go into detail on our editorial process," a Times spokesman told the Free Beacon. "Our reporting was fair and accurate and we stand behind it."

Longtime Thomas confidant Mark Paoletta was the first to reveal the Hakim-Kremer texts.

There was a skirmish among Justice Thomas's sprawling network of ex-clerks after John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Trump on tactics for stopping certification of the results, sent emails to a listserv called Thomas Clerk World casting doubt on the integrity of the election. The exchanges appeared in part in the New Yorker and the Times.

Helgi Walker, who clerked for the justice and practices in the Washington, D.C., offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said the exchanges were uncharacteristic for the listserv and that bad feeling hasn't lingered. Law clerk networks are generally friendly and intimate, but the Thomas clerk network is famously close.

"The Thomas clerk family—and we do refer to it as a family because that's what it is—is one of the most special and close-knit groups I have ever been a part of," Walker told the Free Beacon. "It really was a blip, and our group is strong—stronger than ever."

The Times story opens with two memoranda from a conservative advocacy group, theCouncil for National Policy, that outlined pressure tactics for influencing Republican lawmakers ahead of certification and damage control strategies after the Jan. 6 riot. The article billed Thomas as a "leader" of the council who had "taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years," noting she was appointed to the organization's advisory board in 2019.

Thomas told the Free Beacon that she played no role in crafting either document. Thomas says she has not even seen them as of this writing, nor did she disseminate them when they were released. She said both the Times and the New Yorker overstated her connection to the council.

"As a member of their [501]c4 board, candidly, I must admit that I do not attend many of those separate meetings, nor do I attend many of their phone calls they have," Thomas told the Free Beacon. "At CNP, I have moderated a session here and there. I delivered some remarks there once too."...

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/11/revealed-new-leaders-of-council-for-national-policy-set-extremist-agenda/

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at its first meeting of 2022, the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) laid out its plans for influencing this year’s midterm elections, abolishing abortion rights, defunding the left, limiting China’s influence, and countering a topic of great concern to Republicans: “wokeness.”

According to an agenda obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the CNP meeting took place the last weekend in February at the posh Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California. The agenda reveals changes in leadership and current priorities of the influential group, which is closelytied to Trump and the Republican Party.

Kevin Roberts, a CNP board member and president of the Heritage Foundation, kicked the event off with a speech on “how the Conservative Movement can go on the offense to promote America’s founding principles across the country.”

CNP is known for “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” as Columbia University Professor Anne Nelson describes the group in her definitive book :{Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

Leadership Changes Elevate Voter Suppression Advocates

The program for the February meeting offers the first glimpse of the secretive group’s high-level members and leaders since CMDpublished its September 2020 Membership Directory, provided by open source intelligence researcher Brent Allpress.

The group’s Executive Committee is headed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who has taken over from William Walton as CNP’s president. Judicial Watch’s “Election Integrity Project” has pushed for voter roll purges and promotes the myth that voter fraud is widespread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meeting, Fitton facilitated two panels on “election integrity,” CMDreported. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton told meeting attendees, according to videos obtained by The Washington Post.

Another lifelong advocate of voter suppression now serves as CNP’s vice president: J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former secretary of state in Ohio and member of Trump’s failed voter fraud panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He currently chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a nonprofit spin-off of the Trump administration.

In May 2021, Blackwell facilitated an “Action Session” at CNP’s 40th anniversary meeting on how to combat the national voting rights effort, featuring U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential electoral college results, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has promoted Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infamous call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for the former president to win the state.

At its February meeting, CNP hosted a screening of the film:{**Capitol Punishment**:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: with director Chris Burgard, which promotes the claim that, “Everything that we are being told [about the insurrection] is a lie and Americans are being persecuted to support that lie.” CNP has extensive ties to #StoptheSteal and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, CMD reported.

Others joining the CNP executive committee this year include Jerry A. Johnson (treasurer), former president of the National Religious Broadcasters; William G. Boykin, retired Army lieutenant general and executive vice president of theFamily Research Council; Chad Connelly, president of Faith Wins; and Millie Hallow, managing director of executive operations at the National Rifle Association.

Blackwell is also listed as president of the board of directors for CNP Action, and Fitton is a new director of the affiliate.

The Gold Circle Members list is largely similar to the September 2020 directory, with many of the new additions representing shifts from lower membership tiers. Notable new members include Ashland University President Carlos Campo; Lynn Friess, widow of GOP megadonor Foster Friess;and Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center and a vice president at Liberty University.

Politicizing Covid

“The pandemic led to unprecedented government mandates, the erosion of civil liberties, and an outright assault on freedom,” CNP’s agenda booklet argues. “Americans have seen and experienced what unchecked government power can do, and they have had enough.”

CNP has been instrumental in the relentless push from the right to ignore public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. It played a leading role in the anti-lockdown coalition known as “Save Our Country,” with members making up half of its leadership counciland organizing weekly conference calls to coordinate response tactics.

