Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star hotel room in Washington, DC, bowing his head in prayer with two men he believed were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Trump's second term, anticipated that the meeting would help his team secure a significant contribution. For nearly two hours, he spoke candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policies for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on "religious freedom" instead of "Christian nationalism."
However, the men Vought was speaking to were actually working for a UK-based nonprofit journalism organization and had been secretly recording him throughout the conversation. The nonprofit, the Climate Reporting Center, released a video of the meeting on Thursday, revealing a glimpse into the thoughts of one of the top policy planners of the MAGA movement, who is seen as a potential White House chief of staff.
Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025 as Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign attempts to link him to some of the plan's most extreme proposals. But privately, Vought said that such denials were just "graduate-level politics."
Vought stated that his group, the Center for Renewing America, had secretly drafted hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for swift action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating "shadow" agencies. He claimed that Trump had "blessed" his organization and was "very supportive of what we’re doing."
"Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans for what needs to be done to control these bureaucracies," Vought said. "And we're working hard on that, whether it's destroying the concept of their independent agencies... or thinking about how deportations will happen."
Discussing Trump's plan to carry out the largest deportation in U.S. history, which the former president has publicly called for, Vought said that deporting millions of undocumented immigrants could help "save the country."
Once the deportations start, "you’ll really win a debate along the way about what that looks like," Vought said. "And that will take us away from multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend deportations, right?"
The video is the latest example of secret recordings revealing private comments from political figures. The tactics used by the Center – creating fake websites and LinkedIn profiles to deceive Vought – are generally rejected by mainstream U.S. news outlets.
But the use of hidden cameras and deceptive practices in reporting is more common in the UK, where the Center is based, and it’s also growing on the fringes of U.S. media. The conservative group Project Veritas has long carried out sting operations and released selectively edited videos, and earlier this year, a liberal activist released recordings of her conversations with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts.
In an email, Lawrence Carter, the Center's co-founder and director, defended the group's tactics, saying that the public had a right to know Vought's private comments about his relationship with Trump and his work on Project 2025.
"We comply with the UK press regulator’s guidance on this issue, which states that it is justified if in the public interest and not otherwise achievable," Carter said. "We therefore balance the subject’s reasonable expectation of privacy against the public interest."
The Center posted clips of the secret conversation with Vought online. It provided CNN with the full, unedited video on the condition that CNN blur the footage of the staffers' faces to protect their ability to operate covertly in the future.
In a statement Thursday, Vought's nonprofit downplayed the significance of the video, saying that it didn't reveal any new comments from him.
Rachel Cauley, spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, said, "It would have been easier to just Google to ‘discover’ what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews. But thanks for broadcasting our perfect conversation, emphasizing that our policy work is entirely separate from the Trump campaign, as we’ve said."
A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment on the video, but his campaign emphasized that he sets his own agenda and that Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups do not represent him.
"The Trump campaign has made clear that only President Trump and the campaign, not any organization or former staffers, represent policies for a second term," said senior campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez in a statement. "President Trump personally led the effort to establish 20 promises to the forgotten men and women across our country, as well as the RNC Platform – these are the only policies President Trump endorses for a second term."
A Sophisticated Deception
Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, where he was known as a policy wonk committed to the MAGA movement. Publicly, Trump repeatedly praised Vought for doing an "incredible" and "great" job at OMB.
After Trump left office, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as “the tip of the spear of the America First movement.” CRA is one of several right-wing groups collaborating on Project 2025, a more than 900-page blueprint for Trump’s second term led by the Heritage Foundation. Vought personally compiled the chapter on the executive office of the president in the project, and his team contributed to several other chapters of the plan.
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 his central role in the party’s policy goals.
Last month, Vought’s team was approached by staffers from the Climate Reporting Center, which previously published investigations into climate negotiations and Saudi Arabian energy policy.
The Center constructed an elaborate fiction, with a journalist and a paid actor playing the brother and son-in-law of a reclusive New Mexico investor. The nonexistent father had seen Vought appear on Steve Bannon's "War Room" show while recovering from a severe illness – and wanted to donate seven figures to CRA after previously focusing his philanthropy on classical music, they claimed.
The meeting took place on July 24, a week after the Republican convention, in the presidential suite of the Rosewood Hotel in DC, where the Center had set up several hidden cameras and microphones, Carter said. After the Center staffers 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 room, Vought appeared relaxed and affable as he discussed a range of topics, from the history of the conservative movement to European politics and his relationship with the former president.
Vought said he wasn’t fazed by Trump’s repeated denials of any connection to Project 2025, viewing such public statements as political maneuvering.
"I see what he's doing is just very, very consciously separating himself from a brand," Vought said. "It's interesting, the fact that he's not even opposing himself to a particular policy idea."
About a week after the conversation, the director of Project 2025 resigned, and Trump’s campaign managers said in a statement that "reports of the demise of Project 2025 will be widely welcomed."
Vought said he had personally spoken with Trump in recent months and received at least one personal “assignment” from him after he left office. He noted that the former president had "been to our organization, he’s fundraised for our organization, he’s blessed it... he’s very supportive of what we’re doing."
According to others in the MAGA movement, this wasn’t just hyperbole to try and win a big check. Trump and Vought have spoken several 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 Stage’ of Project 2025
To prepare for the possibility of Trump returning to the White House, Vought said during the meeting that he has a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would turn Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.
"We have about 350 different pieces of paper on regulations and the like that we’re planning for the next administration," he said.
For example, "you could say, 'Alright, DHS, we want to have the biggest deportation ever,'" Vought said. "What are the actual memorandums that a secretary puts out to implement that? Like, there's an executive order, regulations, secretary memorandums. Those are the kinds of things that need to be thought through so that you're not, you're not rushing or doing that later."
Vought said those plans would not be made public but instead kept "very, very tightly held."
A Climate Reporting Center journalist, posing as a relative of the fake donor, also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides, who delved deeper into the process. Micah Meadowcroft, CRA’s research director, said the drafts the team is preparing would be provided to the next Trump administration in a way that protects them from public disclosure.
"It’s a big, thick stack of papers that would get distributed during the transition," Meadowcroft said in the video – noting that "you don’t actually email it to their work email" to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
He described Vought’s work preparing executive orders and policy strategies as the “second stage” of Project 2025.
The policy-drafting work months ahead of the election is partly because "President Trump is not going to want to spend any time thinking or deliberating about what the transition is going to look like," Vought said. "That’s not the way he thinks."
Vought said his guiding principle was simple: What would Donald do?
"We
know him well enough to know that he’s looking for any excuse to exert as much power and authority over these people as he possibly can," Vought said.
Throughout the conversation, Vought also expressed a series of inflammatory views that mirrored his policy proposals.
He said the Trump campaign’s slogan “Agenda 47” – which refers to Trump being the 47th president if he wins – was inspired by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda in the 1930s.
In another clip, Vought said it was time for conservatives to move beyond religious freedom, saying it was a "secular framework" that allowed the American government to "rip out... American Christian culture." He added that conservatives should instead be fighting for "Christian nationalism."
Carter, the head of the Climate Reporting Center, said it was in the public interest for Vought’s remarks to be disclosed so voters could judge for themselves how his rhetoric lined up with his actions.
"Our reporting shows that these private views are not just loose talk – they’ve driven his team to the point where they’re drafting executive orders and regulations to carry them out if Trump wins again," Carter said.
