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

In 2024, as Donald Trump’s reelection campaign gathered steam, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 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 officials. 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 service. For Ingrassia’s critics, he would be just the wrong person to lead OSC. The Project 2025 questionnaire answers given under Ingrassia’s name would appear to bolster the case 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 2025 application questionnaires was released in June by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets. An analysis of the leaked data showed that more than 13,000 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 data included in the Project 2025 file matched Paul Ingrassia’s information. On July 24, Ingrassia will face a confirmation hearing in the Senate — and good government 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 24 civil society groups led by the Project on Government 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 important role.” “Paul Ingrassia is none of these.” Ingrassia has advocated for the arrest of the president’s political enemies, said 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 2025 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 officials.” A response to a prompt about which political issue he was most 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 many of them, given how destructive they and their toxic ideologies have been on the American way of life; reform and shut down many of the intelligence agencies; fully upend the justice department; reform the courts; redesign Washington, D.C., and build an even better city in its wake,” the Project 2025 applicant wrote. The questionnaire also asked respondents to “name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.” The response — Trump and Pat Buchanan — lacked an explanation. When asked to “name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy,” the data under Paul Ingrassia’s name said “Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Donald Trump.” The answer to the question about what issues the applicant was passionate about said: I’m also very passionate about immigration — specifically, ending birthright citizenship, deporting all illegals and thinking about economic, other ways, to incentivize them to self-deport, building the wall and militarizing it with state of the art technology, 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 government, Ingrassia was a right-wing firebrand. A 30-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 6 rioter who the Justice Department called a “Nazi sympathizer.” Ingrassia’s social media has included 9/11 conspiracy theories and support for Alex Jones, who gained notoriety for denying children were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. He graduated from Cornell Law in 2022. In 2023, Ingrassia worked for McBride Law, a firm that represented far-right influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate when they were facing allegations 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 allegations. Proceedings are ongoing in both countries.) Ingrassia was not legally allowed to practice or market himself as a lawyer at the time; the firm referred to him as an Ivy League-educated associate attorney working on the case. He sat for the bar in July 2023 and was admitted to practice in New York on July 30, 2024. Related Trump Appointee Prosecuting LA Protesters Defended Jan. 6 Suspects 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 few 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 many January 6 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 many clients he had, and was fired by multiple defendants. According to ABC, Ingrassia wanted 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 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration appeared first on The Intercept.