Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.
Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution. For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on “religious liberty” instead of “Christian nation-ism.”
But the men Vought was talking to actually worked for a British journalism nonprofit and were secretly recording him the entire time.
The nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, published a video of the meeting on Thursday – offering a window into the thinking of one of the top policy minds of the MAGA movement, who’s been floated as a possible White House chief of staff.
Trump has publicly rejected Project 2025 as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to tie him to some of the plan’s most extreme proposals. But in private, Vought said that those disavowals were merely “graduate-level politics.”
Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”
Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”
The video is the latest example of secret recordings exposing political figures’ private comments. The tactics used by the Centre – which created fake websites and a fake LinkedIn profile to deceive Vought – are typically rejected by mainstream American news outlets.
But using hidden cameras and deceptive practices in reporting is more common in the UK, where the Centre is based, and it’s been on the rise on the fringe of the US media as well. The conservative group Project Veritas has long conducted sting operations and published selectively edited videos, and earlier this year, a liberal activist released audio recordings of conversations she had with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts.
In an email, Lawrence Carter, the Centre’s co-founder and director, defended the group’s tactics, saying that there was a public interest in revealing Vought’s private comments about his relationship with Trump and work on Project 2025.
“We broadly follow the UK’s press regulator guidelines on this, which say that it is justified if it is in the public interest and not obtainable via other means,” Carter said. “We therefore weigh the subject’s reasonable expectation of privacy with the public interest.”
The Centre posted clips of its secretly recorded conversation with Vought online. It provided CNN what it said was a complete, unedited version of its video on the condition that CNN blurred footage showing its employees’ faces, in order to protect their ability to go undercover in the future.
In a statement Thursday, Vought’s nonprofit downplayed the video, saying it did not reveal any new comments from him.
“It would have been easier to just do a google search to ‘uncover’ what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews,” said Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America. “But thank you for airing our perfect conversation emphasizing our policy work is totally separate from the Trump campaign, as we have been saying.”
A Trump spokesperson declined to comment on the video, but his campaign has stressed that he sets his own agenda and that Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups don’t speak for him.
“President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor to the campaign, said in a statement. “President Trump personally led the effort to establish 20 promises made to the forgotten men and women across our nation, as well as RNC Platform – these are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”
An elaborate ruse
Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, where he made a name for himself as a policy wonk committed to the MAGA movement. In public, Trump repeatedly praised Vought for doing an “incredible” and “fantastic” job at OMB.
After Trump left office, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as the “tip of the America First spear.” CRA was one of many right-leaning groups that partnered on Project 2025, a more than 900-page blueprint for Trump’s second term that was led by the Heritage Foundation. Vought personally authored the project’s chapter on the executive office of the president, and his group contributed to several other chapters of the plan as well.
Vought also served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee that rewrote the GOP’s official platform this year – a sign of how central he is to Republicans’ policy goals.
Last month, Vought’s team was approached by employees with the Centre for Climate Reporting, which has previously published investigations into climate negotiations and Saudi Arabia’s energy policy.
The Centre spun an elaborate fiction, with a journalist and a paid actor posing as the brother and son-in-law of a reclusive New Mexico investor. The nonexistent patriarch had watched Vought’s appearances on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show while recuperating from an illness – and wanted to make a seven-figure contribution to CRA after previously focusing his philanthropy on classical music, they claimed.
The meeting took place on July 24, the week after the Republican convention, at the presidential suite of the Rosewood hotel in DC, where the Centre had placed several hidden cameras and microphones, Carter said. After the Centre’s employees suggested starting the meeting with a prayer, they peppered Vought with questions about his work and views, the video shows.
Sitting on a couch in the hotel suite, Vought seemed relaxed and comfortable discussing a wide range of topics, from the history of the conservative movement to European politics to his relationship with the former president.
Vought said he was unfazed by Trump’s repeated denials of any connection with Project 2025, dismissing such public statements as politics.
“I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand,” Vought said. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”
About a week after the conversation, the director of Project 2025 stepped down, and Trump’s campaign managers said in a statement that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Vought said he had personally talked to Trump in recent months and received at least one personal “assignment” from him after he left office. He noted that the former president has “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it … he’s very supportive of what we do.”
That wasn’t just bluster to try to land a big check, according to others in the MAGA movement. Trump and Vought have spoken at various times since leaving office, and the former president has adopted some of Vought’s ideas, two sources familiar with their relationship told CNN.
Inside the ‘second phase’ of Project 2025
In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.
“We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.
For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”
Those plans will not be made public, Vought said, but instead will be “very, very close hold.”
A Centre for Climate Reporting journalist, under the guise of the fake donor’s relative, also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides, who went into more detail about the process. Micah Meadowcroft, the research director for CRA, said the drafts the group was preparing would be provided to an incoming Trump administration in a way that would protect them from ever being publicly disclosed.
“It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video – while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
He described Vought’s work preparing executive orders and policy playbooks as “the second phase” of Project 2025.
The work of drafting policies is happening months ahead of the election in part because “President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like,” Vought said. “It’s not how he thinks.”
Vought’s guiding principle, he said, was simple: What would Donald do?
“We were always going off of, if Donald Trump was head of this agency, what would he do with it?” Vought said.
The Washington Post and Associated Press previously reported that Vought was drafting a playbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.
More broadly, during Trump’s first term in office, Vought said, “we had people, appointees, that were not on board with the president’s viewpoint – leaking, destabilizing the policy process.”
“I don’t think that will be the occurrence again,” Vought said. “I think he will find people that share his political views are bought in, and that will be a much more healthy White House process as a result.”
Some have speculated that Vought himself could be one of those people, with others in the MAGA movement floating him as a potential White House chief of staff. Asked if he had been offered a job in a second Trump administration, Vought said no, but added, “I think there’s an expectation that I would go in.”
“I don’t know what that would be,” he said. “I don’t know what the President would want me to do.”
Religion and race
Elsewhere in the conversation, Vought outlined views on religion and race that seem more extreme than those Trump has publicly articulated – including criticism of the right for what he described as an excessive focus on religious freedom.
In the conservative movement, “we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” Vought argued – an idea he’s also talked about publicly. “Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”
He said that conservatives should push to have debates over whether to allow mosques to be built in America’s downtowns, and whether Christian immigrants should be prioritized over those of other faiths – ideas that run contrary to First Amendment protections.
“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought added later. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”
Vought argued that it was important to pursue some of the culturally conservative policy goals listed in the Project 2025 blueprint – including abortion restrictions and making pornography illegal – while taking into account political realities.
Instead of an unpopular new law banning all pornography, for example, Vought said that his group would propose “doing it from the back door” by making pornography websites legally liable if minors use them. That could lead pornography companies to stop doing business in states with those kind of laws, he suggested.
And in discussing the protests and riots around the US in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Vought said that the president had the ability to use the military to restore order. He argued that the commander-in-chief wasn’t limited by the Posse Comitatus Act, a nearly 150-year-old law that prevents federal troops from conducting civilian law enforcement except when authorized by law.
“The President has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military,” Vought said. “And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for, for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm.”
Trump wanted to deploy thousands of active duty troops on the streets of major cities to quell protesters in 2020, but defense officials pushed back, a senior official told CNN at the time.
Vought added that the unrest following Floyd’s death “obviously was not about race.”
“It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he claimed.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
