Leaked files show far-right influences among Project 2025 applicants

Hacked materials from the powerful rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation show that applicants to a Project 2025-branded effort to create a talent pool for the Trump administration cited the influence of Nazi political theorists and other far-right thinkers on their political views.

Not all applicants revealed in the hack ended up with Trump administration jobs, but some current appointees did make applications.

And amid a developing “civil war” on the right about the influence of the antisemitic far right – which has included internal dissension at Heritage – the materials show that at least seven members of a nationwide network of men-only, nativist and antisemitic clubs applied to work in the administration, revealing the extent to which the Republicans and the far-right have converged.

Hannah Gais, a senior analyst at the civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law center, told the Guardian: “Given Project 2025’s reactionary goals, it’s no surprise that these applicants would cite any myriad of influences peddling such authoritarian and anti-democratic rhetoric.

Gais added: “These are the fruits of the strategy that some activists have embraced of ‘no enemies to the right.’ But it’s nevertheless telling that these applicants felt safe citing such radical figures.”

The database and the hack

Project 2025 was a policy project by Heritage designed to influence and power the agenda of the second Trump administration along radical conservative lines.

One of the “pillars” of Project 2025 as it developed throughout 2023 and 2024 was to developcreate a pool of politically-aligned candidates for staffing the new administration, according to media reports in 2024.

At that time, Project 2025 director Paul Dans said that the database was “akin to a conservative LinkedIn”, full of potential recruits likely to “be a good fit for a Republican administration”. Dans aimed to assemble some 20,000 potential recruits.

One way in which the database was grown was Heritage’s invitation for applications to the Presidential Administration Academy. The academy, and the open application process, were widely publicized in conservative media in early 2024.

Videos from that academy’s training curriculum leaked in August 2024, significantly raising public awareness of Project 2025.

The materials analyzed by the Guardian are applications for the Presidential Administration Academy. It contains 13,726 applications, a small minority of which are clearly intended to lampoon Heritage and the Trump movement.

Applicants were asked to characterize their political beliefs according to a drop-down menu, spell out their political philosophy, identify the primary influence on their politics, to name a book and a public figure who had influenced them, and then to say whether they agreed with political proposals such as whether the US should increase legal immigration.

Project 2025 was subject to a series of cybersecurity incidents from mid-2024.

In June 2025, the transparency non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets) released the contents of a database containing more than 13,000 submissions to an online application form by individuals interested in working on the Project 2025 initiative. The identity of the hackers is unknown.

The Guardian sourced the data from DDOSecrets and analysed it.

All individuals named in this reporting were contacted for comment via contact information in their applications, and professional email addresses where these were available.

Sources at Heritage said they would not know the political views of applicants applying through a public link nor be able to screen them.

A Heritage spokesman said: ‘The Guardian is a leftist gossip rag. Its dishonesty is matched only by its uselessness. We don’t waste time answering its half-baked questions.’”

Carl Schmitt

Dozens of applicants expressed admiration for Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who has been called the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” and whose intellectual legacy is inseparable from his collaboration with the Nazi regime.

Ville Suuronen, a research fellow at the University of Turku in Finland who has written extensively on Schmitt’s legal and political theories, said: “After Schmitt joined the Nazi party in late April of 1933, he revolutionized his legal theory according to the ideological principles of National Socialism and did everything he could to legitimize the Nazi party and the policies of Adolf Hitler.”

Suuronen added: “Schmitt legitimized the murders of ‘Night of the Long Knives’ by describing Hitler as the highest judge in Germany”, and also “characterized the Nuremberg Laws as the ‘constitution of freedom’ and organized a deeply antisemitic conference ‘The Jewry in Legal Science’ in Berlin in October 1936”.

Applicants who cite Schmitt include Paul Ingrassia, who was last week tapped for a new job as deputy general counsel of the General Services Administration, leaving his former role as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

Last month, Ingrassia’s nomination for special counsel to the United States foundered after group chats leaked in which he told other participants that he had “a Nazi streak” and that holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated”.

The Intercept reported in July that Ingrassia’s application was a part of the Project 2025 trove, but did not mention his expression of admiration for Schmitt’s books.

In the application, Ingrassia listed Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Political Theology, and Constitutional Theory among the books that had influenced him.

