Project 2025’s authoritarian vision for the DOJ is fully realized

 

Wednesday, March 19 When President Donald Trump gave a speech at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week, it marked a significant moment in his still nascent second term: Project 2025’s vision for the DOJ is fully realized, with the department transformed into a weapon of the executive branch. Also in this edition of Eye On The Right: The election conspiracy group United Sovereign Americans is taking credit for routine voter list maintenance in New York. As always, thanks for reading. — Matt Cohen, Senior Staff Writer At Democracy Docket, we prioritize our readers in everything we do. Help support our pro-democracy news outlet as we continue to hold the Trump administration accountable. Join us in the fight for a stronger, more transparent democracy. Under Trump, Project 2025’s Authoritarian Vision For the DOJ is Fully Realized Last week, Trump gave a speech at the DOJ where, in between ramblings about the DEA and heaping praise on his lawyers and allies, he gave a chilling warning. He singled out a number of lawyers, judges and other political enemies — including Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias — and doubled down on his threats to use the full force of the DOJ to punish them. He specifically called out the people involved with his thwarted effort in 2020 to overturn the election. "What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country, when you think about it,” he added. “And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.” The speech wasn’t a warning of things to come but a marker of where things are right now: In just under two months, Trump has successfully transformed the DOJ into his own personal litigation and prosecution weapon — exactly as outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Buried deep within Project 2025’s 900-some pages is a chapter on suggested DOJ reforms by Gene Hamilton, a lawyer who served in the DOJ and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the first Trump administration. The chapter outlines a number of reforms — like a radical overhaul of the FBI and gutting of the DOJ’s civil rights division — that we’re currently seeing happen in real time. But Hamilton’s key thesis doesn’t come until the middle of the chapter: “The next conservative Administration should embrace the Constitution and understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches,” he writes. “We’ve heard a ton from Trump about his willingness to use the presidency to punish whoever he wants, including political opponents,” Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told me in an interview about Project 2025 back in July. “And so certainly a MAGA-controlled DOJ would be hugely problematic. Coupled with what just happened in the immunity decision, I can’t think of a bigger place where democracy will be undermined if Project 2025 is in place.” And that’s exactly where we are right now. Trump is wreaking havoc on the federal government, pushing the boundaries of the executive branch to the breaking point with his executive orders and defiance of court orders. It is now crystal clear that Project 2025 — something that Trump claimed to “know nothing about” — was the plan all along. And just about everything that’s happened in the past two months was written out almost word for word in the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian playbook. If there’s any silver lining, it’s this: There’s still a lot within Project 2025 that the Trump administration has yet to implement — though you best bet it’s coming. I can’t say what’s going to happen but it’s worth pointing out that, for as long as Project 2025 has been public, there have been people and organizations working diligently to come up with strategies to fight its implementation. And that fight is just getting started. An Election Conspiracy Group is Taking Credit For Routine Voter List Maintenance I spent a good amount of my time last year reporting on the people and groups who worked hard to try and disenfranchise millions of voters in the months before the election. But no group tried as diligently — and failed as spectacularly — as United Sovereign Americans (USA). The nascent election integrity group formed last year to file lawsuits in a host of states challenging voter roll maintenance and other election procedures. None of them were successful. But you wouldn’t have known that from the group’s website, where they posted a press release in the days after the November election with the headline, “Suing Election Officials Proves Effective.” The press release doesn’t cite any specific instances where their lawsuits were successful, but instead claims that the slight decline in ballots cast in 2024 from 2020 (155 million in 2024 compared to 158 million in 2020, according to UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project) was because of their legal efforts. “Whoever is orchestrating this attack on our country realized not only that they were being tracked by professional auditors, but we were willing to take the fight to the mat all across the country,” USA chairman Harry Haury said. USA’s website is littered with press releases highlighting their various “victories,” including a recent one that caught my eye. USA co-founder Marly Hornik, who also chairs a sister organization challenging voter rolls in New York called the New York Citizen’s Audit (NYCA), highlighted a “stunning victory” in the Empire State after a text message from Jennifer Wilson, the New York State Board of Elections’ (NYSBOE) Deputy Director of Public Information, was “anonymously leaked” to the group. The text allegedly said that the state board is “working on a full audit of voter records” to ensure that the rolls are up to date. “We presented the election misconduct facts calmly, accurately, and powerfully from Montauk to Buffalo, and the mountain is finally moving,” Hornik said in the release. Given that the NYCA and USA are known to peddle election conspiracies, I emailed Wilson to see if the NYCA truly was victorious in their effort and how her text was leaked to the group. Kathleen McGrath, NYSBOE’s director of public information, emailed me back and explained what was going on. Audits of the state’s voter rolls are part of NYSBOE’s regular maintenance procedures and are conducted each year to ensure the voter rolls are accurate. “Put simply, there is nothing ‘stunning’ about standard synchronization processes that are clearly outlined in state election law and happen year-round across the state,” McGrath told me. “Furthermore, the information that New York Citizens Audit (NYCA) was sent anonymously was not a text message. It was part of regular messaging that the State Board has with the County Boards across the state to ensure open communication channels about ongoing work to all election officials across the state.” McGrath emphasized the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls to me and explained how there are various transparent mechanisms in place to do routine maintenance of voter rolls in every county. “NYCA and Ms. Hornik are engaging in baseless conspiracy theories,” she said.