In 2021, a CNN executive was caught on video revealing that the network had chosen to make "Climate Change" the next pandemic, claiming that people were sick of COVID

Sama_El
Published on Oct 11, 2024
In 2021, a CNN executive was caught on video revealing that the network had chosen to make "Climate Change" the next pandemic, claiming that people were sick of COVID.

He also admitted that CNN was focused on helping to remove Trump from office.

Climate change, now being blamed for hurricanes, could play a major role in influencing the upcoming election.

Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution. For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on “religious liberty” instead of “Christian nation-ism.”

But the men Vought was talking to actually worked for a British journalism nonprofit and were secretly recording him the entire time.

The nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, published a video of the meeting on Thursday – offering a window into the thinking of one of the top policy minds of the MAGA movement, who’s been floated as a possible White House chief of staff.

Trump has publicly rejected Project 2025 as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to tie him to some of the plan’s most extreme proposals. But in private, Vought said that those disavowals were merely “graduate-level politics.”

Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”

In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”

Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”

The video is the latest example of secret recordings exposing political figures’ private comments. The tactics used by the Centre – which created fake websites and a fake LinkedIn profile to deceive Vought – are typically rejected by mainstream American news outlets.

But using hidden cameras and deceptive practices in reporting is more common in the UK, where the Centre is based, and it’s been on the rise on the fringe of the US media as well. The conservative group Project Veritas has long conducted sting operations and published selectively edited videos, and earlier this year, a liberal activist released audio recordings of conversations she had with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts.

In an email, Lawrence Carter, the Centre’s co-founder and director, defended the group’s tactics, saying that there was a public interest in revealing Vought’s private comments about his relationship with Trump and work on Project 2025.

“We broadly follow the UK’s press regulator guidelines on this, which say that it is justified if it is in the public interest and not obtainable via other means,” Carter said. “We therefore weigh the subject’s reasonable expectation of privacy with the public interest.”

The Centre posted clips of its secretly recorded conversation with Vought online. It provided CNN what it said was a complete, unedited version of its video on the condition that CNN blurred footage showing its employees’ faces, in order to protect their ability to go undercover in the future.

In a statement Thursday, Vought’s nonprofit downplayed the video, saying it did not reveal any new comments from him.

“It would have been easier to just do a google search to ‘uncover’ what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews,” said Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America. “But thank you for airing our perfect conversation emphasizing our policy work is totally separate from the Trump campaign, as we have been saying.”

A Trump spokesperson declined to comment on the video, but his campaign has stressed that he sets his own agenda and that Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups don’t speak for him.

“President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor to the campaign, said in a statement. “President Trump personally led the effort to establish 20 promises made to the forgotten men and women across our nation, as well as RNC Platform – these are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/russ-vought-project-2025-trump-secret-recording-invs/index.html

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