Ingrassia’s sister, Olivia Ingrassia, also now works in the Trump administration, also had a Project 2025 application exposed in the hack, and also cited Schmitt as an influence.

According to her LinkedIn account, Ingrassia has worked in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) since August, after completing a four-month internship there earlier this year.

Under director Russell Vought, who once said of federal workers “We want to put them in trauma,” the OMB has aggressively moved to dismantle federal agencies and consolidate executive power. There’s no suggestion that Vought himself has praised Carl Schmitt.

Other Schmitt-positive applicants include a Heritage employee who has since landed in the administration. Max Matheu is now an attorney adviser at the State Department, according to his LinkedIn page.

Last year, he was still lead attorney in the Heritage Foundation’s own Oversight Project. Previously, he served as a congressional intern for Florida congresswoman Laurel Lee, and controversial former legislator Matt Gaetz, according to congressional information service LegiStorm.

For Heritage, he acted as an attorney in several Freedom of Information Act (Foia) suits brought against the US government following up on the blizzard of tens of thousands of Foia requests Heritage made during the life of the Biden administration.

In his Project 2025 application, in response to a question about which books have influenced him, Matheu nominated The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt, adding that “The friend/enemy distinction is the cardinal concept that undergirds all politics. The Left has been making the distinction since Gramsci and other cultural marxists captured the media and academic institutions to subvert Heritage Americans and the shared ideals this country once held.”

Matheu’s use of “Heritage Americans” invokes a slogan popular on the new nativist right that supports Donald Trump and the Maga movement. Critics have said it can be used to convey white nationalist sentiments in softer language, though Matheu does not identify as a white nationalist in his application.

Elsewhere in his application, Matheu wrote: “Our specific social, cultural, and religious heritage define American politics. Our shared cultural identity is necessary to achieve the common good and share a unified political vision for conservative politics.”

The Guardian reached out to Matheu directly for comment. A State Department spokesperson replied that in the future the Guardian should “​​feel free to submit a formal inquiry rather than contact the individual via their personal email”.

They added: “The essay highlights how the left adopted and applied Schmitt’s philosophy against Americans, hijacking and corrupting traditional nonpartisan institutions like the media to expand its power,” a reply that appeared to bear little relationship to Matheu’s application.

On the friend-enemy distinction, Suuronen, the academic critic of Schmitt, said “For Schmitt, the ideals underlying liberalism – not only rational discussion, but also the idea of inviolable and universal human rights – were nothing but an illusion,” and he “developed a theory of ‘the political’, according to which the fundamental political distinction was that between the friend and the enemy. For Schmitt, politics was not about individuals, but about the potentially violent confrontations of homogeneous groups.”

Other applicants teamed apparently racist sentiments with invocations of Schmitt.

Joe Amato, a former Publius fellow at the right-wing Claremont Institute listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board in the Mandate for Leadership document it published in 2023 and currently chief of staff at an AI-driven law and regulation startup, according to his LinkedIn bio, wrote in his application that “Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political has most shaped my political philosophy for the moment we live in.” It’s central thesis is that the core of politics is the friend-enemy distinction.

He added: “Given that the Left is waging an all out war against the Right, we must remember this distinction in all our actions. No Leftist or Democrat is our friend, nor any Republicans who oppose the America First agenda. If those on the Right want to actually win, we must support those friendly to us, and ruthlessly destroy our enemies.”

In the application, he echoed beliefs associated with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, writing, “It’s clear that the Democratic Party is importing a blue wave of voters to illegally register. This unprecedented wave of migration is nothing short of a barbarian invasion … Cities will be overrun and become like third world slums. Our women and young women will be raped and sexually assaulted. Our young men will be attacked.”

According to his Claremont Institute biography, Amato “received an inaugural Passage Prize for poetry”.

In May 2024, the Guardian identified Jonathan Keeperman as the founder of Passage Press, the far-right publisher that sponsored the Passage Prize.

The Guardian has also reported extensively on Claremont’s ties with a secretive far-right men-only network of fraternal lodges, the emergence of its board chair and biggest funder as a conservative megadonor, and its links to JD Vance staffers.

Claremont’s links to the Trump movement have seen it labeled as the nerve center of the American right.