In May 2020, CMD also revealed that CNP Action, CNP’s 501(c)(4) affiliate, organized a call to discuss a plan for recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to campaign against Covid public health restrictions.

CNP’s February meeting featured a general session on the state of the pandemic in the U.S. led byDr. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading advocate for herd immunity who has advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on his controversial anti-mask policies.

Focus on Elections

Despite being a tax-exempt organization barred from engaging in electoral politics, CNP is focusing heavily on elections this year, according to the agenda for its February meeting.

Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, led things off at the Gold Circle Dinner with a presentation on “the most pressing political battles in DC and their impact on the Conservative Movement.”

A general session titled “Virginia 2021: Lessons Learned” featured Chad Connelly, founder and president of Faith Wins; Mark Campbell, campaign manager for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia; Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia; and Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence sharing “their analyses of the Virginia race” and “what it means for 2022.”

After not winning a statewide race in more than a decade, in 2021 Republicans in Virginia won the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, while also recapturing the majority in the state House.

Former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop, a past president of CNP, joined the four “Lessons Learned” panelists for a CNP Action session “to chart the course to success nationwide in November.”

In his capacity as CNP Action chairman, Blackwell also hosted “Candidate Introductions” for attendees. While candidates were not listed on the program, CMD obtained a flier for Drew Montez Clark, a Republican candidate for Florida’s 25th district seat in the U.S. House, that was circulated at the meeting.

Clarkreportedly co-organized two buses carrying 100 Floridians to the Jan. 6 rally in DC that led to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. He also spoke at a far-right “America First” rally in April 2021 headlined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Supreme Court Takes Center Stage

“This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most consequential ever, and CNP Members have been central to some of the landmark cases being decided,” the CNP’s February meeting program notes. Speakers at a general session on the subject included Alan Sears, founder of the Christian right litigation powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom; Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser; and First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford.

“CNP has been strategizing to dominate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nelson told the Associated Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association, all run by members of the CNP.”

Dannenfelserwas among 14 other CNP members to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Garden ceremony at the White House where Amy Coney Barrett accepted the nomination for the Supreme Court, solidifying the far-right’s hold on the nation’s highest court.

The agenda notes that Dannenfelser “will provide an update on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that could result in completely gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.

Mississippi’s Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn (R-Miss.), the 2020 chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), touted the Dobbs v. Jacksoncase and its prospects for leading to a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade during a panel at the CNP meeting last May, CMD reported.

“We think that’s going to be a landmark case. All of us know that the United States Supreme Court composition has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meeting attendees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Barrett is one of the most active, pro-life people in America, so we believe that she brings a new dynamic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be transformative in the arena in abortion. We’re proud of that.”

Dannenfelser then led a CNP Action panel “on how the Conservative Movement can be best equipped for the impending Supreme Court decision on Dobbs” and to “strategize on messaging, state legislation, and more with attendees.”

One of the panelists,Mike Thompson, is a senior vice president with CRC Advisors. Leonard Leo,who played an integral role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges, founded CRC Advisors in 2020 with Greg Mueller to “funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.” As of September 2020, Leo was aBoard of Governors member of CNP.

Pushing Back Against China, the Left, and a “Woke” Military

Placing China “at the heart of the greatest challenges facing the United States in recent years”—from Covid to currency manipulation, climate policies, and “undue influence over American corporations”—Economic War Room host Kevin Freeman led a discussion titled “The 21st: An American or Chinese Century?”

Freeman was joined in the panel by Beau Brunson, Consumers’ Research Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs. Consumers’ Research has committed millions in dark money to fight environmental, social, and corporate governance concerns (ESG) and “woke” capitalism, where BlackRock has emerged as a top target of its campaign for its “hypocritical” investments in China.

CMD recently exposed Consumers’ Research as one of the largest sponsors of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group of Republican treasurers, auditors, and staff from 16 states, which has also prioritized fighting the ESG movement and “woke” capitalism.

Also on the panel were Pete Hoekstra, former ambassador to the Netherlands under Trump, and Steve Milloy, a FoxNews contributor and paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil, and other corporations.

The three also participated in a CNP Action panel on “Countering China,” where they collectively worked “on ways to combat the increasing and pervasive threat China poses to the United States and American life.”

Leading an CNP Action panel discussion on “Defunding the Left,”**Buckeye Institute**President and CEO Robert Altfacilitated a tutorial on how to cut off contributions to “left-wing causes” by targeting public employee unions, trial lawyers, and investment management firms. O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance for Consumers, and Bridgett Wagner, vice president of policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, joined the discussion.

New CNP Executive Member Boykin led a panel discussion focused on the question: “Can a Woke Military Address Future Threats?” with Mike Berry, First Liberty’s general counsel, and Keith Kellogg, retired Army lieutenant general and co-chair of AFPI’s Center for American Security. The three talked about “extreme policies [that] have been implemented through the Department of Defense” and “how woke ideologies have influenced our armed services.”

Two other CNP meetings are scheduled for this year, May 18–20 in McLean, VA, and September 15–17 in Frisco, TX.