Project 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration

In as Donald Trump s reelection campaign gathered steam the Heritage Foundation s Project had its eye on staffing a new Republican administration The initiative which was designed around crafting an agenda for an incoming Trump White House put out a call for aspiring administration bureaucrats The application including multiple-choice questions and open-ended queries sought to place would-be Trump apparatchiks on the political spectrum and suss out their political priorities One of the people who filled the form out entered a name that would echo through the first six months of Trump s new term Paul Ingrassia Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department s Office of Special Counsel Now pending a Senate hearing this week Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department s Office of Special Counsel Among other responsibilities related to the federal workforce the office is supposed to protect whistleblowers and keep partisan politics out of the civil facility For Ingrassia s critics he would be just the wrong person to lead OSC The Project questionnaire answers given under Ingrassia s name would appear to bolster the episode that the applicant s primary concern is loyalty to Trump and sharp-elbowed partisan politics The responses include allusions to severely cutting down federal agencies because of their toxic ideologies halting immigration and imposing a new test for voting Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment A leaked dataset of the Project application questionnaires was disclosed in June by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets or DDoSecrets An analysis of the leaked evidence indicated that more than people had filled out the applications Heritage did not respond to a request for comment DDoSecrets redacted the full entries for applicants but provided The Intercept with an unredacted version The contact information and other personal facts included in the Project file matched Paul Ingrassia s information On July Ingrassia will face a confirmation hearing in the Senate and good ruling body groups are opposing his bid As head of OSC the special counsel should be someone who respects federal workers who will treat them fairly and without bias a group of civil society groups led by the Project on Leadership Oversight wrote in an open letter to Senators opposing Ingrassia s nomination The special counsel must be a person who will exercise their duties in a nonpartisan manner a person of honesty and integrity who has the necessary experience to fulfill such an crucial role Paul Ingrassia is none of these Ingrassia has advocated for the arrest of the president s political enemies disclosed that Democrats are a threat to democracy and labeled Republicans who disagree with him as RINOs a derisive acronym meaning Republicans in Name Only The Questionnaire In the Project questionnaire filled out under the name Paul Ingrassia the respondent agreed that the President should be able to advance his her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal functionaries A response to a prompt about which political issue he was greater part passionate about and why included a long list of pet projects I m passionate about restructuring the administrative state condensing the size and scope of the various bureaucratic agencies defunding a large number of of them given how destructive they and their toxic ideologies have been on the American way of life restructuring and shut down countless of the intelligence agencies fully upend the justice department improvement the courts redesign Washington D C and build an even better city in its wake the Project applicant wrote The questionnaire also sought respondents to name one living society procedures figure whom you greatly admire and why The response Trump and Pat Buchanan lacked an explanation When demanded to name one person past or present who has greater part influenced the enhancement of your political philosophy the details under Paul Ingrassia s name reported Alexander the Great Julius Caesar Napoleon Donald Trump The answer to the question about what issues the applicant was passionate about commented I m also very passionate about immigration specifically ending birthright citizenship deporting all illegals and thinking about economic other techniques to incentivize them to self-deport building the wall and militarizing it with state of the art hardware personnel instating a moratorium on all immigration and revising the tests for citizenship voting other basic privileges of American life Trump Loyalist Long before his stint in executive Ingrassia was a right-wing firebrand A -year-old lawyer and right-wing commentator he has referred to himself as Trump s favorite Substacker and spent years writing articles praising Trump He has ties to far-right figures and those with fringe beliefs Last summer Ingrassia appeared at a rally organized by far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes whom Ingrassia has advocated for in the past He also has a relationship with Timothy Hale-Cusanelli a January rioter who the Justice Department called a Nazi sympathizer Ingrassia s social media has included conspiracy theories and patronage for Alex Jones who gained notoriety for denying children were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in He graduated from Cornell Law in In Ingrassia worked for McBride Law a firm that represented far-right influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate when they were facing assertions of rape and human trafficking in Romania and the United Kingdom The firm filed a defamation lawsuit against one of their accusers that summer The Tate brothers have consistently denied these statements Proceedings are ongoing in both countries Ingrassia was not legally allowed to practice or territory himself as a lawyer at the time the firm referred to him as an Ivy League-educated associate attorney working on the situation He sat for the bar in July and was admitted to practice in New York on July Related Trump Appointee Prosecuting LA Protesters Defended Jan Subjects After McBride he worked as a communications director for the conservative nonprofit National Constitutional Law Union and occasionally wrote articles for the right-wing site Gateway Pundit He left both positions after taking a job in January as a presidential liaison to the Department of Justice in January After a scant months however he was reassigned from the Justice Department to another agency amid reports of administration infighting Reporting from ABC suggested his advocacy for the department to hire John Pierce his old boss at the National Constitutional Law Union played a role Pierce represented a multitude of January rioters During his time as a criminal defense attorney Pierce failed to show up to court sent in a co-counsel who wasn t authorized to practice law forgot how numerous clients he had and was fired by multiple defendants According to ABC Ingrassia sought Pierce to run the pardon office at the Justice Department Now with his elevation to the Office of Special Counsel Ingrassia could be back at the Justice Department The post Project Material Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration appeared first on The Intercept