A journalist secretly recorded a Project 2025 architect. Here’s what the video reveals.

Plus, Eric Hovde falsely claims that the morning-after pill is used for abortions and is being circulated like narcotics. 

The Centre for Climate Reporting, a British investigative newsroom, released a video yesterday of one of their reporters and a paid actor meeting with Russ Vought, a key member of the Project 2025 political initiative.  Vought, who did not know he was being recorded, believed he was meeting with the relatives of an affluent, pro-Trump donor. 

Along with helping write Project 2025, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America (CRA), an organization that works directly with the Heritage Foundation.

During their conversation, Vought revealed that despite Donald Trump’s efforts to disavow the highly unpopular Project 2025, the former president is not actually opposed to any of the policy proposals contained within the over 900-page document. 

“[Trump] is running against the brand. He is not running against any people. Okay? He is not running against any institutions,” Vought, who worked in the Trump administration as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the undercover reporter. 

“It's interesting. He's, in fact, not even opposing himself to a particular policy. He's been at our organization. He's raised money for our organization. He's blessed it … I remember walking into our last day in office and told him what I was going to do. So he's very supportive of what we do.”

Vought’s interpretation of Trump’s actual stance aligns neatly with the fact that he was recently named by the policy director of the Republican National Committee platform. Over the past year, Trump transformed the RNC into an entity that is loyal to the MAGA movement. Vought also told the Centre for Climate Reporting that he expects to rejoin Trump’s regime if he assumes the presidency. 

The investigative outlet then met with Micah Meadowcroft, another former Trump administration member and an associate of Vought’s, who said that his colleague is in charge of running a more covert juncture of Project 2025. 

“The second phase, after the book came out, was to break down actual policy packets and executive orders and agenda items and things like that. And that’s been supervised largely by Russ,” Meadowcroft tells an undercover reporter. “He’s the team lead behind the scenes, just putting all that together … I have colleagues who officially work for CRA, but 35 out of their 40-hour work week is Project 2025 stuff.”

Meadowcroft also explains that the secretive second phase is designed to implement the policies of Project 2025 within each federal agency and that the goal is for very little of the implementation to be open to public records requests. This would include, according to quotes from Vought, the rehabilitation of Christian nationalism, the largest deportation in history and to block the funding for Planned Parenthood.

Following the release of the video, a spokesperson for Vought’s CRA organization asserted the recording reveals nothing about the inner workings of Project 2025. 

“It would have been easier just to do a Google search to uncover what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews,” Rachel Cauley, CRA’s communication director, said in a statement. “But thank you for airing our perfect conversation emphasizing our policy work is totally separate from the Trump campaign, as we have been saying.”

Eric Hovde falsely says the morning-after pill is abortion, then compared it to narcotics

By Clare Olson 

At a luncheon Wednesday, Wisconsin Republican Senate nominee Eric Hovde falsely claimed that most abortions are conducted using the morning-after pill. Plan B doesn’t cause abortions, as it does not terminate a pregnancy. 

“The vast majority of abortions today are done through the day-after pill,” Hovde said when asked about states having different laws on the issue and people crossing state borders for reproductive care. 

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an emergency contraceptive like the morning-after pill “prevents pregnancy by acting on ovulation, which occurs well before implantation.” This is vastly different from a medication abortion, more commonly known as the “abortion pill,” which is offered during the first 11 weeks of pregnancy at Planned Parenthood. 

The WisPolitics host then asked if the Republican Senate candidate was okay with preserving the use of emergency contraceptives. He responded saying that the country is “not changing that” — expressing this as a similarity to narcotic drugs and drug trafficking. 

“We can all talk in theory, let’s just talk in reality. You’re, you’re not changing that,” Hovde continued. “That pill will be around and just like hard narcotics transferred from state to state or from other countries into our country, medications move all over our country. And that’s just reality.”

Hovde said he wants to see “less abortions” but ultimately believes that each state’s reproductive laws should be decided through a referendum instead of via state legislatures.