Gais, the SPLC analyst, wrote “Even just within the United States, Schmitt’s theories have nurtured any number of anti-democratic impulses, ranging from the ‘war on terror’ to the Maga right’s extreme rhetoric against the left.”

Bukele

Dozens of other applicants expressed their admiration for El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele.

Bukele’s brutal prison system came into focus earlier this year when the Trump administration summarily deported hundreds of Venezuelans and Salvadorans to that country. According to a humanitarian organizations, some 250 of those deported endured systematic torture.

One applicant, Jackson Kitchin, now serves as a federal law clerk in the eastern district of North Carolina according to his LinkedIn profile, and previously clerked for the supreme court of North Carolina and the US Senate judiciary committee, according to his LinkedIn and the website of his alma mater, George Washington University Law School.

In his Project 2025 application, Kitchin wrote that “Bukele has shown the world that morality is objective, that societies which understand this prosper, and that decline is a choice. He has been outspoken in his belief that God’s will ought to be done, and that political leaders ought to actively seek out God’s will.”

He added: “Bukele has defied a global majority which claimed these things could not be done. The same voices make similar claims about the United States. It is my fervent belief that we can prove them wrong as well.”

He looked forward to a time when the US president likewise had more centralized power, writing “Over the last fifty years, our nation has seen an attack on the Article II powers of the Presidency. Over the course of this attack, the President has been stripped of his authority to see that the laws are faithfully executed. “

On the law, Kitchin wrote: “Any institution which reflects God’s moral order will govern a more virtuous people, achieving societal prosperity.”

Another Bukele admirer, Justin Henle, now works as a staffer for the House administration committee under Wisconsin according to Legistorm. Previously, he worked as a intern for Virginia Republican, Bob Good.

In his application, he described Bukele as “a public figure I admire” whose “tough on crime measures brought El-Salvador into a period of prosperity and safety”.

Fringe figures

Several applicants nominated Jared Taylor as an influence on their thought. Taylor is a prominent white nationalist, and the founder of the American Renaissance website, journal, and annual conference. For decades, Taylor has denied that he is a white supremacist.

Others found inspiration from other, lesser-known far-right figures.

One is a senior figure in for the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, according to a LinkedIn page and the department’s staff directory.

In their application, they express admiration for Neema Parvini, a current British writer who, according to UK anti-fascist non-profit Hope Not Hate, lost an academic position over his far-right activism, has attended far-right conferences, and claimed on social media that black and white people are “different species”.

They wrote that Parvini’s book the Populist Delusion is “A thorough and concise overview of political philosophers from history which more directly addressed the myriad problems faced by our nation and some of the mechanisms by which Trump was prevented from governing successfully”.

Elsewhere in the application, they said “I gravitate towards antebellum writers more than modern ones”, and said that the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the wake of the civil war and granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people, should be repealed, since “Nearly all of our modern problems are descended from this verbose and destructive inversion of sovereignty signed under duress.”

The Old Glory Club

There were at least seven applicants who the Guardian identified as members of the far-right, men-only secret society, the Old Glory Club, although none of them appear to have been offered jobs in the administration so far.

Although none appear to have gone on to find employment in the Trump regime, they made little attempt to hide their nativist views.

Last July, the Guardian reported that the Old Glory Club had established at least 26 clubs nationwide, had ties with similar far-right groups in the UK and antisemitic activists, had held in-person meetups, and represented a “new breed of extremist organisation which aims first to build an offline social network before taking over society”.

Ryan Turnipseed is a founding member of the Old Glory Club who appears to have made an application to Heritage that includes his personal email address and phone number.

In describing his beliefs, Turnipseed wrote that he supported “Freedom of association and the right to discriminate. They are both one and the same, just worded differently.” He added: “I believe that one’s freedom to associate is vital for a healthy, productive, sane, and morally upright civilization, and that the enshrining of anti-discrimination laws into the American legal system has been disastrous.”

In February 2023, Turnipseed was identified by antifascist researchers as a member of what they called a rising “white supremacist faction within the Lutheran faith”. Later that month, the president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod called for the excommunication of those “propagating radical and unchristian ‘alt-right’ views”.

The Guardian cross-referenced application materials with company records for the Old Glory Club umbrella organization and local chapters to identify six other members who had applied to Project 2025.